economics of DRM, was Re: Ross's TCPA paper

[Harmon Seaver]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 10:59:23AM -0700, Eric Murray wrote:
> Microsoft does not do things simply because they enjoy being evil.
> They are not so worried about Linux (with its small share of the market)
> that they will spend mega-bucks now on a very long term project that might
> possibly let them keep it off some PCs in the far future.  They _are_
> concerned with getting paid for the 50% of their software that isn't
> paid for.  There's a shitload of money there, and if getting at some of
> it costs a little, well, its still more profit than they would
> have gotten otherwise.

   Isn't it much simpler for them to just write into their OS the ability to
snitch on what M$ software was on the users machine everytime they go online? In
fact, I've been assuming that everything from w98 on did exactly that. And
wouldn't it be trivial for them to check for cracked serial numbers, or
duplicate serial numbers? 

-- 
Harmon Seaver	
CyberShamanix
http://www.cybershamanix.com