Blu-ray Copy Protection: Punishing the Honest Customer

I absolutely sympathize with legitimate businesses when they lose money to piracy. In my book, it's wrong to steal movies. But it's equally wrong to put the whole burden of preventing piracy on the shoulders of honest customers. Not just wrong, but blindingly stupid as a business decision.

So then I have to confess to being mystified by the BD+ Blu-ray copy protection that is just now beginning to ship on Blu-ray discs. It seemed like a huge aggravation for consumers, and unsurprisingly, it's turning out to be just that. With the recent news that Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow on Blu-ray discs are failing to play on several players from Samsung, LG, Sony and Panasonic, Blu-ray disc vendors have managed to lob the unwelcome copy protection ball back into the consumer's court.

To make the discs play, customers must update their firmware. Except that for some of them, there is no new firmware update to be had. This leaves them in the infuriating position of having to watch their new movies on the schedule of their player manufacturer's software development team.

Now, if this happened once in a blue moon, they might be able to get away with it. But how long do you think it's going to take before a new crack motivates the movie studios to release yet another updated copy protection scheme that forces yet another firmware update?

And let's talk about those updates. Even when they're ready in a timely fashion, the average consumer faces unprecedented hurdles in applying these updates. Never before has there been a stand-alone entertainment appliance that required more specialized knowledge simply to make the thing perform its basic task. You either have to have a home network to plug the thing into, or you have to download .iso images and burn them to discs. Now, I can tell you, my Mom has neither a home network, or the knowledge to download and burn .iso images. And that is always the threshold that a consumer device should pass—can your mother use it? (Okay, some of you may argue that a TiVo is pretty complicated, and requires some fiddling. But I would say that to get it to perform its basic tasks, you don't need the network connection.)

I'm a technophile—I eagerly awaited a high-definition DVD format, and was looking forward to watching movies in stunning clarity on my HD TV. But, for the first time I can remember, I have decided to stick with an older technology because I can't tolerate the inconvenience and restrictions of meddlesome, intrusive DRM. I say "long live standard-def DVDs" until something more intelligent comes along.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 12:30 PM  Permalink