Given the unorthodox style in which I’ve lived the last 4 years of my life–forsaking a lucrative and stable job stateside in favor of pursuing entrepreneurial and educational opportunities (with varying degrees of success) abroad, specifically in Latin America–I’ve felt a bit more freedom than I otherwise would have to spend most of my computing time in the idealistic world of Free Software. While I’d long been a Linux dabbler, I’ve now become a full-time devotee of Ubuntu Linux, and, with the one exception noted below, have never felt poorer for havng left behind proprietary alternatives.

But considering my probable reentry into the mainstream workforce at the end of this year, and the likelihood of my having to work in a proprietary computing environment again, I thought it would probably be a good time to reacquaint myself with Microsoft’s offering in the field of operating systems. Maybe I’m softening in my old age, or maybe it’s the fact that desktop Linux has matured to the point where it no longer suffers from an inferiority complex (at least compared to Windows; OS X may be a different story), but I’d actually even started to entertain the idea that maybe the Windows and Linux approaches were simply two means to the same end, that perhaps the two offered divergent strengths that in the end complemented one another.

After all, I actually enjoyed working with Windows 2000 in my last job as a Visual Basic and ASP developer. And I continued to rely on the original Windows 2000 installation on my dual-boot IBM ThinkPad T23 for viewing DVDs on my TV using the machine’s S-video port. (I simply don’t have the geek firepower to get this working properly in Linux with my T23’s SuperSavage video adaptor, despite marginal success with a patched version of the s3switch utility.) To get current, I bought a shrink-wrapped Windows XP CD, license and all.

Lately, anti-Microsoft invective has shifted from expression of a generalized contempt for Microsoft’s monopolistic practices and the technical inferiority of its operating system and development methodology to complaints about its role in the promotion, along side other large media concerns and software companies, of "draconian DRM" (digital rights management) policies and technologies. While sympathetic to this line of argument, I’d generally written off the rabid anti-DRM crew as a bunch of overreactive Stallmanites. Whatever the ethical or legal questionability of the companies’ DRM practices, surely it wouldn’t affect my day-to-day use of the products I’d paid for and had a legal right to use.

I had no idea how bad it had gotten.

The first thing I did after upgrading to Windows XP, was to rehabilitate the installation to perform the main task for which I was still relying upon Windows: DVD viewing. But upon reinstalling PowerDVD (never mind the fact that I have a legally licensed CD, but had lost the "product key" and had to enter the seedy nether world of "warez" sites simply to get another product key that would let me use the software I had purchased) and the most recent ThinkPad T23 video drivers, I discovered that something I used to be able to do–watch my (originally purchased) set of 24 DVDs on my TV set through the S-video connection while running PowerDVD on Windows 2000–now caused an error window to pop-up indicating that the "copy protection" on the DVD would not permit viewing on an external display.

So much for PowerDVD. I wish I could get back the money I spent on this product back as well the time I wasted trying to reactivate it with a new product key, since I won’t be using it again.

Interestingly, the version of Microsoft’s own Windows Media Player running on my machine is not crippled by this "bug", but I discovered when I went to try to run a copy of Super Size Me, licensed for viewing in Latin America and rented from the corner video store in my neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that I had finally used my last alotted "region" change, and that my DVD player was now permanently set to "Region 1."

Here it seems necessary to point out to companies who implement such DRM schemes the existence of such modern phenomena as "portal electronic devices" like "notebook computers," as well as "international travel." For what possible reason should I be prohibited from viewing a DVD that I rent in this country for the purpose of viewing it on a device that I had legally brought into this country for personal use?

When the first instinct of software and media vendors to whom you’ve paid hundreds of dollars for licenses to use their products is to treat you like a criminal, you know that there’s something fundamentally wrong with their model, that maybe it’s time to stop using their products entirely. If their business model is to alienate their customers to the point where they lose them entirely, they’re succeeding brilliantly, at least in my case.

What’s more disturbing, however, is that the only workable solution I found–to download and use the open source VLC Media Player–is probably itself illegal according to the terms of the ill-conceived Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), at least if I were using it within the borders of the United States. The effect of these companies’ policies is not only to turn customers into non-customers, but, potentially, into criminals.