DRM and MSFT: a product no customer wants

June 17, 2004
Cory Doctorow

MSFT kicked ass by being unafraid to clobber IBM’s business model with MSDOS. Now it stands astride the globe like a titan, laughing the face of the world’s roughest, toughest antitrust regulators. Why then is MSFT pursuing Digital Rights Management? Does Hollywood even *want* MSFT DRM? Do any of MSFT’s customers? Can MSFT take the high-road on DRM without being soft on people who bootleg Windows? I sure think so.

Text of talk available at http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

Speaker Details

Hi. I’m Cory Doctorow, a 32-year-old renaissance geek. I do a bunch of things: freelance computer stuff, freelance journalism, freelance fiction writing, blogging, and a lot of volunteer activism. I’m the Outreach Coordinator for the EFF. My job is to figure out ways to convince companies to understand their common cause with the EFF – maintaining their freedom to innovate without entertainment-industry oversight, for example – and get them to open their wallets to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that has been fighting for cyber-rights for over a decade.www.craphound.comwww.boingboing.net