David Berlind points out a charming feature of the new BitTorrent movie-distrubtion network: its DRM scheme apparently isn’t compatible with the other DRM schemes already on the market. His reaction to that is about the same as mine:
To go with yet another proprietary DRM technology when the market is already full of exisiting non-interoperable ones that are screwing it up is quite an unnatural act and evidence that either Warner Bros., the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), or the movie industry as a whole have no clue how to right a ship that’s about sink as it floods with stupidity.
So. Let’s see. I need PlaysForSure-compliant technology to playback content X, FairPlay-compliant technology to playback content Y, and Bittorrent technology to playback content Z. Why don’t we bring back BetaMax and VHS while we’re at it?
He mentions Sun’s DReaM as an alternative, but as I’ve written before it’s not clear to me how that would be an improvement. DReaM would simply be a fourth (or fifth if you count Google’s DRM) incompatible DRM scheme. The fundamental problem here is that Hollywood is prioritizing (ineffective) piracy-fighting higher than giving their customers products they’ll actually want to buy.
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