Should Apple and Microsoft be responsible for enforcing DRM in their products?

There’s a couple of stories that Cory over at BoingBoing posted recently (1 | 2) that raise interesting questions about how Microsoft’s Windows Vista is rumored to enforce DRM and how the new Apple iPhone will do the same thing. Without a doubt, the biggest mistake Apple made this week was not having tractor trailers filled to the brim with the sleek new phone for sale. It’s definitely a jewel and has had the technology world buzzing all week. But now the euphoria is wearing off and people are starting to take a closer look at what the pricey iPhone really does and the biggest of these is also a large part of the discussion surrounding bitter rival Microsoft’s upcoming operating system. I’m not debating the finer points of whether the respective industries should protect their material, by all means, they should. Right or wrong the music and video related industries that foot the bills for creation should be able to protect their investments. I’m curious though, if by extension of trying to enforce that protection they’ve not created an umbrella which hardware and software manufacturers can hide behind to now monopolize their own respective markets.

Apple locked up the portable music player market a few years ago when it introduced this walkman like device called the iPod. At the time it was a revolutionary marvel and it was so cool compared what was out at the time, it was instantly a “must have gadget”. So goes the iPhone, no doubt leaving competitors spending the week rearranging appointments in favor of “what do we do now” meetings. In an op-ed by Randall Stross at the New York Times, Stross suggests that Apple is using the current state of the union surrounding DRM to effect its own monopoly on the marketplace through what it calls “Fair Play”. Meaning, if you buy a song from the iTunes Music Store you can play it on one piece of hardware, the iPod. Buy an iPod, you can only download music from one place, iTunes. If your “it” in the marketplace that’s a pretty good place to be. As Ross points out the only legal way around this limitation is to remove the copy protection by uploading tracks that have been “ripped” from a CD and uploaded to the device. But that’s a lot of trouble and don’t I by right of purchasing that CD gain the ability to play it where and how I want?

So on the scene comes the iPhone. A super ubber hot gadget and if it had been available on Tuesday would probably be sitting on my desk right now, forced to again use iTunes and of all things Cingular Wireless. This is it folks, everybody will want one of these, and regardless of it’s initial shortcomings Apple stands to make billions because of our need to have the ultimate in cool. Has this not given them the power to monopolize the market and tell us what we get? Why Cingular? They don’t have the largest network and even if they did people are going to be more reluctant to switch cellular providers than they will be shelling out $700 for the phone. For some reason that just seems counter-productive, unless of course your Apple, who probably gets a commission from Cingular for every iPhone sold. I know when I was in cellular sales, what I wouldn’t give to have had a phone that was so in demand that I could force everyone to get it through me.

Then we have Microsoft, whose not releasing a phone, but they’re doing something that seems just as bad. Everything I read about this operating system makes me glad I’m no longer working desktop support. If you’ve not read it, check out this piece by security researcher Peter Guttman who wrote the infamous “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection“, the “executive executive summary” of which read “The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history”.

There is no doubt that regardless of what it says publicly Microsoft is a company that has aspirations to rule the world and the Vista platform pushed them just a little bit closer to that reality. Guttman, in his analysis, digs into the finer points of Microsoft’s imposed DRM standards related to what they refer to as “premium content”, HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. In it he finds that Windows Vista, among other things, incurs a considerable cost in terms of resources and has significant impact on system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, hardware and software cost. As a result, these effects are passed on to the rest of the PC industry in the form of contracts that force vendors to comply with Microsoft’s own interpretation of copy protection if they want a piece of the Vista pie. That in turn gets passed on to us, the consumers, in the form of new hardware that’s usually more expensive because it’s designed and licensed for use with Vista.
Here again we have a scenario much like Apple and the iPod in which a company holds the virtual keys to a kingdom where their product basically rules and they use that platform to force vendors and consumers alike to conform to a set of standards, we have no real hope of ever understanding.

Both Microsoft and Apple use the excuse the music industry, and to a lesser extent the movie industry, makes them have to implement DRM support. The question is though, is that or should that be their responsibility. I may be a little skewed in my thinking of the whole thing or misinterpreting some of the findings by others, but isn’t that sort of like me telling you to go figure out how to protect my house? Granted, Apple and Microsoft are the ones that have to actually implement whatever is imposed but should it be left up to them to define the standards for how that is done?

What are your thoughts on the whole thing?