Blu-Ray : are you sure?

Imagine that you happily buy a laptop with a Blu-Ray player, you happily erase its pre-installed OS to install Linux, you happily rent a Blu-Ray movie to watch, and you sadly realize you cannot do so.

According to the Ubuntu wiki,

The AACS 'Digital Rights Management' system in most HD-DVD and all Blu-Ray discs attempts to stop consumers from exercising fair use rights, including:

* Playing purchased Blu-Ray and HD DVD films using Open Source software.

That might make sense, since someone could modify the code to copy the movie as well. However, I think that playing the film using Open Source Software _is_ fair use, and I do not want to support those who prevent me from doing so.

* Playing films using standard digital (DVI) or analog (VGA) cables and monitors, which generally do not support HDCP DRM, without a 75% reduction in resolution.

No big deal. (I suppose they just want to plug the analog hole)

* Fast forwarding or skipping advertisements.

Give me a break. Those who pay for a movie have to watch advertisements, but those who pirate it don't? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

* Playing imported films, including when local equivalents may be overpriced or not available.

[sarcasm]Cool - if the movie isn't available in your country, you have no choice but to pirate it. As a bonus, it would be ad-free too![/sarcasm] I'm not saying "go ahead and pirate movies", but I don't see a solution that conforms with fair use either.

But the best comes from Wikipedia:

The approach of AACS provisions each individual player with a unique set of decryption keys which are used in a broadcast encryption scheme. This approach allows licensors to "revoke" individual players, or more specifically, the decryption keys associated with the player. Thus, if a given player's keys are compromised and published, the AACS LA can simply revoke those keys in future content, making the keys/player useless for decrypting new titles.

Simply put: you happily buy a Blu-Ray player for your home, but then some hacker uses the same player model to decrypt a few movies. The keys will then be revoked, so, one day, you'll realize you cannot play new movies anymore, even though you haven't done anything wrong!

Sony has always been a company with emphasis on quality on its products. They were always a bit more expensive, but always worth the price as well. Lately, they tend to get overpriced, even with good quality taken into account. Sony tends to keep its customers as hostages with closed formats and zero interoperability (e.g. Memory Sticks), rather than attracting them with the good quality it does have. Maddox is stating a few points as well (remember the rootkit in "audio" CDs?), with his unique way of writing about things.

Conclusion: are you sure you want to financially support this DRM system? I'm fine with DVD quality, thanks.

Humble Indie Bundle

You think all this DRM is made in order for the owners of the "intellectual property" to make more profit.

Wrong.

Power should be given to the consumers. The proof is in the Humble Indie Bundle.

They're basically saying: pay as much as you want, starting from 0.01$, you may donate any percentage to charity, and you get all of our games (World of Goo, Gish, Penumbra, Lugaru HD, Aquaria, Samorost). You may choose between Windows, Mac and Linux. No DRM, no middle man, all money goes directly to the developers. And, yes, they're aware that their games are available on BitTorrent. Needless to say that I bought the games immediately, though I'm not a gamer and I doubt I'll ever play them. ☺

It's not just me. They generated more than _one million dollars_ in just seven days!

Now they decided to open-source their games, thinking that it's their turn to give back.

I think some people need to learn from this model...

PS: there's more to come about DRM, I'm planning an article about Blu-Ray.