DRM and HD woes abound....

I'm not likely to steer clear of this topic for a while, so my apologies to those it doesn't apply to.  The link below is about another person's nightmare with the HD (HDTV, HDCP, HD DVD, BLU-Ray) restrictions and DRM (Digital Rights Management).  No one I know likes to be micro-managed, and just about every management philosophy says to stay clear of it ( I mean really, if you can't trust your people to do the job then you either aren't managing them properly or they can't do job and need to be moved elsewhere ).  The media moguls are trying to micro-manage the viewing habits of hundreds of millions of viewers.  The blog entry link below makes a good point about the technical controls involved to ensure an encrypted un-copyable stream from the disc to the display.  Now you also have DRM incompatibilities that will prevent you from displaying some content unless to disable content from other providers or vice-versa.  Even if you go with the suggestion from Netflix for downgrading your equipment to something less capable, even that may prevent you from viewing higher quality content. 

The complications with competing software, especially software that tweaks your Operating System or your hardware is the primary reason I stopped playing games on my home computers.  I do too many other things with them to jeopardize their stability.  I can't really afford to journey into the DRM world with these types of issues.  I read this morning also that the EU is contemplating standardizing DRM.  It could be a good thing, but we all have seen where something wasn't totally FUBARed until government got involved (sometimes they do end up making things better though).

There are many good comments that are worth reading in the blog link below too.

http://davisfreeberg.com/2008/01/03/bad-copp-no-netflix/

In the mean time I guess I'll stick with DVDs for my movies.  The headache and expense of the HD world is just too much.

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"Until you forget what you think you know and what you think is possible, you will never know what is truly attainable."