Ravenwood - 10/11/05 06:15 AM
Watch them once and then throw them away. Content nazis - who want total control over how you view and play their movies - have been busy developing the single play DVD.
Step forward one Alistair Baker, md with Microsoft in the UK. He claims that Microsoft's DRM software now gives the owner of content "total control over how it is viewed". That could mean that not only could the content be viewed only once but that the content could also have an expiry date and/or time of day.Will Microsoft also champion DVD recycling, or are they prepared to take on the environmentalist wackos? How many ducks with DVDs stuck around their neck will we have to see?Why would anyone want to introduce one-play DVDs, you might ask? To sell new hardware, of course. Baker describes the typical playing device as a "new DVD player from manufacturers like Toshiba supporting high-definition DVD and running Windows CE."
No biggie, some enterprising person will hack it. All their DVD's are belong to us
Posted by: Sgt Fluffy at October 11, 2005 9:16 AMA few years ago, there was a proposal to do this using a plastic that would break down in a few days. So what you got amounted to a two or three day rental that you didn't have to take back because it turned itself to trash. Not a bad idea if it can come in at a price similar to regular rentals, and if you can reassure me about pieces breaking off inside the player...
However, encoding an expiration date and expecting everyone to change their hardware to respect it is ridiculous...
Posted by: markm at October 11, 2005 9:49 AMBesides, there is a nice, simple market mechanism to stop such a thing.
If people don't want it, it will never get off the ground. Remember years ago when digital tapes were supposedly going to obsolete CDs, or how about when they tried pushing those mini-CDs on consumers?
If you build it, they will not necessarily come.
Posted by: roger at October 11, 2005 10:09 AMThe hazard is that they will lobby to cripple hardware by law, even for those not interested in their DVDs, to protect their scheme.
No ... they will try to cripple the hardware and fail.
I had zero problems ordering a grey market DVD player from asia, in fact, it was cheaper than one from a local store ... everything was in english, and everything worked fine ... except the regional encoding ... the player simply ignored it and played any DVD from any region, as many times as the user wanted, without locking regions or doing any of the other stupid crap the MPAA wanted done.
Posted by: Kristopher at October 11, 2005 5:39 PMThe DMCA still makes what you did a crime. Most people dont have the gumtion to get a dvd player from asia, so their scheme will work. I'm glad to see some conservatives getting upset by this.
Posted by: JC at October 12, 2005 11:48 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
