Did you say fair use rights?

...Oh, yeah, now I remember! Wasn't that something about people being allowed all kinds of stuff without paying a dime? We are loosing our rights rapidly without most people being aware of it. Here is a scary read about this issue:

Intel's Viiv is the proverbial icing on the cake, a home entertainment concept adding the needed hardware support to supplement the features as found in Windows Vista. And unlike the concept platform Intel has shown us in the past, Viiv Fork will start shipping in the first quarter of 2006, quite in time for the release of Windows Vista. The combination of the two will mean that you, the end-user, will be royally screwed in every way, shape and form. That's right, once Viiv Fork and Vista ship you can forget about exercising your fair-use rights, no more converting songs to MP3, no more music downloads to and from friends and family, no more DivX movies, and the list goes on. But more disturbing is the fact that new content will only be able to playback on the new platform, there, for example, will be no (legal) Linux support or support in other operating systems. Simply because any such media player, able to playback this content, will circumvent the protection scheme that is DRM, which is illegal. Basically fair use and your rights as a consumer are out of the window when Viiv Fork and Vista arrive.