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

[Eric Murray]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2002 at 07:10:07PM -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
> 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? 


I don't think 98 does it, but XP does.
It just raised the bar a bit-- there was a pirate version
of Office XP out before the legal version. 


Eric