AfterDawn: News

In slightly surprising move, Microsoft has posted an article on their website basically opposing MPAA's and RIAA's suggested hardware copy-protection mechanisms.

Microsoft says its worried about suggested copyright bill's (Fritz "MPAA's pet" Hollings' bill that is dubbed as Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act or CBDTPA) effects on consumers' privacy and also to future software and hardware development. This is quite a radical opinion from Microsoft, who has a long history of not-so-consumer-privacy-friendly decisions. But if the Beast is on our side against Even Bigger Beast, that's always a good thing :-)



Microsoft also goes so far in the article that they suggest recording and movie industries to actually offer a competitive digital distribution model to fight the Net piracy. This is something that most of the analysts have suggested for years, but for these companies this somehow doesn't seem to be an option.

But this is definately good news to "us", digital media freaks. Microsoft, despite having their own legal problems, still has huge amount of power within U.S. politics and its opinions simply cannot be ignored as it represents a huge portion of software industry.

Source: The Register

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 6 Jun 2002 14:24