How you see it, how you don't
By Nathan Cochrane
August 27 2002

Microsoft has unveiled its vision for the future digital media landscape and it's a world where content creators are king.

Version 9 of its Windows Media technology, codenamed "Corona", to be launched in September as part of the Windows.NET server, gives media conglomerates complete control over the way their content is viewed by consumers.

Corona's monolithic Digital Rights Management (DRM) is by far the most exhaustive envisaged by a software company, extending from the content server, through the network and lobbing on to the user's device. Microsoft will extend the concept over the next few years to embrace not just audio and video, but all content, including computer software and the text used in electronic books.

Already more than 350 million player applications use Microsoft Windows Media CODEC (coder-decoder) and the plan is to extend it off the desktop into the home-theatre lounge room, DVD players, cinema and for professional film and television production, replacing industry standards Avid and Apple QuickTime.

But the software giant may have overreached itself in its rush to cozy up to Hollywood and the music recording industries, all but abolishing consumer rights such as timeshifted video recording and "fair use" for the purposes of education and criticism.

In the Microsoft world, makers of software that play media streams ("media players") will have to get a licence from Microsoft before they will be allowed to process content encoded in the Windows Media format. Makers such as competitors Real and Winamp have already passed this first hurdle and use the Microsoft software development kit in their players. This is doubtless a lesson Microsoft learnt from its DivX experience, a rogue CODEC derived from leaked and reverse-engineered Microsoft MPEG-4 technology, a favourite of online movie pirates.

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There are some valid concerns about censorship and more in the article - you can see the complete article at:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...052995857.html