Bloggers air gripes over Vista's DRM

As noted elsewhere on CNET News.com Tuesday, Microsoft's Vista operating system launched to a not-very-exciting turnout and relatively little in the way of user attention.

Temperatures ran high on Vista's aggressive digital rights management (DRM) features, however. Some bloggers defended the software giant's right to market whatever product it chooses, but by and large, those vocally against DRM seem to be in the majority.

Some folks, it turns out, are pretty livid about Microsoft's copy-protection measures. Not because they're professional pirates hoping to make a killing selling copied DVDs and not even because they're casual music pirates who will miss getting stuff for free--but because the system itself is apparently capable of locking you out of your own machine, and because any other kind of software bought at the store might not work with the operating system by next year.

Some bloggers are even audacious enough to propose that they should only have to pay for a piece of software one time.

"It's built to have problems: The anti-piracy protections will have it lowering image and sound quality, turning off features, and disabling itself altogether if it decides you're doing anything hinky, whether or not you are...You don't want a product that's defective by design anywhere near your important files."
--Push c x

"Vista launched this week, and it's already broken...Now that Vista, HDCP, Blu-ray and HD DVD are all broken, it seems like the millions of dollars and thousands of work hours sunk into these systems was misspent."
--BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow

"To the tune of "Start me up" by The Rolling Stones:

Well I bought it up
Brought Vista home and tried to boot it up
But when I load it up
It says my permission is not enough
It went on about
Some of my MP3s that loaded up
Because my EULA's up
I have to pay again
It never stops, never stops, never stops, never stops
This Windows Vista jive
It's DRM'd my drive
My Duo Core can't fly
My new sound card is obsolete
'Cause hardware DRM's not on my machine!
Cough it up!"
--Emiofbrie