Do Not Discuss the removal of Protected BD files here

[Rob71]

Originally Posted by Matthew1987

Still, some of them aren't. And that's only NEW monitors. The vast, vast majority of monitors currently in use are NOT HDCP-compliant. This issue will not go away anytime soon.



Good point.

One of the most destructive tactics that companies have used with DRM is gradual change. 10 years ago, people would have been SHOCKED by what DRM is like today.

In February 2001, a very interesting article was published in Discover magazine. I remember very well when I read this article not long after it was published. This article was written by a person who is a computer scientist and a professional musician, and in it, he gives a thought experiment where he predicts what might happen over the next 15 years with DRM.

Here's the article:

http://discovermagazine.com/2001/feb/featnapster

It has now been almost 10 years since that article was published. It is very interesting to look back at it, because some of the things in his thought experiment have happened.

For example:



Something just like this has happened with video. HDCP, of course. In fact, 2004 was the exact year that the FCC approved HDCP.

Another thing about HDCP is that it is very anti-democratic. It gives a single company complete control over DRM with video.

This article illustrates the fundamental problem with using DRM against piracy: For it to be effective, we would have to abolish democracy.

All of this means that I have a few deeply felt ideas about Napster, the free software millions of people use to share their music collections over the Internet.

All I needed to read. Napster was not in any way "sharing". It was outright theft. Same with movie torrents. Not a difficult idea to grasp. Sharing is loaning a CD or DVD to a friend for a few days or weeks, then they return it.