Brandon Wirtz's Digital Mix

Robert responded to my post on the Xbox2 SDK. Here

MS may have just pulled a fast one and I think I'm the only one who noticed. If they didn't pull a fast one they should have.... Windows On a G5 not running via an emulator, running natively. The Xbox2 SDK is currently a G5 running on a custom Windows Kernel. While this confirms that the Xbox is likely going to run on an IBM processor what it doesn't tell us is does it mean that MS will take this opportunity to port the rest of the OS? It isn't such a far leap that if you are going to create developer tools for the platform, and port your kernel that porting the rest of the OS would be such a stress. Might we be looking at a huge win for IBM/Motorola? Having the worlds most popular OS running on your Chips can mean big bucks. It could also mean big world of hurt for Apple since a lot of the loyalty Mac enjoys is related to hardware as much as it is to software.

Referrer Spam. Pretty cool way to trick some one in to visting your site. I thought it was odd I was getting taffic from http://www.visitcelebrities.com/paris-hilton/download_paris_video.html So I checked it out and it is a sign up for a site. So either 20 people all came from this site, or they are going after bloggers who check their stats. What do you bet they are using Techorati.com and automating visiting all the blogs with a forced refereral tag.

I think asking this to an Apple User is Rhetorical (if you are a PC user you think it is rhetorical for a different reason than if you are an Apple user) a $250 grab bag? Come on. If I drop that kind of money I want to know what I'm getting. Sure the stuff is supposed to be valued at $600 - $1000 but there are a lot of things valued at $1000 I woudn't pay $20 for. If you are one of the first 200 Shoppers I guess you are very likely of the sort that thinks anything Apple is cool so maybe it works.

Nvidia's new AR10 is supposed to turn Mobilephones into a device that rivals Camcorders, game consoles, and is generally a Portable Media Killer. Having seen some of the new Portable Media Centers based on the MS Pocket PC platform I could see the AR10 being huge in that space, epsecially since many of these devices have several gigs of storage. My mobile phone doesn't.

Everyone is talking about how the new 3d graphics of an AR10 enabled phone could revolutionized the way we use our phones, but unless our phones get a huge upgrade to their storage how is that going to happen? A Java game with the quality of an old Atari game weighs in at about 1 meg the size of a Floppy disk. A "Real" PC Game averages about 500 megs these day. Cut that to 1/8 to accomodate the difference in necessary texture size considering your screen is at 1/8 the resolution and you are still at 60 megs.

The experience in a "Camcorder killer" is even more dramatic. A camcorder uses 720x480x30fps, in a DV Cam this is at 25mbps which is 3 Megabytes per Second, DVD quality is .6 Megabytes per second and Mpeg4 is .4 meg per second, with WM9 weighing in at 1/3 of a Meg per second. This Translates to a 3 minute clip being 60 megs if WMV were used.

Considering the amout of storage most phones have right now this means that there will have to be some big upgrades if AR10 is going to find a market. Though I think that market will be in Portable Media Centers, not phones.

I wouldn't buy Nvidia Stock to day... Back in October, for sure, but wait for someone to announce it for a PMCE.

EFF is proposing to do a nielson's style rating system to distribute a voluntary fee. This is much like how radio stations pay artists for play. The Problem I see with this system is that as an independent music artist you are going to have to achieve a certain popularity before you get one red cent. At least with itunes and Napster2 you can get paid even if the only one who buys your music is your grandmother's bridge club.

It also doesn't address other content. E-books, Movies, Software. I publish an e-book, and since its started being circulated on Kazaa my sales are all but nill. Conversely the 1000 or so copies I sold would quite possibly not even show up on the radar of the EFF proposal. So either way I wouldn't get paid.

In a Tech TV article Madigan Shive and Indie Musician talks about how P2P has been a great promotional tool for her band. And "I feel what the major labels are giving us in terms of music is a bunch of crap" I have to agree.

I usually only talk tech, but you know what this really irks me. I'm not Gay, I'm not married, but I think it is stupid that two people who go to Vegas and meet and marry in 5 hours can get all the tax, health, and social benefits of being married. And two people who live together, in a relationship or just in the same place as room mates, can't. I split the rent why can't I split the Medical coverage?

And what happened to a seperation of Church and State? I thought we got Laws from the State, and Morals from the church. And while I think the State should cover the contract that says who gets the house, the dog, and the mercedes, let the church work out if you will burn in hell for getting married, or divorced.

I like the good old days of a hands off government policy. I wish Canada was warmer.

One of my biggest complaints with CDs isn't a fault in the media, it is the fault of the idiots who master them. It seems there is but one goal for them: to ruin my hearing. Great sound and great music require there to be several elements: punch, definition, and clarity.

Think of some of the most identifiable natural sounds. The crack of lightning followed by the roll of thunder, the spring peepers croaking in the woods, the roar of the ocean; these sounds have a melodic quality, a rhythm and definition, and a definite change in decibels as the sounds are heard. Sounds that are considered pleasant most often mimic the qualities of these natural sounds.

There is a class of guys who lay down soundtracks for movies that understand this. Music becomes part of the experience: booming and fast paced in action scenes, soft and subtle during romantic scenes, and so on. This is demonstrated in movies like Lord Of The Rings and Legend where the music is blended in so well you almost don't know it's there. There are, of course, exceptions to this - movies like Mystic River where the music track completely drowns out the voice track at times.

Most music CDs don't seem to get the kind of attention they should. Music CDs are compressed, a term that has nothing to do with the amount of size a file takes up but rather the amount of range in the volume of a piece of content. By compressing audio you never end up with sounds that are too quiet to be audible or so loud as to be deafening. Instead, you end up with audio that is very monotone.

This image shows four audio tracks. The first is an example of how audio should look. With a great deal of change in volume within the file: occasionally being truly silent, and occasionally being at its peak.

Next is an acceptable example. While peak isn't reached at any point, there is a good amount of variation in the volume.

Sample three suffers from severe compression. This is a piece that no longer has any diversity - it is all monotone. This piece also never reaches a peak level, so to make the song soft, it was compressed but not normalized.

Sample four is very close to perfect. There's good variation in volume, though it is normalized to a bit beyond peak (which can cause distortion).

In CDs you buy today, sample three is the most typical. The audio is compressed to the point where there is added distortion and all the "life" is gone. The music becomes severely ugly. This, of course, helps sell concert tickets because these days most everyone does sound better on stage. It also helps MTV as the Unplugged music sounds much more lifelike than the music that gets passed off on CD.

Going back to the thunder example, below is a wav of a thunder clap. The green is the wav before audio compression, and the red is after.(I used Adobe Audition's Radio Compression preset to ruin this beautiful sound.)

ThunderNatural.mp3

ThunderCompressed.mp3

Compare the two mp3s. This demonstration is quite dramatic because the roll of the thunder (in the compressed example) doesn't get softer the way it ought to. This isn't to say that compression has no purpose. It is great for interviews and spoken word content where you want to keep mumbles audible and shouts to a small roar. But compression takes a lot of the emotion out of the sound. It's like the difference between listening to NPR or listening to Martin Luther King Jr.: an audio compressor makes everyone sound like Lynn Neary and Robert Siegel.

Because online music such as iTunes and Napster 2.0 use CDs as their source, the music I buy for my portable device sucks, too. Only it sucks more because instead of getting CD quality suck, I get near-CD quality suck. The distortion and loss of frequency response that results from a file being data compressed / encoded to 128 or even 192k stacks on top of the distortion added via audio compression.

Because each format encodes slightly differently, some content will sound better from one online provider than from another. AAC tends to handle content that is audio compressed better than WMA does, but WMA tends to handle the softer and more subtle sounds found in uncompressed audio. Because so much of what is sold online is pop music, this puts AAC in a better light than WMA in the format wars. If you are, however, interested in preserving your RCA Red Label 1812 Overture or you're just transferring it to your portable media player, might I recommend WMA? You will find the cannons' rumbles to be crisper and the subtle sounds of the children's choir fading in and out to be much cleaner in WMA. Mp3 will lose some of the stereo separation that is much more important in orchestral music than it is in pop. If you look at the examples above you will notice that most of the music is practically monophonic; the audio in the left and right is almost identical, whereas the thunder is very different between channels. AAC has stereo separation equal to that of WMA but it tends to drop sounds below a certain db. Whether this was done as a noise reduction feature or if it is just a way to drop some of the bits that would never be heard by someone who has been to too many concerts, I don't know.

I'm 24, so I don't remember tube amps or 8 tracks, but I often think maybe it would be better to roll back to those days. When I bought my home theater, the salesman was trying to push me into a model that included 20+ surround modes from living room to concert hall to cave. Sure, that is cool for my Audigy card when I'm playing games and the programmers don't have to presample all of those environments for each sound in the game, but like I would want to watch a movie in a cave, or hear Britney as though she were performing at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. (Okay, Britney in the bathroom surround mode crossed my mind briefly as I figured I could pretend she was in my shower... but that passed pretty quickly.) Perhaps I'm too much of a purist, or perhaps labels think their target audience is the guy with a 4000-watt, 42-inch subwoofer in his car. But for me, I'd like to hear the music the way you would in the studio - with all the subtlety and life still in it.

MS released a spec for their Caller ID for E-mail unfortunately the system is easily beaten. The spec only requires that the e-mail doesn't spoof the domain, as opposed to has to come from a particularly unique or permanent domain. You can still use a Zombie to blast millions of e-mails that zombie just has to be willing to verify that it exists. 69.1.Comcast.com is still a valid domain, just not a great one.

I also have concerns about my cheap hosting company updating My DNS entries to include the XML entries to comply with this system.

Welcome to those of you who tracked me down from the article I wrote for Chris! Hope you enjoyed it, feel free to wander around there is a fair amount of good content here. Or I like to pretend there is.

Feel free to drop me comments positive or negative about things too.

Got 20k or more songs, videos, and media? Want to help a bloke out? Sean is looking for some big collections to test Windows Media Player Databases.

Get a hold of him here

If Dan Verner goes by I'm sure he'd be a prime candidate.

Gates may be predicting the death of passwords but if he is going to stick with smartcards internally, it is going to be a hard sell. the SecurID system is strong and the little timer device is cool, but the truth is it is too inconvenient. At least with a smart card I have to have the physical device present. With SecureID is can have a friend with a cell phone read me the numbers over the phone. I can grab the device from the parking attendant and the owner be none the wiser.

The system still doesn't solve the physical proximity issues that I mentioned a few posts back.

Tsunami is a set of tools for building clans and social networks with in the Xbox Live Gaming Platform. This is a truly unique idea that lets you set up tournaments, give ranks to your players, share content, and even use messenger to talk with those in game.

Team Dynamics: This is a structured clan system where players can form a team with a distinct identity, send messages within that team, store statistics and challenge other teams to matches.

Competitions: Tsunami allows developers to easily implement different competitions into games, which can then be administered by either users or publishers.

Title-Managed Online Storage: Players can upload content for games, like their own customised logos, as well as more complex items like maps, and see them organized by title for other players to download.

MSN Messenger Integration: This feature lets players in a game contact other players on their PCs, using Microsoft's MSN Messenger utility.

I'd still like to see MS allow us to create home brew games, and access them via the Internet, but a web browser, and the ability to play WMV files off of the web would be spectacular. I know it is all coming in Bob Sled, I just have to be patient. When you are as big as MSFT it takes time to move on things.

Wired has a great article on how people use their iPod the gist of it is something I have thought and said for a while about all products. If you can add a few simple features that you can see even a shimmer of potential for do it. What iPod has that so many devices are missing is a clock. A scheduler. Read the article and you will see that people are using this little feature for all sorts of things.

I was reading it and thinking of a 1000 other things I could use this functionality for. Imagine using Outlook to assign a music or genre, or key word to your tasks, uploading those tasks and schedule to your PMD and then having a soundtrack for your life.

Or conversely letting your therapist do it for you. Oh you have a meeting with your ex-wife at noon, so at 11:45 a calming voice says, "This is the mother of your children, a woman you once loved, no matter how you feel now, know that she will be a part of your life atleast until your 6 year old turns 18, so be polite, and patient, it will make the next 12 years easier."

Later when we are all tagged with RFID chips we can have our PMD play the theme song of an individual as they approach, or if you have trouble remembering names have it tell you their name and if you ask how is the wife, or how it the 66 'stang.

The moral of the story is the same as it is with Open Source. Give people the tools to use your product how they want. And they will reward you by buying, and idolizing and converting your friends. Remember you aren't selling a product you are building a religion.

If people knew what I know about how the legal system works with regard to tech we would have a lot longer passwords. Did you know I can hack any password that is all lower case on your Windows Server in 8 minutes? Mixed case all letters in 24, Mixed case with letters and numbers 40, and Mixed case with numbers letters, and punctuation marks in 6 hours? And once I get past the login I can get all the rest of the passwords for that machine in 5 minutes no matter their complexity?

But skip all that if I have a search warrant I can simply peruse your hard disk and it doesn't matter what your password is you are not likely to be in the .01% that run encryption, and if you are I'm only 5 minutes away from extracting your login and so that encryption didn't slow me down at all.

You don't do anything illegal you have nothing to hide right? Wrong! Do none of your friends do anything wrong? If they e-mailed you a Search warrant could easily be drafted to check your PC. And you'd be surprised what you are doing that is illegal. No Mp3's from the Napster 1.0 days? No copies of MS office you don't have a CD for anymore? Yeah Hulk Sucked but you shouldn't have started to download it even if it never did finish. Is the girl in that photo 18? Really? You have a copy of her ID?

What I'd like is a 128bit encryption DRM that has a license server in a far off country. That way when they come to take my PC I can turn off my sensitive content. Would even help with theft as a the info on your laptop is very easy to get at even with passwords. And those laptops that you can low-jack and disable, unless they low level format the Hard disk they aren't saving you.

5000 people have been effected by the patriot act being used in a non-traditional way. I'm among them. I was never charged with terrorism. To the best of knowledge I don't know any terrorist. By some fluke it is possible that one of my High School buddies could be in the Michigan Militia, but these days those guys seem almost normal when compared to our government.

I am more and more looking at Canada as a utopia to flee to. Patriot act I and II aren't good things. And the only group speaking to this seems to be EFF and
Wired.

Today I'm on my Linux is more secure trip. I could Blowfish my whole hard drive and if some one had physical proximity to my machine they would still be 4000 hours from my stuff.

MS should address this at some point.

Eminem is suing Apple over a 10 year old singing his song in a commercial. I wonder if Ricki Martin will sue FOX over Will Hungs rendition of "She Bangs" ? Hung's performance is a crime on so many levels, where as demading 10 million dollars for a 10 year old singing a song sounds like a jealous tantrum. If Apple has to pay $10m for the performance some one should sign that kid a contract, anyone who cost that kind of cash for a 30 second spot is going places.

This isn't the first time Apple has created heat with artists. They pissed off the Beatles back in September

I realize you don't get to the top with out pissing a few people off, but you'd think you'd try and keep the Artists happy being as you are trying to convince them that this new economy for music is in thier best interest.

Slashdot ran an article implying that Microsoft formed an aliance with Sendmail. This isn't the case. The two happen to be both presenting a similar solution to the spam problem. Just because Ford and Chevy are both working on Electric Hybrid cars doesn't mean they are in an aliance. Do you think Slashdot reads the articles before they post them? I don't know if I'd be pissed or happy if some one told me that Mircrosoft was allied with me and I didn't know it. I guess it depends on if I was publicly traded. ;-)

So for some reason no one is putting an FM tuner in an iPod or DJ, So if you are listening to your mp3's radio won't reach you. Unless they stop you on the street, interrogate you and record what is coming out of your head phones.

Wired News Story

It is interesting to me that we care what others are playing. It doesn't surprise me that people want to tell others what they are listening to, but when did society get so interested in other people? I understand Blogs where we shout to the world our thoughts and our feelings, but it is like all those friends you have that want to tell you everything in your life but don't want to listen…. That's why there were always more ShoutCast Stations than listeners :-)

Dawson writes about the frustrations of programming in Indigo. Exciting but frustrating none the less.

Oh, come on. I'll buy in to there was a Stargate in Egypt, and one in Antarctica, but a third one in Atlantis? Earth was the Grand Central Station of advanced ancient alien civilization. Oh, and new enemies? I'd think we'd deal with one Alien Race at a time. Read more at SciFi

Jake Is RIGHT!

For me it is as much about Portability as it is longevity. I can take my CD with me. I have a walkman, a boom box, home stereo, and car audio that will all play my CD. And low and behold so does my Girl friend, and my mom, and my grandma, and my neighbor. Amazing how well that technology just works. And I can transfer the license very easily, I pick up the media and put it in the next device and I don’t even have to be connected to the Net.

I think (and correct me if I’m putting words in anyone’s mouth) That for most people it is just about being able to get their content on to their player. There are a few iTunes Exclusives, and BestBuy Exclusives that mean iPod won’t have that content, or RIO won’t. We never had that with CD’s With a CD you new that if it came on cassette it would be available on CD. Movies are the same way. (Barring StarWars) You never have a VHS only release.

Most people like one stop shopping. I would be content going from artist site to artist site, or Label to Label to buy my music if it meant I could get one license for multiple formats. But once and play on any player, and Have a CD sent in the mail. I’d pay $3 a track for that.

I have started writing programs in the Whidbey Beta, I'm really impressed with the improvements, little things trip me up every now and then but for the most part it really rocks. I cranked out a new version of an old app in a matter of minutes and the forms tools helped me improve the UI's look a great deal in a matter of seconds.

Looks Like I have to build a machine whose sole purpose is to game. FFXI won't run on Longhorn, the Play Online program errors on start up that it won't run on this OS.

Probably to cut down on the support headaches.

So I moved to Longhorn PDC release. I have to admit it was pretty painless. I got burned by the Static IP known issue, and a few other things, but I was able to move almost all of my applications over. I miss my Nero Image Drive that won't install. I'll have to find another way to run from my ISO library. ( my file server is a big juke box for my software CD's)

I kept VPC around so I can run a mirror of the machine prior to the Longhorn install. All seems to be going well. Performance is acceptable, I like a lot of the new features, though the new IE is ugly. I hate where the address bar is.

I'm debating if I'm going to disable WinFS as it idles at 75megs, but I'm only using 500megs of my gig of ram so I'm running just fine :-)

ASF has several issues that need to be addressed if it is to be a premiere format for HD and Extremely long play media.

The inability to start buffering a second file when all of the previous file has buffered: In the current format ASF doesn't handle being split in to multi-part files, because the current disc specification says no file should exceed 1 gig, a feature length movie has to be split. This creates buffering issues.

The inability to use multiple profiles with in a single piece of content. The DVD's that look the best each scene is encoded with settings specific to the way that scene plays. Sometimes you want key frames 3 seconds a part, and others you want them at 1.5 seconds to match the strobe of a scene. You want a chase scene to play at the maximum data rate, and the makeout scene to play at a lower data rate.

No Key Frame Index: While there is a Maximum key Frame distance there is not index to keep track of forced key frames. As Such content can only be played as fast as it can be renedered and seeking with in a file is difficult from a ROM.

Lack of a sprite layer: Many of the coolest features of DVD-roms involve the use of a sprite layer when playing content. "Follow the White Rabbit" is a feature of the Matrix DVD and is a prime example of how even minimal use of the sprite layer can be used as a value add for the content.

Lack of a uniform directory structure: So far no HD media disk has used the same directory structure as the one before. While the ability of the player to seek through the directory structure can remedy this, it is still an important feature as it reduces the boot time of a disc.

Lack of a uniform menu system: Flash, Sparkle, Java, it wouldn't matter just pick one. Until a menu system is identified there is little a hardware manufacturer can do to create a box that will play an HD disc with the same plug and play experience as a DVD. I know I'm supposed to be all about HighMat, it is a start.

You can have any color you want as long as that color is black.

We have come a long way from the day when you could only get a car in one color. My sister changes the color of her cell phone with her mood. You always know what the hot new single is by what her ring tone plays. So while we can have 100's of colors for everything from toasters to laptops, the downside to this level of customization is that we are creating a world where there are no standards. Interoperability that was the buzz of 2000 is fast dying. Many of the coolest technologies are disparate. The lack of standards has created a world where I can by 100+ accessories for my cellular phone, but I can't walk down to the radio shack to by a power chord to plug that same phone in to my cigarette lighter because they only carry the 15 most common. Going to the Kinko's to have a document printed can be quite a feat. They print from a Mac most the time and fonts and formatting can be an issue, especially if I use Publisher or a custom template for Power Point.

We have created a world where many of the most exciting technologies are not compatible, only exist on a single platform, or compete with each other even though they were never designed to be even remotely alike. I bought my mom an Xbox and use the Lobby of Xbox Live Games to talk to her VoIP because the technology works better and easier than many of the technologies specifically designed for that purpose, and certain it is cheaper. But I shouldn't have to fire up Unreal Tournament to talk to my mom.

Microsoft has a unique opportunity in this technological world. It has the largest install base of consumer desktops. It has the largest install base of broadband set top box users. The combination of these two platforms should be cause for MS to create technologies that enable greater interaction and communication between users. Unfortunately because there is so much segregation in the departments at MS, standards are often overlooked. Because two teams solving the same problem for different products rarely interface to create a single module to be used in all products and instead create slight variations on the same feature. This is especially true if the products don't exist in the same family, Xbox, Server, and Office teams may create separate products that do the same things an compete with each other as is the case with Xbox Live, MSN Messenger, Communications Server, Presenter and a few other products that are variations on VoIP and digital conferencing. Rather than using MSFT's impressive install base to create a unified or at least compatible network the technology is in a state of disarray.

Unified DRM - Extended Active Directory Security (XADS)

In this document I will attempt to outline what I would like DRM to look like in the near future. I will do my best to outline both the end user experience and the backend. There are many problems with in my vision that I don't have solutions for.
The problem with DRM as it exists today is that it only works on select media types in controlled environments for select players. The problem with ADS as it exists to day is that it assumes that all files will reside on Windows machines. While DRM and ADS are currently viewed as separate technologies the end user experience for each is approximately the same. Both DRM and ADS protect content from unauthorized access and set the rights that authorized users have to that content. To that end I propose a marriage of these technologies into a single technology that offers the advantage that security can be maintained for files not stored on a server, files being transferred via optical media, and files not residing with in the corporate network or domain.
DRM from Microsoft currently exists in several unconnected variations, Windows Media DRM, e-Book DRM, and Information Rights Management. Each of these technologies has distinct strengths and limitations. Many of the features of one DRM technology may not make sense for another DRM technology. For example it is unlikely that a book would have limited plays, or that an HTML document would have a transfer to SDMI option. There are however instances when content not covered by these technologies would be more valuable if they could be secured. There are also instances when you might want to only allow use of content that had been secured.

Scenarios: Content that can not currently be Rights Managed

A letter sent from a defendant to his lawyer would not be admissible in court. However an e-mail retained in the sent messages folder would be.

A picture of your ex-girl friend in sexy lingerie would be in her interest to be rights managed so she could expire the content when she finds you cheating on her with her sister.

An Excel spread sheet of an earnings report could be delivered to stock holders during the 24 hours leading up to the official announcement, but only enabled 5 minutes after the announcement. There by saving bandwidth costs as rather than making a large file available and having a high demand for it all at once a very small amount of bandwidth can be used at activation.

Scenarios: Content in situations where only signed content could be used

In an environment where low paid, employees work in mass with sensitive content it would be invaluable to be able to make all of that content useless away from the PC they work at, but also impossible for them to bring their own content to work. By limiting execution of programs to signed code there would be much lower risk of virus infection or security breaching applications being used.

In locations where the public has access to a PC it is often the goal of the random individual to see if they can "break" the system. Allowing only signed content to execute would mean that even in the event they left the closed system of a Kiosk, ATM, or Check out counter that they would not have access to the content, or ability to execute programs outside the original context of the device.

End User Experience

The end user experience for content creators with regard to DRM today is less than ideal. Signing content is not easily done, setting up a server to handle licensing is not cheap, and the over all experience is not at a level that a typical content creator could implement themselves. In an ideal world creating Rights Managed content would be as simple as signing an office macro, or editing meta-tags is today.

In my optimal scenario the user would have difficulty telling the difference between how IRM works now and how it would work in a scenario where there was a centralized license server. When a user created apiece of content in any application that had XADS support under the file menu there would be a permissions option. From that menu a user could set the rights would be imposed on future users, and could set what user/machine combinations would have "owner" rights to the content, along with a master key for the content. User/machine combinations would be pulled from the existing ADS setup, or could be imported in the same manner that a public key is delivered in a PGP scenario. By setting these owners in the content you are saying that these user/machines can access the content even when there is not a connection to the license server available and that these user/machines have the right to edit or re-license the content.

Content delivered via e-mail would prompt the creator for permissions for the recipient when the file was attached, content delivered via disc could either use permissions controlled by the central license server, or be tied to the disc, or a combination there of. For example: A power point presentation on a future product might be released that allows viewing of the presentation when delivered on the original media, but would not allow viewing, or editing if copied to hard disk, however a user could acquire a license for the content form the licensing server to view edit, and possibly repackage the content if they are listed in the user/machine owners list, or if they know the master key for the code.

Content could also be "bound" to smart media or other security device, allowing the "master key" to be a thumbprint, retina scan, DNA, etc.

Rights and Privileges

Rights for content would include:

Rights Description
Preview Preview as a mark in mark out and number of Times, i.e. word 50 to 150
of the content viewed 3 times. This would be "book marked" from
preview start to preview end as appropriate by content type
Render Play, View, display, execute,
Annotate Add comments, book marks, and additional meta-tags
Modify Edit, Patch, Change, This allows you to change the content,
Modify does not imply the ability to copy the content,
nor copy from the content.
Copy Copy in whole or in part, and number of times. i.e. 15% up to 3 times
Media Shift Move content from one media to another. i.e. Content could be delivered via
the web and burned to disk or documents would be printable
Transcode Deliver to SDMI at a lesser data rate or in an alternate format. i.e. Audio
Delivered at 5.1 lossless could be reduced to 128k stereo for portability. For
Audio Video and Images this would also be used for changing resolution, and
Bitrates to allow User to take HD quality content on a PDMC
Delete Delete or crop content
Instances Number of instances a piece of content may have. For example a song might
Might be allowed to exist on 3 devices.
Relinquishable Can a file be relinquished to add to the Instance count. i.e. a user chooses to
Play a file on their PC but now wants it on their laptop but is only allowed one
Instance.
Repackage Allow content to be repackaged and with what rights. i.e. Audio content might
Might be leased to a distribution house but only for X number of days or only
For so many sales.
Affiliation Tracking information that allows for content to be tagged with an origin, and
Delivery path information. i.e. Origin: IGN.com to John Smith to Jane Smythe

Secure Data Paths

One of the most obvious problems with the system outlined so far is that it would require that a certification program would verify that a program respected the license of the content. With out this certification there would be no way to verify that a program that could render content wouldn't copy, print, or dub the content. There would also have to exist a secure data path so that content did not exist in an unencrypted state in memory. Most likely this would only be possible through the addition of hardware, but as I'm only creating this white paper to outline usability and feature set I won't address this at this time

I beat this topic to death, but Mac has it and WinTel doesn't. This article can be summed up in one line.

I guess it shows Mac users relate to their machines differently.... We've gutted Dells and we never got a 'My God you desecrated a Dell!' reaction

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