Will digital rights management kill rich media?

DTV has ushered in a new wave of technologies that enable the content provider to control how, where and on what device the media is used. These technologies were added to DTV standards without much public fanfare, because no one outside of the industry could have foreseen how digital rights management would be employed in consumer devices.  As it stands today, your pretty new 50″ flat screen is full of on-off switches that only big media can access. And there’s more to come. Now big media wants more of these on-off switches only they can control to be built into our internet.

The very characteristic that makes digital TV look so good is the one that makes it so vulnerable to restriction and manipulation: A TV broadcast is no longer a signal, it’s a bitstream, one that has far fewer points of origination than the Internet and is therefore easier to control. Digital TV is rapidly heading for precisely the sort of lockdown that entertainment and broadcast lobbies desire for the Internet, and to the extent that they can be used as video players and recorders, our PCs, Macs, and notebooks.

The primary example of digital lockdown is HDMI, the High Definition Multimedia Interface. Simply put, HDMI is how you get digital video into a high-definition TV. HDMI looks like a dream come true: A single cable with a small connector passes digital video, digital audio, and control signals. HDMI has always incorporated High Definition Copy Protection (HDCP), but for a long time its enforcement was relaxed. You could hook an LCD computer monitor to a cable box or DVD player with an HDMI output. All you needed was a $20 HDMI/DVI adapter.

It doesn’t work that way now. If you plug an LCD monitor into a late model DVD player or other device with an HDMI output, all you’ll see is text telling you that your device is incompatible. If it were truly incompatible, it wouldn’t be able to display that text. Wait, it gets better. (Infoworld)

Copyright law was never intended to enable the producer of content to impose so many restrictions on its use. We have reached the point where you have broken the law by listening to or viewing content you have paid for the right to use on a device that was not approved by the content distributor. It’s time for Congress to repeal the DMCA and start over. Beyond that, our rights as consumers  should be protected  by insuring the net remain free from micro management by the big media. In the mean time, we recommend you not buy any new video device that does not have analog inputs and outputs. Boycott HDMI only.