I need info on Microsoft Windows Media Encoder/DRM 11. My Google fu is not working well. My specific question iswhether there are any hooks between the DRM scheme and the Windows OS to prevent the copying of files between PCs or between a PC and a network storage device. I know that with DRM 10 that if you copy a file it won’t be playable if you don’t get a new license for the new machine. My question is will DRM 11 go further to actually prevent the copy.
I don’t have behind the scenes knowhow, but my practical experience has been that no, there’s no prevention of this sort. In fact, I accidentally copied a whole bunch of WMA files to my creative muvo about a month ago through windows explorer, instead of sending them through WMP 11 to transfer the licenses, and it wasn’t until I was on the bus that I realized the darn thing wouldn’t play. The copying stage went through fine.
Hope this helps with what you wanted to know.
It makes little sense to prevent copying of the file itself since the file is already useless without a license. Even if Windows prohibited the copying of DRM’ed files, any other program or OS that could read from the drive (e.g. a Linux live CD or a bit-based disk imaging utility) would still be able to copy the file. Unless the DRM system has total control over both software and hardware, this type of protection doesn’t work. But then again, every additional annoyance adds to the deterrence factor, so maybe they’ll do something like this just to make crackers’ lives a bit more difficult.
Thanks, both replies make sense to me. Sometimes when marketing people write up explanations things just get too hosed up to understand.