Quote:
Originally posted by sner
Four points:
3. WRT HDCP, why is there so much emotion about this issue? The artists have a right to protect intellectual property(and presumably the flags won't be turned on for *everything*--maybe first run movies etc.). Will/has HDCP be "cracked"? Sure, but it will still be illegal. You won't see Sony or Panasonic marketing decoders.
|
Do you lease your HT equipment from Hollywood? Of course not. It's my f* equipment and I resent it being under control of the owners of the media. No form of digital copy protection from a read only source, such as a D-VHS, DVD or OTA is really copy protected. The only thing you need to copy an encrypted document is a good copy machine. I can take those signals, record them bit for bit and replay them later without decrypting them in between.
There is no such thing as secure digital rights management, and it is impossible to restrict duplication of any digital stream fed to a consumer. Two things need to happen to realize that goal: 1) there has to be a private two way communication to exchange a unique key, and 2) the equipment has to be a black box in order to deny digital access to the decrypted stream. In short, so-called copy protection requires control over the consumer's equipment.
Since the case we are talking about here involves one way communication only, you can always replay the encrypted stream, and thus make a perfect copy of it. So Hollywood is focusing instead on forcing our equipment to be black boxes.
The real reason for these schemes are not really copy protection, but control of consumer equipment. It is to make it illegal under the DMCA to manufacture equipment that doesn't make the media owners happy. This costs all of us money for unnecessary circuitry in our equipment and restricts LEGITIMATE USE of our equipment.
This is why no consumer DVD players that aren't HTPC's will scale the MPEG in the digital domain to the native resolution of your display. This is why DVD publishers can screw consumers in certain markets to pay more for their DVD's than others. And don't forget somebody is collecting a lot of money to license these so-called copy protection schemes, and has the right to deny these licenses to companies it doesn't want entering the market.
So you can see this has little or nothing to do with artists protecting their work, and screws the legitimate user.
So tell me again why this shouldn't this p* me off?