Silverlight (Microsoft) and Moonlight (Novell) Digital Restrictions Management frustrations

Moonlight is a Free implementation of Microsoft Silverlight. Its a Mono project, http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight. I have read rumors that 2.0 will have support for Netflix. I went to install the 2.0 dev (currently 1.99.5). Logged into netflix and was denied. I was confused because moonlights dev website says that 1.99.5 is complete except for bug testing and a security audit. I did more reading and found that its not a limitation of moonlight at all, its the DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) that Netflix licenses from Microsoft called Play Ready. This is why we can’t watch Netflix with Moonlight. Another case where the end user suffers at the hands of DRM. The industry again is trying to control the user and hope no one cares. So what, if people save the movie streams from Netflix, you can copy as many dvd’s as you want when they show up in the mail! What happened to Fair Use? The move to hosted content is highly desireable by these industries. Now they can tell you what, how and when. Since its hosted on their servers, you can’t do a thing about it (other than not use it). Ugghh. I am disappointed…


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *