There's another possibility [LWN.net]

There's another possibility

Posted Aug 1, 2005 21:19 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
In reply to: There's another possibility by Ross
Parent article: Microsoft's DRM vision

I also know that the last three DVD players I have owned are region free and ignore Macrovision. Region encoding affects almost nobody, yet region free players are easy to get. Copy protection has an even more pitiful effect, yet is also ignoreable to those who want to.

I believe that if DRm were to intrude into Joe Sixpack's ability to share movies and record football games, there would be such an outrage at 800 call centers and people returning computers to stores so fast, that the DRM would be rescinded within days.

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There's another possibility

Posted Aug 2, 2005 8:50 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Ross is right, don't extrapolate too far. Remember iPods, iTunes store and "FairPlay" DRM restrictions? Are people returning them to stores like crazy?

The difference

Posted Aug 2, 2005 14:04 UTC (Tue) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

But there is a difference here. The copy protection on DVDs hasn't ever
gone away. In fact, people don't seem to care about it. It is true that you
can pretend that CSS was never created but only if you are willing to break
the law. That's not the same as the other copy protection measures which
people outright rejected leading the company to go out of business or remove
the protection. Note I'm not arguing the protection is good or useful, just
that it is still there.