The record companies and Hollywood have been trying to stop consumers (and pirates) copying their music and movies for years. Their attempts usually stuff something up and rarely stop the copying. Experts say copy protection (Digital Rights Management or DRM) is impossible because if you can’t decode the content to copy it, how can you decode it to play it?

DVD copy protection is a joke. There are very easy ways to get around both the region code (which stops you playing movies from other countries) and the copy protection. The plethora of cheap disks from Asia demonstrates this.

CD copy protection hit a new low when Sony got caught infecting customers PCs with a root kit that not only disabled their CD burners but also allowed viruses a back door to bypass any anti-virus software on the PC! And you caught this root kit, just by playing an affected music CD on your PC!

The new High Definition DVD systems (there are 2 competing formats, HD-DVD and Blue Ray.) both contain new DRM. The alarming thing about this system is that it can disable your player (stop it playing any disks!) or degrade the quality of the output (so its not worth copying). And it can do this just by you playing a disk. So the movie companies can decide (for example) that your particular model of DVD player is a danger to them and include the instruction “if you find this model player, kill it!” on every new movie they release. If you play one of these movies, your player dies!

You will need a NEW TV with this DRM built in. ALL your stuff (DVD player, amplifier, TV) has to have it, any “non secure” device in the chain and the quality will be reduced badly, or it won’t work at all!

If you just bought a new TV with HDMI (“High Definition”) input - think again. It probably won’t have this new system and so won’t work!

Worse still, the manufacturers (of the DVD players, amps, TVs etc) have to pay an annual fee to use this DRM system. If they stop paying, their players can be disabled. Similarly, if they fail to meet the expectations of the movie companies, they can be black banned. So your player can be turned off because the manufacturer went broke or didn’t obey Hollywood.

Each movie DVD has the latest “black list” stored on it. Just playing the DVD causes the player to update from the list.

If a manufacturer does not use this new DRM, then their stuff won’t play HD movies at all!

There’s full discussions of this technology out there for the interested. For the rest of us, I for one, won’t be buying a new player any time soon!