The Mad Rants of a Raving Genius

It’s the bane of every consumer: digital copy protection. You find it on games, DVDs, music CDs. It’s everywhere and it’s damned annoying. Sometimes it can be extreme, such as the rootkits installed by some Sony CDs. Sometimes it’s easily broken, such as with HD DVDs. But no matter what, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, which is keep people from pirating copyrighted material. What it does do, on the other hand, is hinder legitimate consumers from being able to fully utilize the very things they paid for.

Normally, I’m not big into complaining about copy protection. I’ve never had any problems. If I want to rip a CD or DVD, it’s easily done. Playing, then, should be simple. Not so today. I recently received the first season of the new Battlestar Galactica series, which I decided to watch today on my new laptop. Naturally, I expected no problems. I mean, the DVDs are legit. My computer is legit. The software running on the computer is legit. There should be no problems at all with playing these DVDs, right? Wrong.

First thing I did was start up Windows Media Center and pop in the first DVD. It sat there for a while before telling me that there was a problem with the digital copy protection on the disk and it won’t play. So I tried on Windows Media Player. Same thing happens. I figured both programs were just being annoying, so I tried an old copy of Media Player Classic, bundled with a codec pack I downloaded. More copy protection problems. No matter what I do, I can’t get this DVD to play. Finally, I tried MediaDirect, the Cyberlink-based Media Center ripoff bundled with newer Dells. It worked. Just for kicks, I tried Media Player and Media Center again, but with mixed results. Now Media Player worked, but Media Center still refused to play the DVD. I was pissed, but decided to watch my movie just the same.

Now, the big problem here is that I’m a legitimate consumer. Not only should I be able to play my DVDs and CDs (that’s a given), but I should also be able to make backup copies. The problem is that newer copy protection technology sometimes prevents both, as evidenced by my rather unusual case. You know there’s a problem with a system when it fails to work against the people it’s supposed to work against. By this, I mean that pirated movies and music is still rampant. Certain people will always be able to get around protection. Unfortunately, that leaves legit consumers in the dust. While pirates and movie/music/software organizations fight over digital copyright, people like myself have to suffer through sometimes absurd and downright dangerous copyright schemes (StarForce, anyone?). Copy protection shouldn’t protect copyrighted material (which it doesn’t anyways) at the expense of the ability for legit consumers to use what they rightfully bought. Okay, so we could argue semantics (we don’t buy stuff, we “license” it), but this is a rant, and I’m entitled to skip over what I don’t want to talk about.

Anyways, since I did finally get to watch BSG (albeit not without a lot of grief and yelling), I’m willing to let things slide for now. The only things I tend to copy are music CDs (for archiving purposes, I swear), and I’ve never had trouble with those. But seriously, I shouldn’t have to work hard just to play a DVD that was legitimately paid for. That’s just…wrong.