‘Distrusted Systems’: Why the EU’s going after Microsoft and Time Warner
In Distrusted systems in the Inquirer, writer Wendy M. Grossman tells why the Europeans are so rational in their fear of the acquisition of ContentGuard by Microsoft and Time Warner.
“It’s not just another case of ‘Oh, let’s Get Microsoft,’” she writes. “What few outside of the digital rights management arena have realized yet is that ContentGuard holds very significant patents that could have a very broad impact if the use of digital rights management takes off.”
ContentGuard’s patents, she says, are “impressive. They cover using markup languages to attach machine-readable rights to content; they cover incorporating charging mechanisms. In fact, they cover much of what we’d describe as digital rights management.”
Lurking in the background, of course, is one of the great hazards of DRM, the replacement of ordinary copyright law with contract law that does not provide sufficiently for fair use.
Related: Microsoft, Time Warner Face In-Depth EU Probe on ContentGuard from Bloomberg.
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