The futility of DRM

Here’s an interesting interview with the chap who’s broken both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray copy protection (he broke Blu-Ray without even owning a player).  It took him eight days.  Here’s a snippet from the interview:

The mainstream media tends to have many labels for you, i.e. hacker, cracker, pirate, etc., in response to your efforts. What would you call yourself and what would you label your efforts?

I’m just an upset customer. My efforts can be called “fair use enforcement”!

What motivated you to help circumvent the content protection scheme associated with HD DVD and Blu-ray?

With the HD-DVD, I wasn’t able to play my movie on my non-HDCP HD monitor. Not being able to play a movie that I have paid for, because some executive in Hollywood decided I cannot, made me mad…

After the HD-DVD crack, I realized that things where “unbalanced” by having just one format cracked, so I did Blu-ray too.

Hat tip:  Boing Boing

There are a couple of key points to be made here:

  • It’s a lot easier to crack a protection scheme than it is to develop one, productize it, get it into production on both players and media, and have it adopted by customers
  • Media companies have been using the “lost leader” strategy, i.e. making their money by encouraging customers to assemble collections, for nearly 100 years.  They don’t know anything else.
  • The ease of cracking will encourage media companies to adopt new, incompatible technologies at an increasing pace.
  • Incompatible technologies discourage assembling collections.

Or, in other words, the intrinsic internal contradictions of the industries involved will overwhelm them.

Artists don’t need the media companies anymore and should be marketing directly to their customers.  The remaining challenge is to get the government out of the business of subsidizing media companies at the expense of artists, a perversion of the constitutional provisions on intellectual property if ever there was one.

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