The HD Boycott Begins Now

[thunderhawk]

The HD Boycott Begins Now

This is important. I really want you to understand what’s going on with the video industry’s push towards HD. Under pressure from Hollywood, they are engineering a complete removal of the concept of fair use. They are setting up systems that will completely control how, when and where you can use content that you buy. Even worse, they can retroactively change the rules!

Today the AACS (aggressive automatic consumer screwing*) organization announced availability of the interim version of their system for protecting content providers from their criminal customers. Their noble intentions are pretty well summed up in this choice excerpt:

The AACS specification accelerates the ability of consumers to enjoy exciting, new, flexible entertainment experiences and storage options, while continuing to provide the traditional, straightforward playback mode, for the next generation of prerecorded and recordable optical media such as Blu-Ray and HD DVD. Additionally, AACS is designed to create unprecedented flexibility, portability and security for entertainment content to be enjoyed on networked home, portable PC or CE devices.

I especially love their mention of a ‘traditional, straightforward playback mode‘. I bet it pained them to have to include any way to play the content at all. Rest assured they have top minds working on making sure nothing will be straightforward in the future.

Further, if you download the AACS agreement itself, you find the frightening concept of the ‘analog sunset’ (it’s on page 82). This is where device manufactures agree to not make analog devices after certain preset dates.

Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray have embraced this draconian system, and the studios are salivating at the prospect of you never actually being able to own content again.

My reaction to this abomination is simple: no way in hell. I will not buy any product that uses this crap, and I hope you’ll join me in that boycott. Let these morons see the early adopters staying away in droves.

Please pass this on; post it on your blogs, ‘digg’ it; slashdot it; whatever it takes to stop this insidious plan.

Here is the AACS announcement

P.S.
*I got some complaints about not giving the ‘official’ full name of AACS. Well, OK, if it’s that important to you: Advanced Access Content System. There; feel better?

P.P.S.
At the advice of a reader I looked up an article from 2004 about DRM, written by Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Absolutely brilliant description of the problems of DRM. You’ll find it here.

Source: http://writersblocklive.com/part-156