According to the LA Times, Microsoft is introducing technology that greatly reduces consumer choice as to copying, burning, sharing:

Studios and record labels want their products protected from the widespread thievery popularized by services such as Napster. Spurred by the threat of federal legislation, technology companies such as Microsoft Corp. and RealNetworks Inc. are scrambling to prove that their systems do more than the other fellow's to keep content under lock and key.

Microsoft has been particularly aggressive, launching a number of efforts to satisfy entertainment moguls' hunger for security in a digital age when content can be perfectly reproduced millions of times. Other companies are making similar efforts, chasing what they see as lucrative business at a time of flagging technology sales.

But Microsoft, which faces its own considerable battle against pirates, would give copyright owners unprecedented power.

"I was looking at their new innovation, and I was very much impressed," Motion Picture Assn. of America President Jack Valenti said after a trip to Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., headquarters. "Some of the plans they had certainly could include my [member] companies."

Those plans center on three efforts, including Microsoft's latest Media Player, to be unveiled Wednesday in Los Angeles by company founder Bill Gates.

* Media Player 9, like competing offerings from RealNetworks and Apple Computer Inc., is designed to make Internet video look more like a TV broadcast, with less delay and crisper quality.

Behind the scenes, it also will improve content owners' ability to manage the rules they set for users, so that a song or clip can be downloaded but not copied, or can be made to disappear from a computer after a day or a week.

"Giving the content owners flexibility in how they assign rights and bring content to consumers has been a huge focus of ours," said Will Poole, Microsoft corporate vice president for new media.

Movielink, the fledgling multi-studio effort to offer films online, is expected to use the Windows Media format, movie executives said, though it may also use software from RealNetworks.

Pressplay, one of the two major record label-owned music services, already uses Windows Media.

* Today, Hewlett-Packard Co. will announce a new type of home computer based on Microsoft's Windows XP operating system and aimed at the living room, a top unclaimed prize for Microsoft.

At a cost of $1,500 to $2,000, the XP Media Center Edition allows viewers to surf the Web and watch cable or broadcast TV programming and record that material on a high-capacity hard drive or DVD--but not copy it, play it back on the bedroom television or e-mail it.

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