Macromedia Inc. on Tuesday dipped a toe into the choppy waters of digital-rights management when it announced Version 2.0 of its Contribute content-management system.
Contribute 2.0, which will be available for download July 25, uses Macrovision's SafeCast technology, the same DRM technology in Intuit's current TurboTax tax-filing software. Macromedia executives said the San Francisco company has done extensive testing, even trying to reproduce ExtremeTech's TurboTax DRM tests to ensure that performance will not suffer.
While the flexible licensing agreement allows licenses to be transferred between machines, the SafeCast software still writes information to track 0 of a user's hard drive, as it does in TurboTax.
Conscious of the consumer backlash that forced Intuit to disable product activation in future versions of TurboTax, Macromedia has designed an extensive Web site that walks users through a mock activation, describes the terms and conditions of the software, and discloses exactly what information is sent to the company upon registering.
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