Apple to Mac owners: throw away your monitor if Hollywood says so (BoingBoing)

[DrewWilson]

Buying an Apple computer? Get ready to throw away your monitor, over and over again. New Apple hardware is shipping with "HDCP" anti-copying technology that prevents showing some video on "non-compliant" monitors. Best part: the list of "compliant" monitors will change over time: the monitor you buy today can be "revoked" tomorrow and stop working.

Slashdot says that Apple's added "copyright protection" to its video. But copyright law isn't violated when you watch a movie on an "unapproved" monitor. This isn't about enforcing copyright law, it's about giving a small handful of movie companies a veto over hardware designs.

More... (http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/19/apple-to-mac-owners.html)

The people that think these things up really need to spend some time at the Chinese e-waste industry for about a month.

[thepuzzler]

"Some video" being video purchased from the itunes store with embedded DRM I'm guessing. (Havent time to read the whole article)

IF that's the case then it's a non-issue.

[drtoker]

an anti copying technology that prevents the display from working. Does anyone see a flaw in this logic? I dont need to view a movie to copy it, or strip the DRM from it :|

[mountain_rage]

Its another misguided attempt by Hollywood to try and lock down all technology. They force hardware companies to implement this in order to prevent analogue recordings. Its basically a problem for all technology currently purchased and only going to get worse knowing the industry. If the government wasn't so heavily lobbied this would never be allowed.

[DrewWilson]

It's a bit of a non-issue for pirates (the fair use seeking kind), so let's just hope that things similar to this (http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9850/Anti-P2P+Group%3A+%27Online+Piracy+Must+Equal+Physical+ Piracy%27) don't actually come to pass.

[Crashtard]

I don't really see where this is a problem. The only thing I see this doing if it gets passed is driving up the market for old equipment that the rules can't apply to. Perhaps it's a conspiracy to make people buy up old macs?

[wapazoid]

Hmmm, it's a little disappointing to see Apple pull something like this. Without a doubt, iTunes is going to lose support.

[Crashtard]

I'm honestly not sure that it will really hurt itunes that much. A few people might stop using it, but people that download itunes videos usually know how to remove the DRM and they will just do it before they watch it. Those that are buying itunes videos won't have anything to worry about anyway. Doesn't seem like it will do much except piss people off.

[wapazoid]

I don't think that people paying for music, then stripping it of drm makes up most of their customer base. Is there an app that can actually remove the protection off the m4a file, or is it one of those "copying" apps that records an mp3?

[Crashtard]

I've never seen software that can just remove the protection. Everything I've seen is just virtual cd burning. I've seen a few people claiming they have something that simply strips the DRM, but I've never been able to verify there was a program to do it. Even if there was it's not worth doing since you can just burn virtual cd's pretty easily. You're right though about their customer base. Those definitely aren't people that care about removing the DRM.

[wapazoid]

Thinking back, wasn't there something called Fairtunes people used? I think it was one of those converters (m4a>mp3, etc.)

[Crashtard]

Yeah, that was around for a while. There's one called Tunesclone I think, although I'm not sure if it's around still. I tried Noteburner out for a friend, and that seemed ok except that if you tried to do too many files at once it would skip 25-30% of them and not tell you. I imagine that most people just use Daemon or any of the many virtual drive programs out there.

[mountain_rage]

I don't really see where this is a problem. The only thing I see this doing if it gets passed is driving up the market for old equipment that the rules can't apply to. Perhaps it's a conspiracy to make people buy up old macs?

The issue is that hardware companies, and the media industry have been working together for at least the last 10 years to lock down your computer. Basically the plan is to make all new media and software only function if the proper protection is in place. There may even be stipulations on what you area allowed to do with your computer itself. So lets say you buy a movie and want to watch it on your computer, well unless your monitor, cpu and optical drive all have the chip in it, the movie won't play. These chips have found their way into Tv, blue ray players, phones, monitors, video cards, processors, etc..

Here's a scenario, you want to edit a video of a family trip. Unknown to you their is copyrighted music playing in the background, all of a sudden the sound in your video is stripped. This could theoretically be the future as these controller chips become more sophisticated.

[Crashtard]

I definitely understand the implications of it, but I can't imagine it will ever go that far. I'm not for it in the least, but in the end people will always find a way around it like they do now. There will be a way to remove the chip or do something to disable it like every other big DRM advancement. Or people will just stop buying new products.

[mountain_rage]

My hope is that they will implement it poorly and piss off the public creating animosity towards any new attempt at repeating the act. Sadly I think they might be smarter than that, and they are slowly implementing it so people are used to having their computers and electronics locked down.

[Crashtard]

I think the biggest problem we'll see is that people seem to be getting stupider, more ignorant and just uncaring about the whole situation. They'll do whatever they're told to be left alone, and I think it certainly has the potential to take us down a hard road with this technology.

[mountain_rage]

But thankfully you will always have pirated content, as some overworked underpaid Chinese computer engineer will inevitably see the profitability in bootlegging movies. Although not terribly simple, I'm sure they could capture the signal a some point after the descrambling chip giving them a digital replica.

[Crashtard]

Yeah, that's the great thing about technology: it keeps getting better, and no matter how fool proof you make it someone will break it.

[wapazoid]

Unknown to you their is copyrighted music playing in the background, all of a sudden the sound in your video is stripped. This could theoretically be the future as these controller chips become more sophisticated.

That's the trigger for WWIII.

[DrewWilson]

I'd imagine things like this will fuel the hunger for open source (ala Ubuntu) I can see that if things like this continue, that the scene will be the only ones really breaking the DRM, then the pirated content will trickle down to Linux users because Apple (or Windows for that matter) computers will simply cease operating anything that doesn't have a unique and authorized key of some sort.

In the end, a blessing in disguise for open source. Though, the question will truly be, at this point, are these companies involved that stupid?

[mountain_rage]

It will definitely help the opensource initiative. But sadly, no one will convert to a Unix based OS until they standardize their interface, and improve the GUI. Most if not all Unix based operating systems I've used suffer from their quiltwork of coding. They need to interconnect all the parts, and create a standard as to how each elements is integrated. They need to simplify, sort and standardized their OS.

[DrewWilson]

Of course, we are speculating on a hypothetical future here.

If the media companies convince the computer manufacturing industry to lock down people's computers so that they can only play authorized media, people will ultimately find alternatives and that's what open source will definitely provide.

It may be a bit off topic, but I think back to when the original Napster got it's fame. Before the lawsuits were started, Napster had a user population of, what? A million? If that? Then Lars Ulrich basically sued Napster into oblivion, but the population of people interesting in getting free music exploded. Hardly news here by any stretch of the imagination.

People went over to mostly the Fast Track network which was decentralized and the industry made their biggest mistake by suing individuals. As a result, the number of people file-sharing, by the standards of the time, went straight to the stratosphere.

The point is this though, when the media companies inconvenienced the few (and yes, I'm using one of the biggest ephamisms here) the people that were converted were the many. The stigma was set.

Here, in this scenario, we're talking about Holleywood and the big record labels trying to inconvenience even more people, thus reinforcing the stigma that the big media companies are out to make you're life basically a living hell if you decide to abide by the laws of copyright in a digital age. Unsurprisingly, people react to this.

If people's computer screens start saying, "We have detected pirated content on your computer, you need to buy a new hard drive." the consumer backlash will hit both the media companies and the major commercial operating system software developers as well in a similar way that lawsuits against file-sharers has resulted in more people file-sharing.

Linux has been in development far longer than file-sharing technology when the lawsuits first started hitting, but if these plans were to follow through as the BoingBoing post suggests, people will start converting to Linux just for something that will 'play the damn movie'

I do remember a time when file-sharing only supported MP3's at 156kb/s. By todays standards, a lot of file-sharers would cringe at the very thought of something like it (what was one of the biggest complaints about iTunes for the longest time?)

Now, if media companies did things like this before the hayday of Napster, you're right, no one would really care and give notice because fewer people were aware of the idea of playing your music in millions of different ways. The focus would be, 'hey, I heard a great song on the radio a few minutes ago!'

At the end of the day, it'll be a 'convert to do something simple, worry about the details later' which plays huge into the Linux userbases favor just by the very nature of 'you don't like something about the OS, you can code your way to something that works' (which is actually relatively similar to the way the web revolution has been carried out for the last 10-25 years)

We are not talking about an overnight revolution in response to the media companies idiocy, this will take years because there are millions of people sitting on their Windows 95/98/2000 machines happily plugging away and bearing with the limitations of their OS, but sooner or later, their system will crash and they'll have to find something that will suit their needs. At that point, there will be an increasing chance that they know someone who uses Linux and increasing the chance that they'll go over to Linux (alternatively, buying an expensive machine, getting locked out of it and turning to Linux sooner or later)

The only reason this is all a possible outcome is because people realize that they can do more than just buy a plastic disc with holes, go into a theatre or get high at rock concerts to have a good time with content.

Linux will constantly be improving and it would probably evolve much like the existance of Limewire, eMule, Shareaza, uTorrent, Azureus, SoulSeek, WinMX, Mute, Ants and the tonnes of other file-sharing apps. There'll be popular ones and there will be not so popular ones. In the end, the improvements will be exponential as more get driven away from over-protective proprietary systems.

Of course, let's be realistic here. I would be surprised if the companies take things to this extreme purely to the fact that they gotta know this. It would kill the one thing they care about - thier bottom line, maybe even fatally so.

Apple isn't the only one doing these kinds of content protection moves. Windows has been quietly inserting bits of DRM here and there. No one takes notice because they don't get locked out of their content. The day users get locked out of their own content on both Windows and Apple is the day the Linux OS becomes the most ideal OS for the general user.

(sorry for the long post)

[Crashtard]

If people's computer screens start saying, "We have detected pirated content on your computer, you need to buy a new hard drive." the consumer backlash will hit both the media companies and the major commercial operating system software developers as well in a similar way that lawsuits against file-sharers has resulted in more people file-sharing.

This point I think is where it would get me. If something like that actually happened I'd never boot my windows machine again and would dig up parts to build a linux box. I can't imagine this sort of gustapo tactics would do anything but run profits into the ground.

[the-kid]

My hope is that they will implement it poorly and piss off the public creating animosity towards any new attempt at repeating the act. Sadly I think they might be smarter than that, and they are slowly implementing it so people are used to having their computers and electronics locked down.
I hate the idea that any computer is locked down its just wrong. I'm hopping they mess this one up big time to then we wont have to deal with this bs for a little longer well tell they find a new way to piss us all off

[wapazoid]

How dare you live. Die immediately.