The other day I picked up "Order of the Phoenix" on DVD. Warner Brothers includes a "digital copy" for my convenience. Unfortunately, it's utterly useless to me thanks to DRM. I'm all for the right of the producer to control distribution of their products, but this particular case is like shooting fish in a barrel.
The digital rights management scheme WB chose is Microsoft's WMV. When you put the disc in, you are prompted for a key code (included on an insert in the box). This downloads the DRM's decryption key to your computer. The actual WMV file is already on the disc itself and the interface, after installing the key, will copy that file to your hard-drive.
Supposedly, this file is encoded at a particular resolution that will make it easily portable on popular devices. Apparently Sony PSP is not "popular." PSP does not support the WMV codec. And I can't do anything with the WMV file sitting on my hard-drive thanks to the DRM encryption (can't convert it or anything).
The only way I can get my movie playing on my PSP is to rip the DVD to MP4 format (something that the RIAA and very likely the MPAA have previously established in court is "stealing"). And while this process doesn't cost me anything (my CPU cycles are all paid for), I've already paid for the DRM'ed copy currently wasting about a gigabyte of my drive-space. Why was I forced to buy that?
1 comment:
All copy protection is pathetic.
I wont ever buy any product that supports it. As far as I'm conserned, I bought it, I can whatever I want with it. And if they say it's only a licence, then if I break it, they better replace it for free!
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