[nylug-talk] [wwwac] The DRM That Almost Stole Christmas (fwd)

[Jay Sulzberger]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
  Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 18:12:07 -0500
  From: Joel Gwynn <joelman at gmail.com>
  To: WWWAC <wwwac at lists.wwwac.org>
  Subject: [wwwac] The DRM That Almost Stole Christmas

  Warning: Adult fucking language ahead.

  Here's my holiday rant.  My sister bought us a Little Miss Sunshine
  DVD for Christmas, so that night there we were all gathered around the
  warm glow of the TV, ready to watch it.  We fired up the ol' DVD
  player and popped it in, and hit play.  Lo and behold, it plays for
  about 5 seconds, then the screen goes slowly dark.  What. The. Fuck?
  We stopped it and hit play again, and the same thing happens.

  "I think our DVD player is broken."
  "It plays all these other DVDs."

  So my brother whips out his MacBook and plugs it into the cable box,
  and tries to play it via whatever dvd player comes with the Mac.
  Still no joy.

  "It must be copy protected.  I'll try VLC."

  Sure enough, using whatever hax0r copy-protection-breakage
  circumvention he had, we were able to watch that heartwarming instant
  classic.  But what the fuck?

  The next day we try it on my the brand-fucking-new DVD player my mom
  got for Christmas; still no joy.  Finally I look on the back of the
  DVD and see this: "This DVD is copy-protected".  Apparently it's also
  viewing-protected.  Is this what it's come to?  In order to play the
  DVD we legally bought, we have to break the law?  Studios decide to
  just break formats in order to provide some bogus "protection" that
  does nothing but lock out law-abiding consumers?

  I know this is old news to lots of you, but I don't buy/rent that many
  movies, so this is the first time that I've gotten burned by this
  personally and it really pisses me off.

  Those Motherfuckers.


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