Introduction 

This document looks purely at the cost of the technical portions of Vista's content protection [Note B]. The political issues (under the heading of DRM) have been examined in exhaustive detail elsewhere and won't be commented on further unless it's relevant to the cost analysis.  

Note B: This document uses "cost" in the sense of "penalty", "damage", "harm", "injury" and "loss" rather than the more financial "expense", "outlay", and "price". A full financial analysis would require a top-to-bottom internal audit of the design, development, production, distribution, support, and legal costs for each vendor involved, something for which even the vendors themselves would have difficulty producing a precise figure.

It's a bit of a stretch to call this a "cost analysis" with such vague criteria... terms like "penalty", "damage", "harm", "injury", and "loss" are more often found in courtrooms in civil law cases, than in a detailed technical analysis of software or a platform. This dilutes the "purely" aspect of this article somewhat, but maybe we're nitpicking. Insofar as "the political issues" of DRM in its various guises, we don't see how you can discuss DRM these days and have it not be political. If consumers and industry could come to a general consensus about DRM, this article wouldn't have been written, and we wouldn't be here talking about it ourselves.

However, one important point to keep in mind when reading this document is that in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes that it were possible [Note C].

Note C: In order for content to be displayed to users, it has to be copied numerous times. For example if you're reading this document on the web then it's been copied from the web server's disk drive to server memory, copied to the server's network buffers, copied across the Internet, copied to your PC's network buffers, copied into main memory, copied to your browser's disk cache, copied to the browser's rendering engine, copied to the render/screen cache, and finally copied to your screen. If you've printed it out to read, several further rounds of copying have occurred. Windows Vista's content protection (and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent copying. If you're not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox). Depending on whether you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, things then either get weird or very weird. So in order for Windows Vista's content protection to work, it has to be able to violate the laws of physics and create numerous copies that are simultaneously not copies.

The terms "content", "copy" and "protection" are to us being deliberately obscured by a somewhat pointless diatribe in quantum mechanics, which...to be honest smacks a bit of being irrelevant in this context. Its also specious as an analogy in our view. Someone please take "Schrodinger's Cat" out of box and give it some catnip please....assuming it's still alive that is.

This conundrum is displayed over and over again in the Windows content-protection requirements, with manufacturers being given no hard-and-fast guidelines but instead being instructed that they need to display as much dedication as possible to the party line. The documentation is peppered with sentences like:

    "It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter of the specification and provide additional content-protection features, because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content".

This is an exceedingly strange way to write technical specifications, but is dictated by the fact that what the spec is trying to achieve is fundamentally impossible. Readers should keep this requirement to display appropriate levels of dedication in mind when reading the following analysis [Note D]

It's not exceedingly strange to request manufacturers who exist in an industry driven by content to protect that content, even if it's ultimately a fruitless endeavor. Like it or not, companies can expose themselves to legal backlash over issues of copy protection and content protection. Especially with how broadly (and how poorly) such laws as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act are being interpreted and enforced by the legal system. Sure, we agree it is fundamentally impossible to 100% shut any door in an exposed software system. But that's not what the quoted statement claims, so deriding it for "trying to achieve" what is "fundamentally impossible" seems a bit silly considering the obvious history here. Content protection schemes historically have always been defeated and content providers and hardware that facilitates content protection have always fought against this inevitability. This is nothing remotely new, though perhaps the implied responsibilities have increased. Welcome to the digital age.

Note D: I'll make a prediction at this point that, given that it's trying to do the impossible, the Vista content protection will take less than a day to bypass if the bypass mechanism is something like a driver bug or a simple security hole that applies only to one piece of code (and can therefore be quickly patched), and less than a week to comprehensively bypass in a driver/hardware-independent manner. This doesn't mean that it'll be broken the day or week that it appears, but simply that once a sufficiently skilled attacker is motivated to bypass the protection, it'll take them less than a day or a week to do so. 

Let's examine Note D: The prediction is fairly accurate, at least in the case of the two competing high definition content delivery systems that so far have barely been discussed. As long as any protection system is exposed to software (i.e. Software media players like PowerDVD and WinDVD for instance), the door is already open. No shock here. Slysoft's new AnyDVD HD edition software not only strips the protection mechanisms from HD-DVD and Blueray discs, but does so under Vista x86 and x64 editions. Anyone who's vaguely paid attention to history whilst feeding their quantum cat bon-bons could see this coming.

The real issue here involves understanding what primary systems are being discussed. AACS and HDCP for instance. Neither of these systems are uniquely Microsoft developments. Adopting and adhering to their use is the price Microsoft pays for being able to do business in the content delivery business. To make a long story short AACS has collapsed like a house of cards, due to its exposure in software players, not to mention the ingenuity of those great guys at Slysoft. HDCP, or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection is somewhat castrated at this point since there's no HD media released (that we are aware of after a significant bit of digging) that utilizes the Image Constraint Token to specifically force down sampling. It's generally understood (though not officially stated in any forum or arena worth quoting from) that Hollywood won't be enabling ICT for some time, because the whole hardware situation while the universe transitions to a High Definition existence is a big fat mess. The primary problem with high definition content delivery systems today are the output displays themselves. Component, VGA, several flavors of DVI, and HDMI (which at last count is on it's 6^th revision) are all sort of available in a menagerie-like implementation on displays akin to designing input capabilities with a dartboard. Issues like whether or not you can backup discs or have to worry about image degradation pale in comparison to just being able to hook the darn things up properly.

Other DRM systems championed by Microsoft and other 3^rd parties are certainly being catered to in Vista. And it's no secret that Microsoft and these other parties have a vested self interest in them. We feel however this is more generally a direction that industry at large is mandating, and not anything specifically damning about Vista. For instance, though Steve Jobs recently derided the existence of DRM systems, his company is uniquely responsible for implementing one of the most financially successful DRM laden systems in existence. 

A second point to note is that the term "premium content", or in more recent statements by Microsoft, "commercial content" (I've used "premium content" throughout this write-up for consistency) goes well beyond the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray examples that I've used above and encompasses not just the obvious definition of "HD content in any form" but even non-HD content, or as Microsoft put it "commercial content generally, independent of resolution". While premium content is currently still somewhat scarce, in five years' time it'll be hard to find a movie or similar content that isn't HD or similar premium content. So although Microsoft have tried to downplay the perceived impact of Vista's content-protection by stating that it'll only apply when premium/commercial content is present, this conveniently sidesteps the fact that Microsoft hopes that this situation will become universal in the near future. The whole future of Vista's content protection is predicated on this fact, because without near-universal premium content there's no point in having content-protection features in the first place.

Naturally Microsoft hopes "that this situation will become universal in the near future." So does Sony, Apple, and pretty much anyone else with a clear vested interest in being the media conduit to your living room. Hoping doesn't make it necessarily true however. While it's true that pretty much all currently existing commercial delivery systems use one of several forms of Digital Rights Management, in the case of online distribution (which would be the only other premium content conduit we can think of off the top of our collective heads apart from HD disc formats) no one is putting a gun to consumer's heads and forcing them to download DRM restricted content. Consumers are avoiding that bullet in droves already. The only system that has seen anything vaguely resembling success is the Apple/iPod/iTunes Triumvirate, and it's success has come from making a seamless experience for the end user possible, not because it's inclusion or lack of DRM. Still, even Apple can't stop people from plonking mp3's obtained in a questionable manner onto their precious iPod's. Overwhelmingly, "consumers" that utilize their PC's for the enjoyment of media have for the most part avoided such delivery systems like the plague. Are the RIAA and the MPAA freaking out because this is NOT a problem? Did we imagine statistics that show overwhelmingly the bulk of Internet traffic is p2p traffic? Does anyone realistically expect this to change without the content industry fundamentally changing it's business model? We don't think it will.