Later on, Gizmodo broke the news that the Microsoft person had been incorrect, and Microsoft issued a statement correcting the mistake.

Still, the whole flap got me thinking about the past few years, and how invasive the content companies have become in the world of technology. While their fears of perfect digital copies are certainly understandable, it's also true that the major studios and publishers have done little to try to develop different business models.

Even the model of iTunes isn't really new𔃉just old wine in new bottles. You still buy the songs, and the content providers attempt to restrict your ability to move the content to whatever format you want. In effect, the content providers control your ability to use the content you buy. In fact, content companies have moved swiftly to a licensing model—you don't buy a DVD, you license the content.

On top of all this, those content providers are inconsistent in their approach. Take the case of Kaleidescape, which uses enterprise-class server technology to build custom, on-demand movie delivery gear for individual homes. Kaliedescape has taken great pains to try to keep it all legal. The customer must sign an agreement that they own the DVD; once on the Kaleidescape servers, you can't extract the movies, and so on. Yet that didn't prevent the DVD Copy Control Association from suing Kaleidescape for breach of contract and licensing. After all, the DMCA prevents individuals or companies from bypassing content protection schemes—even, theoretically, for fair use purposes.

Microsoft has gone to great pains to build in content protection into Vista, even striving to keep digital content streams invisible to the operating system. Intel and AMD are designing technologies that can help systems be more secure—but which also enable content providers to lock their content to individual systems.

Meanwhile, manufacturers of graphics cards and displays now have to ensure that their products are HDCP compliant, because you never know if some clever college student might pull that content in an unprotected form out of a DVI stream.

Meanwhile, users suffer. We still hear of HDMI and DVD handshaking problems between peripherals, rendering expensive HDTVs useless until workarounds or software updates are made available. It's all a giant headache for most consumers.

Heck, even Steve Jobs seems to have succumbed to the reality distortion field emanating from Hollywood. When the French government tried to ensure that buyers of digital music off of Apple's iTunes service could play their content on any player, not just iPods. Apple objected, and the French Supreme Court eventually overturned that particular provision of the French Law. Yet, Jobs himself, in an interview in MacWorld circa 2002, was quoted as saying, "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own."

Even then, it was clear that his thinking was shifting, given the phrase "legally acquire music," rather than "own the music."

The flip side of the coin are efforts like Creative Commons, which is trying to promulgate a different model for selling content. But I'm unconvinced that a future where artists make their money from public displays or concerts, while giving away the (recorded) fruits of their labors is completely viable. Does that mean if I don't show up at coffee houses and read my product reviews out loud, I shouldn't get compensasted? Or musicians who specialize in studio recording, and don't want to perform live, shouldn't make a living?

It's clear that the evolution and subsequent revolution of thinking and business models still eludes us. A few decades from now, it will all seem very historical and quaint, much like the issues brought about by the invention of the printing press centuries ago. In the impatience that we all seem to acquire living at Internet speeds, it's sometimes easy to forget that robust solutions involving widely disparate interests may take time to reconcile and fully baked models emerge.

My concern, though, is that the companies that are trying to innovate are being squashed by the content providers, who have gobs of money and dozens of lobbyists in place to protect their interests. And in this game of high tech poker, the technology companies seem to like to fold before they show their hands.

This Week on ExtremeTech
This week, we build our own Dell system. No, I don't mean we use Dell's Website configurator. I mean we literally build our own Dell. Meanwhile, we take a look at the world of multi-graphics card performance, comparing CrossFire, SLI, and Quad SLI. The results may surprise you.

Meanwhile, Victor's been playing around with a couple of new power supplies, and we have a performance preview of Intel's mobile Core2 Duo up. Don't forget to subscribe to ExtremeTech's weekly podcast. And be sure to check out latest rants and reviews from Patrick Norton and Robert Heron on DL.TV.