I’m reminded of a line from the original Star Wars movie “The more you tighten your grip the more systems will slip through your fingers.”

DRM is the grip holding the ‘premium commercial content’ (is there ‘premium content’ that isn’t commercial?) hostage in your PC releasing only when you and your PC are deemed worthy to watch it/listen to it. Vista brings this grip to an entirely new tightness, grabbing your PC by the silicon and squeezing.

Regardless of how much MS uses the term ‘enabling’ to describe the new DRM ‘features’ in Vista doesn’t change the fact that they are adding complexity and resource requirements that do nothing but benefit content creators.  Why should I pay extra (in the form of compliant hardware and resource utilization) for something I’m very likely to never use?

This behavior only emboldens those that these protections are meant to thwart; content pirates.  They are trying to battle basic human nature; the more you try to control a ‘vice’ the more people will try to outwit/ignore/topple that control.  This will only stop the dumb pirates, the smart ones will hire a Chinese professor or two to break the system and keep on churning out pirate discs at a fraction of what the studios/labels charge.

The end result is that the consumers pay to make to the pirates smarter.  Ouch.

Windows Vista Team Blog : Windows Vista Content Protection – Twenty Questions (and Answers)