Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 18th Feb 2009 23:28 UTC
Does Windows 7 contain more DRM than Windows Vista? Does Windows 7 limit you from running cracked applications, and will it open the firewall specifically for applications that want to check if they're cracked or not? Does it limit the audio recording capabilities? According to a skimp and badly written post on Slashdot, it does. The Slashdot crowd tore the front page item apart - and rightfully so.
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Member since:
2005-10-05
(Case 1) Someone sent me a .wma file that had DRM on it (initially, I hadn't recalled that that one was a .wma file). This probably arose because that user did not know about the need to uncheck a setting in Windows Media Player for ripping in DRM-free .wma format.
Windows Media Player has not ever defaulted to ripping your music into protected WMA. It didn't in XP, it didn't in Vista, and it doesn't in Windows 7. For this scenario to occur a user will have to on his own enable copy-protecting their encoded media files. Why on earth are there so many oblivious people acting like they know about this software? Thom is not the liar here.
(Case 2) someone else asked me why they couldn't rip .mp3 files using their Vista laptop so that the files would play in his car's mp3 player. There are a number of possibilities here, the most likely of which is that the original audio CD had DRM protection ... it probably had a data track as well as audio tracks, and when that person tried to "rip" the audio tracks CD Vista likely honored the DRM and merely copied DRM'd .mp3 files from the data track instead.
This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and borders on trolling with the incredible lack of technical knowledge. The very way audio CDs work prevent them from being DRM-protected on the disk, you are thinking about mixed-data CD-ROM discs that are not actual standards compliant compact discs which won't play universally due to this. You have to use a format that supports DRM (non-mp3) and also tell the program you are ripping with to copy protect the files. And by the way, you can play WMA files on Linux, you always have been able to. You will not be able to play copy-protected anything on anything without the proper license and a player that supports the DRM mechanism.
Oh, BTW ... the original discussion actually turned up the fact that one CAN apply DRM to mp3 media files. A link was provided to a 2004 article where the owners of the mp3 patents had announced the ability to do so.
Would you like to do everyone a favour and either cite your source or edit Wikipedia's mp3 entry to prove this? Right now it says: the lack of DRM restrictions, which makes MP3 files easy to edit, copy and play in different portable digital players (Samsung, Apple, Creative, etc.)