This Title Rephrased to be Less Aggressive and PG-Rated
2/16/2005
This new technology by Macrovision is designed to crash ripping software. Software that can be used to make copies of DVDs. It will be BUILT INTO your computer hardware. Fuck that.
Let's look into the past a little.
Have you ever tried to record a DVD to videotape, only to find that the resulting picture was horrible, wavy and distorted? Well, that's macrovision, a tool designed to 'protect the interests of the film industry.' What it actually does is inhibit your ability to make a perfectly legal backup copy of something that you purchased with your hard-earned cash. It also makes it impossible to daisy-chain your DVD player to your VCR. In effect, it cripples the functionality of the hardware you've already purchased. And it's intentional.
Another thing. DVDs wear out, just like videotapes, just like records. Sometimes even faster. Like all the rest of the crap this greedy world is spitting out onto Wal-Mart shelves, DVDs are designed with intentional flaws. This is bad for the environment and it wastes valuable resources. But making the rich richer is apparently more important than providing a future for our children and grandchildren.
Sure, pirates are a nuisance. But not the nuisance they would have us believe.
Here's an article written in 1999, just after CSS was cracked. I thus quote:
... the entertainment industry continues to spend millions of R&D dollars coming up with new copy protection schemes, which will eventually be broken in turn. Wherever there exists a technology to prevent us from duplicating digital media, some hacker is going to be intrigued enough to go and break it. It happened for DVDs, it happened for Sony PlayStation games before that, and it will continue to happen.The industries will keep buttering up the consumers, making it look like the future of the industry is at stake because some 19-year-old Norwegian hacker cracked their encryption. They'll continue to make it look like they are merely protecting the rights of the film studios, that it's the little guy that is affected (like those anti-piracy commercials at the movies last summer). But in reality they are bending the consumer over backwards and fucking them up the ass. Those R&D costs are reflected in licensing, and licensees pass those costs onto the consumer. Thereby making the studios far more money than they could ever lose from pirateering. If region coding weren't enough.
Meanwhile, consumers will keep paying for these efforts, as the associated licensing fees and surcharges are passed along into retail prices. So I wonder: Does the consumer lose more because CSS encryption was cracked? Or because it was there to be cracked in the first place?
With the ungodly amounts of money already being raked in my the Motion Picture industry, it's not like they're starving for cash. But if the public continues to buy this bullshit, it's we who will be buying the farm while they waller in our money like gluttonous pigs.
Consumers allow big companies get away with the virtual rape of our culture. The MPAA, the RIAA, and government organizations like the FCC constantly lobby and rage against the rights of the consumer. For money. For power. For ownership and control. When the public finally learns that they are being screwed out of everything they fund and produce, that all of our ideas are owned by corporations that will demand a constant cashflow to maintain the accessibility of cultural content, it will probably be too late to do anything about it.
But we keep hiring greedy motherfuckers to run the show, to make decisions for us so we can pretend to live in a 'free' fantasyland of artificial dreams and empty promises. These people are OUR employees. The president, the vice president, senators, congresspeople that push these policies into action. We give them power, and they fuck everything up because we decided in advance to not think, to not educate ourselves, to not stand up for what is ours.
It's just a simple thing, a DVD. So one might think it's not worth all this hard-headedness on my part. But things compound and get ugly. Everywhere you turn, something is hijacked by opportunists. Something must be done. Or said at least.
posted by Edward Svengali @ Wednesday, February 16, 2005,
