Why are there no services where you can pay to download a movie, burn it to DVD, and watch it on your TV? Ars Technica has a rundown of the problem. It seems that since there is no end-user license for CSS (DVD's copy-protection system), there's no way to legally allow end users to burn CSS-protected DVDs. Without protected DVDs, the movie studios won't buy into any scheme, for fear of people using the system for piracy.

I'm shaking my head as I write this. How ironic that CSS, a copy-protection system, is actually preventing copy-protection measures from being put into place. How ironic that CSS has been trivially circumventable for years, and that anyone who can put a DVD in a drive with the right side up can rip a movie.

These are the kinds of tangles you get into when you become a purveyor of DRM. Eventually, it's going to trip you up somewhere - content that protects itself and limits its own usage is by definition not portable, and DRM schemes can't keep up with people's ideas about how content can be consumed. And you lock yourself in to an ever-escalating battle to create the next generation of "uncrackable" DRM, which is in turn cracked in days, weeks, or months.

How sad that so much mental energy is spent on this dead-end technology. Once a DRM scheme is broken, it may as well not be there at all - it doesn't stop the real, financially damaging commercial piracy, and it doesn't stop the casual pirate either. All it does is artificially limit what the average consumer can do with "their own" content.

When you discover that your $1000 iTunes library won't play on the new shiny brown Zune you bought, you get frustrated. You haven't done anything wrong - you bought the music fair and square. So maybe you return the Zune to the store. Maybe you give up. And maybe, just maybe, you turn to piracy. And that's ironic.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Entertainment and culture, Science and technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.