archive
index

gp originals
google i
google ii
celebrating porn
idiot voters
 

Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com.

 

Has anti-piracy tech gone too far?

6:19:52 pm mst / 17 January 2001 found by diana / filed in legal / source MSNBC 122 hits / 1 comment / 0 e-mails

Microsoft's plans to use "Product Activation" in order to prevent priracy and Content Protection for Recordable Media will soon be on storage devices. Is such technology going too far?

Given how often technology fails, how often will we have to re-purchase what we already own in order to regain access?

Comments

This comment board has been retired.

This is a Good Thing! by MysteriousStranger 11:36:50 am mst / 19 January 2001 / # 1

I think I am in love with the next generation of copy protection technology. There are good reasons to promote it as much as possible... The people who sell copy protected formats to outfits like the MPAA are ripping them off, and they know it. The more these super-duper copy protection schemes are used, the more circumvention will occur; the end result will be nothing more or less than an explosion in the "contraband data" market, with all the "illegal" material in open-standard formats. End result: A generation of kids that grows up understanding the difference between open and closed standards, and which one is the better option. Same goes for copy protected drives. If enough idiots actually buy the things, and enough laws forbid the sale of "real" hard drives, software that captures the output stream on its way to the sound & video drivers, and writes it to disk in an open format that "really works", will become commonplace. End result: A gerneration of kids that grows up knowing that Open Source is a highly desirable thing. The only effective way to outlaw circumvention of copy protection, is to outlaw the private posession of tools used to create and manipulate multimedia files, and mandate end-to-end encryption all the way from the data file to the (closed, proprietary, obfuscated) audio and video driver cards for "legal" playback. The old distribution model for audio and video media is already dead, buried, over, and gone.