So what's wrong with DRM in the platform anyway?

As I said yesterday, it's going to take a bit of time to get the next article in the "cdrom playback" series working, so I thought I'd turn the blog around and ask the people who read it a question.

I was reading Channel9 the other day, and someone turned a discussion of longhorn into a rant against the fact that Longhorn's going to be all about DRM (it's not, there will be DRM support in Longhorn, just like there has been DRM support in just about every version of Windows that's distributed windows media format).

But I was curious.  Why is it so evil that a platform contain DRM support?

My personal opinion is that DRM is a tool for content producers.  Content Producers are customers, just like everyone else that uses our product is a customer.  They want a platform that provides content protection.  You can debate whether or not that is a reasonable decision, but it's moot - the content producers today want it.

So Microsoft, as a platform vendor provides DRM for the content producers.  If we didn't, they wouldn't use our media formats, they'd find some other media format that DOES have DRM support for their content.

The decision to use (or not use) DRM is up to the content producer.  It's their content, they can decide how to distribute it.  You can author and distribute WMA/WMV files without content protection - all my ripped CDs are ripped without content protection (because I don't share them).  I have a bunch of WMV files shot on the camcorder that aren't DRM'ed - they're family photos, there's no point in using rights management.

There are professional content producers out there that aren't using DRM for their content (Thermal and a Quarter is a easy example I have on the tip of my tongue (as I write this, they've run out of bandwidth :( but...)).  And there are content producers that are using DRM.

But why is it evil to put the ability to use DRM into the product?