Okay, something new to me. When I look a list of song download possibilities with KazaA 2.6 there is a blue Download Button beside some and a gold Download Button beside others. I knew something was up so I tried a couple of the gold ones to find out what. These Gold Button songs appear in My Shared Folder, looking like all the others. But when I click to play one of them I get a box named “Security Update Required”. It says: “The owner of the protected content you are trying to access requires you to first upgrade some of the Microsoft digital rights management (DRM) components on your computer. Click OK to upgrade your DRM components. Details: When you click OK, a unique identifier and a DRM security file are sent to Microsoft service on the Internet. The file is replaced with a customized version that contains your unique identifier. This increases the level of protection provided by DRM”
This gibberish smells like sack of rotten fish to me. (That and it being from Microsoft) There is a Learn More button that links to a Microsoft info page full of more nonsensical doubletalk. Anybody know what this stuff is all about?
I really reccomend removing Kazaa from your computer, and then running Spybot or Ad-Aware ASAP. It is chock full of spyware and will seriously mess up your system, given enough time.
Digital Rights Management lets Microsoft (or the content provider) tell you what you can do with your content. Prohibit you from playing it on other computers, opening it after a certain time period, or burning it to CD, for example. Slashdot and most learned individuals recommend against installing the update, as there’s no telling what it will do specifically. It might stop you from doing things with content you already have, and that would be bad.
I believe the gold downloads are from Alternet, the pay network that runs alongside the regular Kazaa network. Companies pay Kazaa to get their items listed in the search results; I suppose Kazaa thinks the paid, authorized downloads will give their service an air of legitimacy.
I work on the team at MS that does the DRM service in question.
Here is what’s going on:
The media that you are requesting is protected by Digital Rights Management. This allows the provider to control how that particular file can be used/transferred/etc. The provider (or Microsoft) can not control how your other files are used.
The provider can have different levels of protection on their files. In this case, they decided that they want to have a higher amount of protection, and thus requested that you go through the DRM Inidividualization process. This is the prompt which you got.
When you Individualize, you are sending a hashed* chunk of data, that is unique to your computer, to a Microsoft server, which then replies back with a DLL file which is unique to just your computer. The unique part is how DRM unencrypts the particular DRM encrypted file. By having a unique DLL, if you were a hacker and figured out the DRM secret, it would not apply to any other machine but your own. In theory.
DRM and/or Individualization does NOT affect your ability to play back any of your files EXCEPT for files which are DRM protected. mp3/wav/ogg/aac are untouched, untracked, and unaffected by DRM or Microsoft. Non-protected wma and wmv are also unaffected. DRM protected wma and wmv MUST go through the DRM system, but they are not being tracked or monitored, unless you make a request to the content provider for getting a new license or whatnot.
If you have any questions or want clarifications, I will be happy to answer as best I can. I wont give you some approved marketing buzzword reply. I may not be able to answer everything though, due to NDA.
drm is another attempt at something like those dvd players they had in 1999 that you had to pay every time you watched the movie. ironically they were also called divx. until they failed disney was planning on only releasing their movies to divx discs so everytime jonior wanted to watch snow white you had to pay.
i would vote no on the possibility content being released only in pay per play and leave it alone if i were you.