Microsoft Office 2003 DRM Hooks Lock Users Out of Alternatives
You can almost hear the lawyers breaking out their accordion files as CNET News reports via ZDNet and directly that the new Digital Rights Management capabilities of Office 2003 are designed to require a rights-tagged document to be only manipulable by the software that creates it. In other words, if you'd like to share your rights-secured Word document with someone equipped with a Palm PDA, StarOffice or Lindows, you're out of luck. Part of the dependency comes from Microsoft choosing a clunky design that requires a server running Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system and Windows Rights Management Services software. Given the growing prevalence of untethered PDAs and peer-to-peer solutions, this seems to be an extremely narrow approach to rights management that's unlikely to set the web-oriented content world afire. Yet some publishers and content ecommerce enablers are languidly awaiting Microsoft's solution as an impending de facto solution to their institutional DRM issues. Microsoft is out to solve its own software sales problems first and foremost, leaving the real encompassing needs of professional and institutional publishers for rights management to be resolved via other methods.