Joe Wilcox: “Microsoft has made content owners the priority over consumers with respect to protected content.”

Microsoft plans to introduce PVP-OPM (Protected Video Path-Output Protection Management) in Longhorn, something incompatible with most (all?) monitors sold today. engadget explains how this works:

“What will happen when you try to play premium content on your incompatible monitor? If you’re ‘lucky,’ the content will go through a resolution constrictor.” If “unlucky,” the screen will be black. “The purpose of this constrictor is to down-sample high-resolution content to below a certain number of pixels. The newly down-sampled content is then blown back up to match the resolution of your monitor. This is much like when you shrink a JPEG and then zoom into it. Much of the clarity is lost. The result is a picture far fuzzier than it need be.”

What is Microsoft’s reason for this?

“The top objective for these mechanisms is to enable the Windows-based PC to play premium content in 2006 and beyond, offsetting any content-owners fears that high-value content could be pirated if played on a PC.”

What about the rights of consumers? What about all those monitors out there that won’t be able to display this “high-value content”? Joe Wilcox says “I see the rights-protection technologies as shifting the role of the PC from a fairly open and flexible platform to one that is quite a bit more closed.”

Thanks to Thomas Hawk, or I wouldn’t have noticed this. Read the full article, it’s quite disconcerting.

Link: Microsoft Monitor Weblog - The Four Musketeers