cliveb;211367 Wrote: > As for Apple: recently Steve Jobs has become a cuddly teddy-bear because > he's come out against DRM. But he didn't do it for philanthropic reasons > - it is a hard-nosed business decision. Under the good-guy exterior, > he's still a megalomaniac.
You can hardly blame him for wanting what's best for his business. I, for example, will never buy into any music format embuggered by DRM for as long as there's an alternative, and that's bad news for anyone trying to sell downloadable music and the devices to play it on. I do wonder whether the impact that DRM has on the electronics industry has ever been properly assessed, and compared against the alleged benefit that it has to the music and movie industries. For example, - how much R&D effort is used in implementing decryption algorithms, and in hiding the keys to avoid having them revoked? - how much additional hardware is required in each and every player? What impact does this have on cost and battery life? - what do licences for things like AACS cost the industry? - what about start-ups who maybe can't afford such licences? Or who would like to offer new and innovative features that would benefit the consumer but which wouldn't comply with licensing restrictions? (For example: want a Blu-ray player that'll stream wirelessly to the Linux box in the study? Forget it! But the reason has nothing to do with technology...) - how about lost sales of equipment, made less desirable to consumers because of, say, the inability to record, when such a feature would otherwise be trivial? The sad thing is, S/PDIF is probably the last interface that we'll see that's straightforward for manufacturers to use, without having to pay silly money for specs and licences that come with overbearing restrictions on what can be done with them. Look at the hi-fi industry: loads of small companies making products that offer superb performance across a whole range of price points. Now look at home cinema and see how few there are in comparison. In the HDMI / HDCP era it's only going to get worse, and the reason has nothing to do with technology :( -- AndyC_772 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AndyC_772's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10472 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35881 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
