"Palladium" and TCPA

[Peter Tomlinson]

Ross Anderson wrote on Saturday, June 29, 2002 9:18 PM:
> I'm not impressed by arguments that TCPA's mechanisms will be
insufficiently
> strong, and that some people will defeat them. Even if they work only 25%
> of the time, they will make a huge difference to Microsoft's bottom line,
> and the holes can be closed down gradually.

This is the same argument that we see from the music distributors: "We are
losing squillions of dollars because people copy CDs, so we must copyright
protect and get back that missing revenue". In the case of utility software
such as M$ Office, just as in the case of music CDs, most of those who have
pirate copies would not buy the real thing if they could not pirate a copy.
For M$ Office, rival software products would grow in importance, and
preventing them from processing M$ Office files, it seems to me, would be an
anti-trust violation. Also, there are those of us who would just not bother
to upgrade their software until all this protectionism blows over.

M$ would be well advised to follow Corel Draw and continue to sell and
support earlier versions of their software for the forseeable future, back
as far as Win 98 and Office 97.

Peter