You can turn it off, and as soon as you can't people will start using another media player that doesn't limit their freedoms which is a good thing (IMO). The only way I see this being newsworthy is if steps are being taken to make it a law that all media players must implement this feature, that would be really bad for the windows users. Of course the linux users could just download a GPLed media player and disable the feature by editing the source and recompiling. Wouldn't even be that hard for non programmers most likely, anyone designing an open source media player for linux would probably put something like this into the source:

//ATTENTION: delete the next three lines to disable the annoying copy protection.

so this is really only a problem for windows users, and if you voluntarily use MS Windows as your primary OS then you should already be used to giving up your freedoms.