Copy Protection Logjam Shows Signs Of Breaking

from the fair-use,-what's-that? dept

It seems that the consumer electronics and technology industries are getting ready to cave in to Hollywood’s demands to build copy protection into everything they want. What this means is that your fair use rights will be destroyed and consumer electronics products you buy will be more expensive. It doesn’t mean piracy will stop – because it won’t take long before the priates break the copy protection schemes (assuming they haven’t already). It also means fewer people will buy these devices and there will be less innovation because people won’t be able to use them to do everything they should be able to do. All in all, it’s a lose-lose situation for everyone. Way to go, Hollywood.


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Comments on “Copy Protection Logjam Shows Signs Of Breaking”

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4 Comments
dorpus says:

Does it matter?

Hollywood is producing more and more trash anyway. They’re taking a quantity-over-quality approach. Market forces may drive Hollywood to produce more quantity over quality still, which would slim the profit margins for pirates.

The movie industry in India produces movies by the thousands each year, faster than pirates can cut into profit margins. That might be the way to go.

ctrlz says:

pointless copy protection

I am living in eastern europe in region which lies on the border of DVD zones. Nobody could sell a DVD player which is not region locked. And as far as i remember only DVD players (playstations too) which was region unlocked were solde here. Most companies made their hardware easy to tweak intentionally , because the trend was clear – hard to tweak harware is nearly impossible to sell.
Salesperson always will tell you that hardware is ( DVD, Playstations , XBoxes etc. ) are region unlocked or cracked. Or cracking, unlocking , uncapping (whatever) could be done without a loss of warranty by qualified expert in company service center.
Currently all DVDs sold here are multizone ( this sounds great, marketing loves this :). Btw, this is a media company fault, too. Really, they did not provided same content to all zones. Look at the amazon for example: “Encoding: Region 1 (US and Canada only)”.

P.S. Most of all I do not understand those “encryption experts” who develop copy protection schemes. This is impossible task, bacause whatever system you make you should deliver plaintext to customer and it can be captured after a point where it is converted to plaintext. Unless they build a DRM directly into our eyes and ears. May be they will ask for this soon, who knows..

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