Much has been said about the draconian DRM measures in Vista, but apart from some creative mythology noted in an earlier blog, we hadn't felt any day-to-day practical effects from the copyright restrictions.

But that's now changed. As an IT journalist working for Computeractive magazine, I'm working on a series of step-by-step guides to using various features in Vista. A key feature of such guides is the illustrative screengrabs used to guide readers through projects. But the grabs in the guide I'm writing on burning a playlist using Media Center under Vista look rather bleak. Totally black in fact.

Here's the grab I've just taken of the Media Center music library. The bleak view wasn't a surprise, as XP channelled video content via overlays to boost video performance. The upshot of which is that when you press Print Screen, you get no image because Windows isn't processing the graphic content. But it wasn't a problem because you could simply uncheck the overlays option in the Performance tab of Media Player.

But our friends at Microsoft have decided that this won't do in Media Player or Media Center under Vista, presumably because it would possible to use a screen grabbing application to capture indivdual frames of copyright-protected video and reassemble them into an illegal copy. Whether this presents a viable threat to the movie industry is another matter that I, frankly, am too irritated to consider right now. But given the attention Microsoft has paid to detecting and protecting copyrighted material, I would have hoped that similar thought would have been given to non-protected material. Guess I should have known how foolish such a thought was.