At 08:29 AM 11/6/99 -0800, Justin Ryan wrote:
>I agree with you, and pretty much everyone else who responded to my
>message - BUT what's happening here is exactly what the movie industry
>was afraid of. It was inevitable, of course - any time you add a
>technology to a personal computer you can pretty much give up on it being
>kept secret for too long.
Oh, c'mon--it was 40 bit encrypted anyway. Distributed.net could break
that in under a day. Probably under an hour with their current MIPS, in
truth. We just didn't know the bitlength going into it. I can't imagine
the idiocy that believed 40 bit would be secure at all. I'm
guessing/hoping it was for export reasons that it was so low. 40 bit DVD
encryption is like saying that people can't or won't copy VHS because
they'd have to have *gasp* two VCRs. What kind of freak has two VCRs?
The short of it is, both the music and video industries must realize that
if they release digital media, there's *nothing* they can do to protect it
from being ruthelessly copied by anyone willing to bother. Not to say
analog is much better with TV-to-PC cards and whatnot.
So the music industry's claiming an 11% loss to MP3? Do they know how good
they've got it? 89% of their revenue-producing customers, *89* percent,
would rather pay an inflated, ridiculous price for the CD rather than
invest a piddly amount of time in downloading the hits off of it for FREE.
Were I them, I'd be breaking out the chapagne. This changes nothing.
Before this, people were swapping huge-ass .vcd files of movies ripped off
of VHS tapes taken at the movies. Now they'll trace huge-ass .vcds ripped
from the DVDs. Better quality. woohoo. They still take up gigs worth of
space. I'm not concerned about piracy going crazy, but I am concerned
about DVD going cold.
I suggest that if people start pulling out of DVD, that consumers demand a
DIVX-like settlement. 40bit can be found to be not a 'reasonalbe
expectation of privacy', I'd imagine, and their mismanagement and fumbling,
and Xing's huge Ooooops gives a great case for the consumer. "It's not our
fault that we paid $300 for players that you're stopping supporting because
of idiocy on your part."
______________________________________________________
Jon "GriffJon" Camfield www.GriffJon.com
Web R&D, Competitive Intelligence; eCertain.com
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher
a hog, construct a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give
orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch
manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die
gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
--Robert A. Heinlein, _The Notebooks of Lazarus Long_
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