Copy catching

Bill Gates's Windows Media 9 could make life difficult for film and music pirates. But, asks Guy Kewney, will it get enough support?

It can be a shock to buy an ordinary CD player and find that it runs Windows. The iRiver SlimX iMP-350 (available in the US) doesn't have a full desktop computer's power, but it can take CDs you've created on your PC in Windows Media Audio (.wma) format, and play them as if they were standard CDs. Microsoft says its Windows Media 9 products, announced earlier this month, are the future: a way of storing, playing back, and protecting audio and video files from unauthorised copying. But after four years of development and £320m spent, WM9 has only been launched – not shipped, not yet. Microsoft's description, then, could be a misleading indicator of the future.

The launch included Titanic director James Cameron, and Sir George Martin, producer to the Beatles, as Bill Gates tried to persuade Hollywood to back him and his technology by announcing more than 60 partners who will support Windows Media 9. These include the movies-on-demand services Intertainer and CinemaNow, and the audio sites FullAudio and Pressplay.

It's not all one-way traffic for Gates, though. CableWorld magazine said that "many [Hollywood] executives see him as a ruthless martinet dead set on controlling how their content is distributed over cable and the internet". But WM9's supporters say this is the way to stop people duplicating tunes and films. Even films broadcast on TV or the net will, they hope, no longer be copyable. No more piracy!

Here's how it should work. When someone creates a new audio or video recording with WM9, it's saved in an encrypted digital format, with an associated licence whose conditions are set by the creator. When you play it back, a processor chip (built into CD/DVD players, and computers) decrypts the data, according to the terms encoded in the licence. If the licence is unrestricted, the recording plays; if not, the computer seeks the licence on your machine or local network. If there isn't one, it will contact the copyright holder, over the internet, and attempt to arrange one.

That won't work on my new iRiver, which doesn't connect to the internet, and can't interrogate the licence authorities if it could. But electronic devices will come with wireless circuitry in them. Intel is researching how to build multi-band wireless transceivers into ordinary computer chips; if it succeeds, anything with a chip and a battery will be able to place GSM calls, or even talk to DECT telephone base stations. So, when you download the new Windows Media Player onto your PC you are being reeled in to Microsoft's vision of the future.

If you see it as just another way of compressing your CDs, or playing video clips on the computer, you may compare it with iTunes, RealPlayer, or QuickTime. By this measure, Windows Media Player doesn't do badly. It offers better audio fidelity than MP3, as well as better compression and more realistic video than the forthcoming MPEG-4 standard. All the frills of these players are there, too: automatic grading of tunes and videos, playlists, and so on.

But the interesting stuff is at the studio end. You wouldn't expect to find Windows on a cable TV set-top box, or in a DVD player, but both possibilities are now likely. Windows Media format may even become the standard in broadcast studios, in the networks of fibre and satellite that distribute video and audio, and in recording studios.

Tim Sheppard, strategic development director of Tandberg TV, which supplies the switching and transmission equipment to these people, reckons the Microsoft standards will be pervasive. "Microsoft is doing a push into the consumer space; not just the PC, but also other devices – set-top box, DVD box, game-makers, and so on, all of which will appear with WM9 capability. The broadcaster [can] go for the standard Windows package and assume playback [capability] will be there."

But Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, is adamant that Windows Media should not become dominant. "The most important thing is that the network is open," he said last week. "So nobody can be a gatekeeper and charge everybody for getting content."

But what about the studios' commitment? Or Tandberg's? "Studios? Who's signed up? Macs are at the heart of the production process for almost every record, movie, TV show... Microsoft is trying to catch up but there is a long way to go."

Jobs sees the battle for domination along simple lines. "Does the world want open or proprietary standards? Everything we hear from the movie, cable and cellphone industry is that they want open standards. Like MPEG-2 did, MPEG-4 is going to win this. It happens to be better. But I don't even think it has to be [better] to win."

But Microsoft doesn't like "open". Windows Media Player 9 will not create files in MP3 format. Microsoft insists this is because Thomson owns the MP3 patent, and charges companies that write MP3 encoders. Apple, with smaller resources, can afford to give away an MP3 encoder (in iTunes). It's interesting that MP3 doesn't need associated "licences" for playback.

In theory, if Windows Media became ubiquitous, the studios could shut off direct copying. Your Windows Media Player can create WMA files from a CD, but they would be encrypted, and only you could play them back. Your DVD player might play a downloaded movie, then discover the licence was for one play, or only valid for 24 hours.

The flaw in this dream of the US media industry is that we don't understand digital data streams. We receive analogue images and sounds. Those sounds and images can, in turn, be recorded – and re-digitised.

Once you've played a CD, and recorded it on a cassette tape, or used a computer sound card, the quality will not be as good as the original. But that's true of MP3 music files. A VHS copy of a DVD will not be as crisp as the DVD, but it will be better than the typical broadcast quality on a TV.

Some PC sound card makers agree that they'll make their cards refuse to digitise an audio signal they have created from a protected digital source. But you only need two PCs – audio out from one to audio in on the other – to get digitised audio just fine, and an unlicensed MP3 or VHS copy.

The end of copying? Few technology experts expect this, no matter how much wishful thinking Bill Gates can inspire. The internet just makes copying too easy.