This document looks purely at the cost of the technical portions of Vista's
content protection [Note A]. The political issues (under the heading of DRM)
have been examined in exhaustive detail elsewhere and won't be commented on
further, unless it's relevant to the cost analysis. However, one important
point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to
work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics,
something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry
wishes it were possible. This conundrum is displayed over and over again in
the Windows content-protection specs, with manufacturers being given no hard-
and-fast guidelines but instead being instructed that they need to display as
much dedication as possible to the party line. The documentation is peppered
with sentences like:
"It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter
of the specification and provide additional content-protection features,
because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content".
This is an exceedingly strange way to write technical specifications, but is
dictated by the fact that what the spec is trying to achieve is fundamentally
impossible. Readers should keep this requirement to display appropriate levels of dedication in mind when reading the following analysis.
