TechDirt points out yet another article about how the content industries are shooting themselves in the foot with overly aggressive copy protection. Next-generation video formats will only allow themselves to be viewed at full resolution on certain hardware. A lot of computer hardware being sold today doesn’t make the cut, despite the fact that they are physically capable of displaying the content at full quality. The result: you buy a shiny new computer with a Blu-Ray drive, and find that it plays Blu-Ray movies at lower quality than your old computer played DVDs. That will really get users excited about adopting the new format!
Why is Hollywood going out of their way to piss off their own customers?
The copy-protection muddle stems from Hollywood studios’ desire to avoid the film piracy that was born when tools for unlocking the encryption technology on today’s DVDs began spreading online in late 1999.
But that completely misunderstands why the DVD’s copy protection system failed. Hackers didn’t use the “analog hole” to record unprotected copies of DVD content. Rather, they reverse-engineered the encryption itself, allowing them to decode DVDs directly. All the “analog hole” countermeasures in the world won’t do a bit of good once the content itself has been decrypted.
This wouldn’t be the first time Hollywood has done its best to strangle a promising technology in its cradle by treating its customers like criminals.
Update: Ars highlights another way that copy protection on next-gen video formats is likely to irritate customers: because the copy-protection specs are still being negotiated with barely a month to go before release, the first batch of HD-DVD players will probably require a firmware upgrade before they’ll be able to actually play videos.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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