An Education on copy protection

An Education on copy protection

Thanks to Paul Miller for the angry post about the idiocies of copy protection on Engadget.

In copy protection schemes, there are two factors to take into account. The first is the possibility that a film will get out in bit-perfect digital quality, available for download in perfect resolution on bittorrent. Anybody who is striving to attain this possibility at this point is an idiot. HDCP protection is now cracked (and Intel is threatening to sue those who use the crack!) Somebody, somehow, will have the ingenuity to get the video onto bittorrent, and from there it’s becoming more and more easy to crack it.

The second form of copy protection is where all efforts should be focused: making it difficult and clearly unapproved for the casual consumer to copy and share videos if they are not following fair use. Make it hard for consumers to email songs or copy over videos, but only if you can make sure they can use them on their own devices–and we are not there yet.

I won’t buy the Amazon Kindle or any movie I plan to watch more than once with all these gooey DRM’ey strings attached.