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

[Drew Wilson]

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.

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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.

[Drew Wilson]

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 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.