Now Hollywood Wants Analog To Digital Converters As Well
from the oh,-come-on dept
Found on Politech is news that not only does the entertainment industry want to take over all digital devices, they also think we need to install copyright protection on every analog to digital converter. The article is quite alarmist, and is certainly written with the idea of stirring people up, but it does make some good points about the ridiculousness of the plan. As the article says, if Hollywood could get this done, you wouldn’t be able to talk on your mobile phone if you were too close to a radio playing music, because the analog to digital converter would notice the song was copyrighted and would shut down. Whether or not such technology would ever really work well enough is certainly questionable. I would also imagine that the added expense on just about every device imaginable would be ridiculous.
Comments on “Now Hollywood Wants Analog To Digital Converters As Well”
Fantasy Land
Whoever came up with this has been watching too much Star Trek. In cheesy science fiction, you can reprogram your communicator (with a screwdriver) to turn it into a tractor beam, but in the real world, it just doesn’t make sense to burden every 49-cent ADC chip with the added size, expense, and power consumption of a processor that would detect watermarks. And on top of that, perfect invisible watermarks are impossible anyway, though that doesn’t stop the content owners from looking for them.