[Discuss] restoring Windows on different hardware

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 12/28/2012 6:43 PM, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Dec 2012 16:44:52 -0500
> Doug <sweetser at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> I think the license management is a subset of rights management.
> 
> I believe that they are orthogonal issues. License management is in
> fact licensor rights management while while digital rights management
> taking away consumers' rights. DRM is how Amazon denies you the right
> to read Kindle books except on those devices linked to your Amazon
> account. DRM is how Sony denies you the right to install and play
> PlayStation Store titles on all but a single specific device. DRM is
> how the movie and TV industries deny you the right to record programs
> despite this being a fair use right enumerated by federal law.

Well, the world of federal law is getting a lot murkier. When you buy an
ebook from Amazon, you're not buying a book.  You're buying a license to
the content, as per the "Amazon Kindle Store Terms of Use".  When all
the storage is in "the cloud" (and in particular, the content provider's
cloud), they probably think they are skirting all those pesky fair-use
issues by not selling you a physical item.  (incidentally, this is
exactly why I never buy movies from some "cloud" service)

> What rights does WPA (Windows Product Activation) deny you? I can't
> name one. WPA is cumbersome, badly designed, poorly implemented, but
> it doesn't deny you the right to install and use what you've legally
> obtained.

More often than not, I have to make a phone call to do what I legally
should be able to do.  And while it's always been relatively painless in
the particular case of activating Windows, whenever I'm making a phone
call, I always wonder "is this the time they are going to start making
me miserable"?  The system is such that it works at their whim, and
could stop working at their whim (e.g., if they started requiring
evidence that you're not using the license on another computer, all the
people who are saying that WPA isn't so bad would start complaining
loudly).  There is nothing in how WPA works technically that prevents M$
from being arbitrary in how they answer the phone when I inevitably have
to call.

That's my issue with WPA and similar license-mgmt mechanisms.

Matt