DRM and the politics of corporate control; environmental 'responsible' computing in the 21st century

"When you turn on your computer, you're making a political statement. If, like most people, your computer boots Microsoft Windows, the statement you're making is that transnational corporations should control access to the most powerful public media that ever existed."
-- New Internationalist Magazine Nov. 2006

A coalition calling themselves "Free Software Free Society" -- a collective of left-leaning and socialist groups supporting ethical computing -- has posted a manifesto damning Microsoft's corporate stranglehold and the Digital Rights Management (DRM) present in their latest operating system, Windows Vista. There's a petition which you can add your signature to. At the time of writing there were 692 other signatories in addition to the members of the groups involved in writing the petition.

A strong opponent of the DRM present in Vista is The University of Auckland's Peter Gutmann, a researcher in the CompSci department. His "Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection" (a CC-licensed work) was Internet-famous for a short while earlier this year and, judging by the new preamble added to the top of that page, has generated a fair amount of criticism and comment.

The article mentions the notion of a 'disposable computer culture'; one where the corporations who control the invention, production and distribution of technology allow built-in obsolescence to act as a profit-making function within their business architecture. Their central argument is that in order to make use of many of the "fantastic new features" built into Microsoft's latest operating system, "most people will have to throw their current computer into a landfill, and buy a new one." Environmentally this will be nothing short of absolutely devastating. If this were any other industry, they would have a very hard time convincing the world that what they are doing to the environment, however inadvertent it may be, is OK.

Furthermore, there appears to be an almost "JFK" level of conspiracy nutcase ideology at work here. Except that this time, they might not be so nuts. To wit:

"Vista was engineered from the ground up as a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and Treacherous Computing (TC) platform. Microsoft hides these defects under more benign-sounding names like “Digital Rights Management” and “Trusted Computing”. But the fact is that Vista is designed to monitor what people do, and in particular to limit what they can do with digital media files. These limits obstruct common and legally protected uses like sharing news story clips and copying text from government documents."

It would appear that in creating new products, the PC industry needs to also come to terms with the environmental and political damage it is inadvertently doing to society.