[Infowarrior] - DRM may be why Microsoft flip-flopped on Vista virtualization

[Richard Forno]

Analysis: DRM may be why Microsoft flip-flopped on Vista virtualization
Eric Lai
 http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&art
icleId=9025466&pageNumber=1

June 22, 2007 (Computerworld) Conspiracy theorists may link Microsoft
Corp.'s abrupt decision late Tuesday not to remove restrictions on consumers
virtualizing its Vista operating system to a Department of Justice agreement
announced the same day or to a desire to jerk Intel Mac users around.

But the actual reason may be found in three little letters: DRM.

Vista's new digital rights management features enable movies or music files
to be password-protected or made accessible only to authorized users for
opening, viewing or changing.

Whether most users would call DRM a feature, however, is questionable. A
close cousin to DRM technology, known as Windows Rights Management Services
(which in turn is part of a larger category of technologies called
Enterprise Digital Rights Management, or ERM), can help business users
password-protect key documents and files, or assign the ability to open them
only to trusted co-workers. But DRM's main purpose seems to be to help the
Warner Bros. and Sony Musics of the world keep consumers from sharing movies
and music. The entertainment industry claims that almost all blocked sharing
is illegal; digital rights watchdogs argue that legitimate consumer uses are
also blocked by such technology.

DRM is capable of blocking both overt piracy -- distributing movies via
BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks -- as well as other common
scenarios that most consumers do not consider piracy, such as moving legally
acquired music files from their desktop PCs to their notebook computers.

"It's like when you batten down the hatches on a ship in a storm," said Aram
Sinnreich, an analyst at Radar Research in Los Angeles. "Vista wants to
batten down every software or multimedia bit so that they don't go somewhere
the creator doesn't want it to go."

Versions out of control?

The problem is that virtualization, by accident, appears to break most of
Vista's DRM and antipiracy schemes.

Virtualization software -- think VMware Inc.'s VMplayer, Microsoft's Virtual
PC or Parallels Inc.'s Parallels Desktop -- allow computer users to boot one
operating system but run a second one as a "guest" at the same time.

That can allow a user who has booted Windows Vista to load XP-only
applications in a guest XP operating system, also known as a virtual machine
(VM). Or it can let a user with an Intel Mac boot up the OS X operating
system but also run Windows Vista or XP applications at the same time.

Microsoft's original plan was to announce on Tuesday changes to the
contracts, known as end-user licensing agreements (EULA), for its Vista Home
Basic and Home Premium editions. Those changes would permit buyers who use
those editions to create VMs. The change was purely to the EULA; there is no
technical limitation preventing knowledgeable users from virtualizing retail
versions of Home Basic or Home Premium.

Microsoft allows only full retail versions of Vista Business or Vista
Ultimate (as well as Vista Enterprise for big corporations) to run as
virtual guests of a host PC. Vista Business and Ultimate cost $299 and $399,
respectively. The simple change in Microsoft's license for the two cheaper
editions -- Home Basic Edition and Home Premium Edition cost $199 and $239,
respectively -- would have saved customers at least $60 and up to $200.

In addition, Microsoft planned to permit the use of DRM, IRM (Information
Rights Management) and Vista's storage encryption technology, BitLocker, in
a VM for any version of Vista.

Besides boosting flagging perceptions of Microsoft's overall virtualization
strategy, the move would have made Vista virtualization much more attractive
to a key and growing segment -- Intel Mac owners who want to run Windows
software.

But at the last moment, Microsoft did a 360. Its explanation was terse:
"Microsoft has reassessed the Windows virtualization policy and decided that
we will maintain the original policy announced last Fall," said a spokesman
in an e-mailed statement.

A perfect picture (of cross-purposes)

When a user creates a VM, the virtualization software takes a snapshot of
the PC's hardware and then creates an exact copy of how that works in
memory, according to DeGroot.

This ability to perfectly simulate the way the original PC ran (albeit more
slowly than the original) is why VMs are such a useful tool. But a VM, once
created, can be copied hundreds or thousands of times and ported over to
radically different PCs without triggering the antipiracy and DRM schemes of
most software or multimedia files, including Vista's. Those schemes raise
red flags only if they realize they've been moved to another computer,
DeGroot said.

Analysts say what probably happened behind the scenes is that Microsoft or
one of its media partners decided at the last moment that encouraging
consumers to use virtualization would, at least symbolically, be at odds
with its attempts to enforce DRM.

"Microsoft doesn't want the music labels, TV networks and movie studios to
come back to them and say that you are enabling this ability to move content
around," said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

Microsoft has more at stake than other high-tech firms, McGuire said, what
with its partnerships with NBC, its Xbox gaming platform, its Media Center
PCs and even its Zune music player.

"It's a very fine line that Redmond has to walk," McGuire said. "They have
to answer to these companies if they want to have any hope of making the PC
and their software the de facto usage model for multimedia."

The problem is that even if Microsoft -- and U.S. law -- insist it is still
illegal to use virtualization to enable the sharing of software or movies or
music, its antipiracy technology is powerless to stop it.

"It's absurd to expect that something demanded by a EULA is followed when
technology and common practice permit otherwise," Sinnreich said. "Microsoft
is banking on ongoing consumer naivete and goodwill. There will be a
backlash against DRM in some not-so-distant future."

Would anyone have bothered?

Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy?
Not anytime soon, say analysts.

One of the main obstacles is the massive size of VMs. Because they include
the operating system, the simulated hardware, as well as the software and/or
multimedia files, VMs can easily run in the tens of gigabytes, making them
hard to exchange over the Internet. But DeGroot says that problem can be
partly overcome with .zip and compression tools -- some, ironically, even
supplied by Microsoft itself.

"It's the kind of idea that is out there among the enthusiast community for
file sharing and remixing, but it's not part of the standard arsenal for the
average college student," Sinnreich said.

Gartner's McGuire agrees: "Unless virtualization is more convenient and
reliable than P2P, then no one is going to go to the trouble."