Tag: DRM

Tomorrow the DC Circuit will hear arguments in the case challenging the FCC’s authority to impose the Broadcast Flag regulation. The case will determine whether the FCC can control the design of computers, in the name of copyright. It will also determine whether the ill-conceived Broadcast Flag rule will be imposed. Today’s New York Times…

I wrote yesterday about the new Cato Institute paper on the economics of peer-to-peer and anti-copying technology, which argues that everything will be okay in the online-music market because competition will force vendors to offer consumer-friendly products. I agree that a competitive market would have this effect. But how competitive is the market? One of…

Macrovision is introducing a new DRM technology for DVDs, apparently based on passive changes to the data encoded on the disc, according to a news.com article by John Borland. (The article is entitled “New Copy-Proof DVDs on the way?” The answer to that question is “no.”) The new technology, called RipGuard, tries to code the…

Yesterday was Groundhog Day, the holiday. But for SunnComm, the embattled CD-DRM vendor, it may have been Groundhog Day, the movie, in which Bill Murray’s character is doomed to repeat the same unpleasant events until he learns certain lessons. Yesterday SunnComm announced a new product. According to a Register story, the product fixes SunnComm’s infamous…

Natali Helberger at INDICARE questions Microsoft’s new “playsforsure” campaign. Playsforsure is a logo that will be displayed by digital music and video stores, and media devices. The program has a cute logo: According to the program’s website, Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you’re shopping for a portable music or video device and you want…

Last week the panel investigating CBS’s botched reporting about President Bush’s military service released its report. The report was offered on the net in PDF format by CBS and its law firm. CBS was rightly commended for its openness in facing up to its past misbehavior and publicizing the report. Many bloggers, in commenting on…

The recording industry may be publishing spyware-infested copies of their songs on P2P networks, according to a PC World story by Andrew Brandt and Eric Dahl. The files are encoded in a Microsoft file format. When the user plays such a file, the user’s browser is forced to visit a URL contained in the file.…

On Friday I wrote about DVD region coding, which allows the manufacture of DVDs that (in theory) can only be played in certain regions of the world. U.S. public policy, in the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), plays an important role in shoring up the region coding mechanism. Is this good public…

As I noted yesterday, part of the license that DVD makers have to sign is <a href="As I noted yesterday, part of the license that DVD makers have to sign is available on the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) website. It’s 48 pages of dense technolegalese, consisting mostly of a list of things that DVD…

There’s a budding format war in the movie industry, over which video medium will replace the DVD. The candidates are called HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. For some reason, HD-DVD advocates are claiming that their format can better resist unauthorized copying. As far as I can tell, there is essentially zero evidence to support this claim. In…