CLR and Digital Rights Management OS (Score 1)

Is it really paranoia? If MS combine this programming platform with the recent patent of a Digital rights management operating system where basically any form of reverse engineering violates the DMCA we may have a situation in a few years where Linux may just be starved for drivers, etc. There is a summarised discussion on the patent at Kernel Traffic (issue #148)

Regardless of whether this patent and .Net and whatever else MS has cooked up recently makes it this way or not, I can see a time where important parts of Linux are illegal (perhaps distributed P2P?) because of the increase of patented / protected material. What would have happened if the original IBM BIOS was not reverse-engineered?