KEY POINTS:
Remember that controversial paper about the DRM features of Windows Vista penned by the University of Auckland's Peter Gutmann that received so much attention early in the year?
It went down like a lead balloon when a few of us journalists brought up the subject of the paper in front of retiring Microsoft executive Jim Allchin at a briefing in Seattle in January.
Allchin denied knowledge of its existence but Microsoft's technical boffins mounted a spirited rebuttal of it through their blog network.
Now ZDNet has climbed into a fight that seemed to have withered and died, with writer Ed Bott (what a great name!) penning a detailed, three-part analysis of Gutmann's paper that pulls apart his arguments that Vista's DRM features are over the top and likely to lock a large number of people out of playing back high-definition content using hardware and applications that work with Windows Vista.
As Bott writes in Part 2 of his analysis:
"If you think I'm nitpicking over these details, you miss the point completely. Gutmann is an academic researcher, and the way scientists have worked since the end of the Dark Ages has been with a rigorous set of principles: You start with a thesis, you design experiments that test that thesis, and using those experimental results as well as those of your peers, you assemble evidence that proves or disproves your thesis. Then you publish.
"As I noted last month, Gutmann has completely skipped the 'experimental' portion of this time-tested process. He has literally no firsthand evidence to support most of the outrageous claims he makes, and much of the secondhand anecdotal evidence he has assembled is either taken out of context or is of questionable relevance."
What's being argued about here is pretty technical so if you're clicking on the links to Gutmann's paper and Bott's analysis you'll need some knowledge of how digital content interacts with software and hardware.
But from what I've read, Bott's arguments are reasoned and thoroughly thought out. According to his biography Bott has written 25 books about Windows and Office.
I couldn't imagine anything worse than that, but credit to the man, he know's what he's talking about.
It will be interesting to see how Peter Gutmann responds to this, if he does at all. There's nothing on his homepage to suggest he has.
Given the outcry the paper created when first published, with Vista's harsh DRM policies presented by many as a reason not to upgrade to the new operating system, some measured and mediated discussion of Vista DRM needs to take place to, one way or other, put the issue to bed one way or other, for good.
