It’s all over the place today: German MusicLoad revealed that 75% of its customer support calls were about complaining around the problems created by the inclusion of Digital Rigths Management (DRM) in the MP3 files they sell. Coming from a company that is living from the sale of legal MP3s, it has a lot of…
Category: DRM
Vista does not sell because of piracy
Believe it or not, this is what Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, just told to financial analysts. He was trying to explain why the actual sales are already considered as much lower than the initial MS estimation. Apaprently, the most exotic countries (China, Russia, South East Asia) are on the list of the accused. But wouldn’t…
DRM: EMI says No, Warner says Yes
The music industry is a large ship that moves slowly. But when they saw the arrival of the Internet, most of this industry decided to jump onto technical measures to close and protect the music they produce in order to protect their rights: Hence the Digital Rights Management (DRM). Today, things did not really change,…
90% of games won’t run on Vista
If you regularly read the news on this site, you know that I am not fully in favor of buying an OS software that could well be more expensive than the computer holding it (more than 500€ for the richer version of Vista). But I did not expect the announcement made by Alex St. John,…
HDMI and content protection
For those of you who want to know where technology-based content protection is naturally leading: Thanks to XKCD.
Sony PS3 and HDCP: It’s a mess
We already talked about it here at length: Devices willing to handle High Definition (HD) video have to (or will have to) be all HDCP-compatible in order to be able to display anything. Recent Christmas holiday season sales will probably soon appear as somewhat lacking in this section (most of the HD-Ready TV sets don’t…
HD-DVD: First pirated copy on BitTorrent
It seems that the previous news about HD-DVD copy protection being broken are true since, this week, BitTorrent users started to see an unprotected copy of Serenity (a 2006 Science Fiction movie) flowing on the P2P network.
How to crack HD DVD?
I was preparing a small post to talk about what I was envisonning as the future of anti-piracy measures included in HD DVD and BluRay DVD. According to me, there were two possible angles of attack: Break the AAS coding on the disc itself. Use the weaknesses of the HDCP protocol that is a requirement…
HD-Ready, crooks are out
We already wrote here about it when the HD-Ready and HD-TV programs were launched, the nice black and white little logos supposed to bring the guarantee of compatibility of electronic devices with High Definition (HD) video are only adding to the confusion of the consumers. At best, the buyer wonders what is really covered by…