This opening paragraph of this Newsweek article speaks volumes when talking about Microsoft and digital security: “In ancient Troy stood the Palladium, a statue of the goddess Athena. Legend has it that the safety of the city depended on that icon’s preservation. Later the term came to mean a more generic safeguard.”
Dictionary.com defines palladium as (1) “A safeguard, especially one viewed as a guarantee of the integrity of social institutions,” or (2) “A sacred object that was believed to have the power to preserve a city or state possessing it.” Notice the two words I highlighted and you’ll understand what Newsweek’s Steven Levy is trying to say.
Either way, the future of file-swapping copyrighted material will be affected in some way by “Microsoft’s hyperambitious long-range plan to literally change the architecture of PCs in order to address the concerns of security, privacy and intellectual property.” With a certain U.S. Senator trying to get hardware and software companies to reengineer their products to better safeguard copyrights and with Microsoft still looking to please the states suing it for unfair business practices, the most popular O/S product line and most popular Internet client could be used against file-swappers in the future.
As for when? Who knows. As for how much anything Microsoft or any other software company does to prevent piracy will actually stop piracy? There is even more doubt there.
