Copyright protection

[[TNT] Sonic Goo]

I'm one of those people who downloads lots of stuff and buys lots of stuff as well. (You'd almost think they were connected, eh?) I recently bought a nice DVD box of Aeon Flux (no, not the recent movie). However, when I want to play it in my Windows Media Player I just get an error saying 'copyright protected'. Fortunately, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in this area yet and I can watch it with one of my other players. But, considering also the blunder Sony made with their copyright protection, it got me wondering. Do they really think they'll make people stop downloading with this kind of thing? By making their product inferior to the illegal alternative? I'll certainly think twice now before buying anything that says 'copyright protected'...

[Surak]

Copy protection? Oh, that's something those nice release groups remove for me before releasing the game isn't?

[{GD}Independent]

Sonic Goo' date='Feb 19 2006, 11:30 AM' post='33107']

I'm one of those people who downloads lots of stuff and buys lots of stuff as well. (You'd almost think they were connected, eh?) I recently bought a nice DVD box of Aeon Flux (no, not the recent movie). However, when I want to play it in my Windows Media Player I just get an error saying 'copyright protected'. Fortunately, Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in this area yet and I can watch it with one of my other players. But, considering also the blunder Sony made with their copyright protection, it got me wondering. Do they really think they'll make people stop downloading with this kind of thing? By making their product inferior to the illegal alternative? I'll certainly think twice now before buying anything that says 'copyright protected'...

 

 

Here's the text of a talk that author/activist Cory Doctorow gave to Microsft on the evils of DRM (Digital Rights Management). It's really fascinating. If you'd rather listen to it than read it, there are links to audio versions of the talk above the text version at the following web page: http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

[daybreak]

Goo, that seems more like an error in Windows Media player to me than an actual copyright flag designed to not let you play it. Try another DVD decoder if you have one.

[[TNT] Sonic Goo]

I did, point is they made something that doesn't work with the most dominant player in the market.

[daybreak]

What you should understand though, is that Windows Media player does not come with its own DVD codec. There is a licensing fee with the MPEG group, which is why it's a miracle that Windows Media Player 10 comes with MP3 encoding support. MS decided long ago that they would not include DVD playback functionality with Windows because they didn't want to get in the way of competing companies and their MPEG-2 implementation for DVDs. So the story is that if you have Intervideo WinDVD somewhere on your system and you play back a DVD in Windows Media Player, it will use the Intervideo codec, same with an nVidia codec or an ATI codec, or a PowerDVD codec. There are bound to be errors made somewhere along the line...So please, don't bother getting angry with standard DVDs, their copyright protection system is extremely weak and has been broken for a very long time. Save your anger for HD-DVD and Blu Ray...

[[TNT] Sonic Goo]

It plays in my other media player, so I should have whatever codec is needed. Anyways, my little anecdote was only meant to start a discussion about copyright protection in general.

 

Unless you wanna talk Aeon Flux of course...