A must-see blog!
I stumbled upon this guy (StumbleUpon is simply too great a service) and promptly added him to my RSS-feeds. Basically his blog is about DRM and all things related to policy making related to copyright and such. He addresses Congress in the US and is a guy you’ll want to listen to.
He gives a great background as to why the copyright-holders behind Blu-Ray and HD-DVD - and in particular their tools to protect their DVD’s are failing. He explains it far better than I ever could, but the basic premise is that they rely on two encryption keys - one in the device and one per title. If you break the device encryption key, you can decrypt any title whereas if you break a title-key, only that title can be copied. Although, they can blacklist any of the codes, every published disc cannot be altered (for very practical reasons) and is thus easy to copy.
It’s funny in my book. Here we have the Hollywood studios vs. the combined efforts of every so-called pirate out there - and they still believe they can trumph them? Sometimes, I think they under-estimate the ability and potential out there - other times, I’m sure of it. They vastly under-estimate the knowledge and speed that can be whipped up in extremely flexible ways. And to top it off, they utterly fail at making it politically and morally wrong in the public mind. I’ll give you a few examples why:
1. They blatantly disregard any kind of fair-use related to copying. When I buy a DVD, I want to make a backup of it. They made that illegal - both software-wise and hardware-wise. I do not intend to give this backup to anyone nor publish it anywhere. I just want to be sure that in two years time, I’ll still be able to see the movie without being afraid that my daughter accidently put strawberry jam in the cassette or some such.
2. They criminalize me as a customer whenever they manage to sell me a DVD. I am prompted with huge red letters, that I cannot avoid, telling me that it is illegal to copy the DVD. First off, I know this - and secondly if you do not trust me with your product, don’t sell it to me, period.
3. They put regions in DVDs so that I can only buy a limited selection of titles that I can legally play. It’s not like I copy a DVD from the States, I just like to buy what I like, not what the movie studios think I like, because they are usually wrong! Every time a movie is released, I can expect it to arrive in Denmark somewhere between 1 and 6 months later here if at all. I know people all over the world, and I don’t like to always be on average 3 months behind in my experiences.
4. They will prosecute anything they deem a threat to their business-model, even when it’s out-dated, stupid and a barrier to themselves. They consider the internet a threat, when it could be the largest ally they have yet to come across. They alienate people by going after the ones they can catch, which is always the small fish - I even read, they prosecuted an elderly lady that didn’t even know what they were talking about… (she wasn’t exactly computer-literate).
5. They force me to see commercials even when I pay for a product. In my usual field of business you will only do this if you reduce or remove the price all-together (shareware and such). They annoy me whenever I start a DVD, that the first thing I’ll see are trailers for other movies and even commercials for gaming consoles or beverages.
They managed to make their product far poorer in quality than the pirated copy. And they are wondering why people are so keen to exploit any loop-hole? Many are willing to pay for top-quality content - they just ignore them and keep churning out the same crap they did 20 years ago. It’s not innovation, it’s stale, run-o’-the-mill, everyday crap. And the only ones to benefit are the lawyers.