Neowin.net

The suit, filed Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, claims the alleged scam stemmed from a promotion in which customers at Best Buy, who paid for purchases with credit or debit cards, were given free compact discs that allowed them to try Microsoft's online service, MSN.

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, and Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics chain, were partners in a pact dating back to 1999 to promote Microsoft's money-losing MSN Internet access service.

"We haven't yet received the complaint and therefore have no comment," a Microsoft spokesman said. Best Buy officials were not immediately available for comment.

Plaintiff Samuel Kim said he unwittingly became a victim in February after making a purchase at a Best Buy store in Los Angeles with his debit card.

News source: CNN

What is Rights Management?
Rights management refers to technologies that protect digital content after it is shared or distributed. Specifically, rights management technologies enable a content owner to stipulate a set of rules, or policy rights, that govern how the content may be used, by whom, for how long, etc. The protection, achieved by encrypting the content, may be provided by software or embedded in the hardware device itself - or some combination of the two.

At Microsoft we began experimenting with such protection for our software as early as the mid-1980s. We learned that no rights management system, no matter how secure, will succeed in the marketplace unless it is both easy to use and flexible. Different levels and kinds of protection are required for an individual's medical records, an attorney's confidential client memo, a recording company's master audio recording, an amateur photographer's images, and a publisher's new bestseller. And because no system can ever be 100 percent secure, protection needs to be easy to update, to address inevitable system breaches.

Microsoft has invested more than $250 million to date in rights management technologies, and we have substantial ongoing efforts to enable a new generation of rights management that will protect a broad range of personal and commercial digital content. We also work closely with many industry partners to advance the development and deployment of rights management systems. We actively participate in several cross-industry initiatives, including efforts to develop industry standards that help ensure the effectiveness, wide availability and interoperability of rights management solutions and the content they protect.

While there is still much work to do, content owners and authors today can choose from an array of flexible solutions tailored to meet customers' specific requirements, cost constraints and business models.

Digital Rights Management
Microsoft's flagship technology for managing the rights to media content is Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM), which delivers music, video and other media content online in a secure format. Released in 1999 as the first comprehensive rights management technology for both audio and video, and now in its third generation, Windows Media uses one of the strongest encryption systems available. To raise the protection level still further, a content owner can change the media file encryption keys daily, or even every few hours.

Supporting a broad array of content distribution business models - such as previews, rentals, subscription, purchase and try-before-you-buy - Windows Media DRM is widely used for securely distributing digital media online. Many major music labels are using Windows Media to deliver digital music, and Microsoft has partnered with several companies that use the technology to offer top-quality online audio and video subscription services. Pressplay and MusicNow, for example, provide online access to hundreds of thousands of music tracks. CinemaNow and MovieLink provide high-quality Internet distribution of movies from major studios such as Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century Fox.

Consumers gain the most from the efforts of these pioneering entertainment companies. Online distribution offers a convenient way for people to access their favorite content wherever they are, at any time. But digital piracy is against consumers' long-term interests; it undermines the economic incentives for artists and producers to continue creating and distributing the work we all enjoy. With rights-managed licensing, consumers can help sustain the flow of fresh creative work, confident that they have legitimately acquired rights to content that is authentic, of highest quality, and virus-free.

Rights Management Services
Anyone who uses a personal computer for word processing, email, data analysis or other common purposes is creating digital content - content that if unprotected might be misused by others. One of the touchstones of our Trustworthy Computing initiative is responding to customers' demands for technology that protects the confidentiality and privacy of their information.

This year we will release Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services, a security service for Windows Server 2003 that works with applications to help customers protect sensitive Web content, documents and email. The rights protection persists in the data regardless of where the information goes, whether online or offline.

Building on this technology, our forthcoming Office 2003 productivity software suite will enable users to designate who can open a document or email message, and specify the terms of use - for example, whether they can print, copy or forward the data. A rights management add-on for Internet Explorer will extend these protections to Web content. Independent software vendors and application developers also will be able to build on Windows Rights Management, using software development kits that we will make available.

As these technologies become widespread, their protection will help encourage wider sharing of information within and between organizations, improving communication and productivity by assuring information workers of the confidentiality of their documents and data. For example:

o Intranet content. A manager with a toy manufacturing company uses its enterprise information portal to see year-over-year sales data on screen. The company has confidence in posting this sensitive information because specific usage restrictions have been applied to it. The manager gets the information she needs, conveniently, but because she cannot print, copy or paste it, sensitive sales data are protected from inadvertent (or deliberate) sharing with a competitor.

o Documents. Using a simple on-screen dialog prompt built into her word processing application, an advertising copywriter specifies that her document, a draft marketing plan, may be viewed and edited by a selection of the client company's managers for one week. She posts the document to a Web portal to share with them. Based on their feedback, she finalizes the plan and posts it. Managers who downloaded the obsolete draft can no longer open it, which prevents confusion as to which document is current.

o Email communications. A senior partner in an accounting firm needs to send email to his partners with a confidential contract proposal attached. Besides specifying who may read the proposal and that they may not copy, paste or edit the information, he specifies that the email itself cannot be forwarded. The recipients' email and word processing applications transparently enforce these policies. All partners worry less about information leaks that might damage ongoing negotiations.

Similarly for consumers, rights management will help protect the privacy and confidentiality of computer files and email. Rights options will be easy to use, appearing as an extension of familiar menus and commands. Besides protecting personal documents of all sorts, individuals will, just for example, be able to ensure that only family and friends can view or download vacation snapshots or correspondence posted to a personal Web site.

Creating New Opportunities with Rights Management
Rights management technologies alone cannot solve all digital piracy and confidentiality problems, but they are a crucial part of the many efforts Microsoft is making toward Trustworthy Computing. For the technology industry, rights management offers exciting new business prospects. Software and hardware developers can enhance their products and generate new revenues by offering rights management capabilities with their applications, devices and peripherals.

We're excited about partnering with a wide range of content owners, authors and industry vendors on these crucial technologies, particularly as broadband continues to expand the opportunities for delivering digital media content worldwide, and as rights management is recognized by businesses large and small as an opportunity to protect copyrights, confidentiality and personal privacy while promoting innovation, creating opportunity and empowering customers.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you would like more information about these and related initiatives, you can find it here.


Steve Ballmer