Digital Home Thoughts: Intel Defending Consumer Fair Use with Viiv? Did Hell Freeze Over?

"According to Don MacDonald, Intel's stance surrounding Digital Rights Management (DRM) is that consumers should be able to do whatever they like with legally purchased content. That means backing it up to external drives and streaming it to other devices such as handhelds and networked machines. As such, Intel is encouraging Viiv content providers to allow users to pass their media to other devices -- a factor that's critical to the success of the Viiv concept. We were unable to confirm whether or not the current selection of content could be streamed seamlessly to external devices, but as mentioned above, this feature won't be widely available until the digital media adapters hit our shores later this year anyway."



Fascinating! I never would have expected Intel, of all companies, to be playing the consumer rights card. It's nice to see, although I remain a bit suspicious. On some level this seems like fluff, because regardless of what "Viiv hardware" a PC has, if it's going to be running Windows Media Center Edition, there are specific hardware requirements for that, including all the cable card chaos.