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Overhype

by Carlo Longino

Mon, Jan 9th 2006 2:05pm





Copy Protection Continues To Endear Itself To Artists Everywhere

from the et-phone-home dept

Much of the thrust for copy protection comes from the likes of movie studios and record labels. While some artists have been very vocal in their distaste for file-sharing and support of copy protection, more and more are discovering that DRM's not the we-do-this-so-everybody-has-to-buy-their-own-copy wonderland their paymasters make it out to be. The latest to discover the downside of DRM the hard way is director Steven Spielberg, whose award hopes for his latest film have been hit by a round of DRM stupidity. His movie Munich probably won't fare too well in the nominations for the UK's BAFTA awards after its members were sent screener DVDs encoded for North America, rather than Europe, rendering their special pirate-proof DVD players useless. BAFTA members can only vote on movies they've seen, and with few live screenings in the UK thus far, Munich will likely be out of the running. A quick check of some prominent file-sharing sites shows the move readily available for download -- so who has the pointless "copy protection" of region encoding helped? It's certainly not Spielberg.

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  1.  
    identicon
    Andrew Strasser, Jan 9th, 2006 @ 3:52pm

    Recently I had a simlilar situation pop up.

    We were renting movies from the movie store recently and didn't think anything about region codes of DVD players and DVD's bought in the same city.... Come to find out that after buying "Brother's Grim" at a couple different places it would not work with our DVD player outright. The "Dukes of Hazard" is done partly like this as well though I got it to work by stopping it and pushing play again as it went to the black screen.

    Obviously this is more a problem where I must have a DVD player that doesn't include many different regions, however you would think the United States would at least try to keep some standard as for all movies to work but a slim few it's showing us you don't care about the profits you could be making off us as consumers and don't care which consumer it is. Mind you our DVD player was bought from Sears not the smallest company in the country.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  
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    Dam, Jan 9th, 2006 @ 4:37pm

    Couldn't Have Happened......

    to a nicer bunch of people

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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