I've been reading the links about Palladium\TCPA\Fritz (thanks guys).

They might just about get it to stick in [relatively] by-the-book countries like the US, UK, France or Germany (albeit after a lot of huffing and puffing on the part of consumers) , but my first reaction is that they're going to have serious problems implementing it other countries and I'm not just talking about China

In Spain, for example, you go into a shop to buy a computer and they often ask you "What software do you want me to install? Office? Photoshop? Freehand? Flash? Director? Premiere?" I've seen copies of Windows and Office collecting dust in computer stores because so few people ever buy them. Game consoles like the Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast simply haven't sold because of their uncopyable formats. The Playstation is normally sold with its copy protection inhibited (allowing copied game CDs) and the same will happen with the Playstation II once DVD recorders come down in price.

In this culture if someone buys a Palladium PC and goes home only to find that he can't install the copies of Office and Photoshop that his friend has made for him, I can guarantee that he'll go straight back to the shop and say "This computer doesn't work properly. What are you going to do about it?" and if the shop can't come up with a hack or a way round it, they ain't going to be selling many new PCs. It's as simple as that.

If Palladium were introduced, a two stream IT world would be created with Palladium compliant countries on one hand and countries with older or hacked computers on the other with all the chaos that that would entail.

Apart from that, it's the anti-globalisation campaigner's worst nightmare: as the articles said, it would severely reduce consumer freedom and choice [and privacy, if abused] and would give even more power and control to mastodontic corporations like Micro$oft, Intel, Sony, Universal etc.

And of course any OSs that resist will soon get squeezed out by major software manufacturers, film distributors and record labels - but as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have been getting more and more pally over the last few years, you can be pretty sure that OSX will be fully Palladium compliant before long anyway (sorry, Bad Vlad). So Linux will be the OS of choice in China and Spain then.