DRM – not a Digital Rights Management,
but Digital Restrictions Management !

http://consumerist.com/2010/04/drm-ravaged-avatar-dvds-may-not-work-on-blu-ray-players.html

Amazon customers are complaining that Fox has gummed up the Avatar DVDs with DRM, rendering them unplayable on many Blu-ray players in an effort to prevent piracy. That is, if you consider making a copy of a DVD you own as piracy.

Lee tipped us off to the problem, writing:

Bought Avatar Blu-ray today along with ten gazillian other people. Only problem is that the digital rights mgmt or copy protection seems to be causing errors on a large number of players (even with updated firmware). Comments are pilling up on the web (see amazon link below). Nice job Fox, keep law abiding cash paying customers from viewing their DVDs so you can keep a few people from ripping copies to their iPods for road trips….

Comments below the article:

You purchased a DVD MOVIE LEGALLY!!! How dare you! I mean actually thinking that you would be allowed to watch it! HA! You just paid for the right to OWN it, not watch it!

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It need to be realized that DRM is only hurting those who purchase things legally.

The PAIN IN THE ASS updating of firmware on blu-ray players is the worst thing ever. If you dont own a windows machine, and you dont know your way around computers, youre screwed. The firmware downloads from blu-ray.com are .exe files. .exe wont open on Mac unless you rename it to .zip or open terminal and type unzip [filename]. I didn’t know that. THEN after the selfextracting (on windows) exe file runs, it gives you a .iso (an International Standards Organization format for disc images). THEN you have to burn it to CD. THEN it takes another 30-40min to update the firmware. By that time I dont want to watch my movie anymore.

This isnt the way paying customers should be treated. Meanwhile, those who want the dvdrip of it, still obtain a dvdrip that works anywhere they want it, computer, psp, ipod, ipad, ANYWHERE.

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And this is why Blu-ray fails in my eyes. The fact that anyone can put any version of the Blu-ray DRM on any disk with the expectation that people are going to have a compatible player is ridiculous. Then the fact that the Blu-ray firmware changes on a regular basis with the potential to break current disks and future disks, it is a freaking nightmare.

I am glad I don’t own a Blu-ray player. When they stop producing DVDs, I will stop buying movies.

DRM has a 100% failure rate – every DRMd item ever release has been pirated, immediately. DRM punishes the legitimate consumer, not the pirate. DRM costs the publishers lots of money to put on their media. DRM should be illegal.

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The Federal Trade Commission told held its long-awaited Seattle conference on DRM. As expected, agreement was hard to come by, but the agency made clear that it has had enough of hidden DRM schemes and companies that pull the plug on authentication servers and leave the users who didn’t pirate content with nothing.

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Jason Schultz, who heads the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC-Berkeley:

Consumers certainly are befuddled and angered by DRM, even the relatively tame version found on DVDs, he said. Plenty of people don’t understand why they can’t copy a movie to an iPod or make a backup, and they don’t understand why a DVD won’t play when they take it to another country.
Schultz even referenced the recent gift of DVD gift set from Barack Obama to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. When Brown returned home from his US visit and popped one of the discs in his player… region encoding prevented it from working!!!

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Fritz Attaway, an executive vice president at the MPAA: "Without DRM technology, how could we provide consumers with choices?"

Comment: "Boy would I love to have my finger over the button that releases 440V to the clamps on his testicles. BZZZT! Sorry – try that again. "

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Yea I was about to say the same thing! What choice? The choice to take your video, burn it to a DVD to watch on my player, transcode it to x264 to play on my ipod, and possibly stream it to my xbox 360 in the other room to enjoy it there?

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There doesn’t need to be a law against DRM, there just needs to be no law against breaking it.

+10! I like that. "If you’re not smart enough to create strong DRM, don’t go crying to congress if we strip it off like a prom dress." I get a small measure of satisfaction every time I see the Macrovision logo appear at the end of a DVD I just ripped.

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The TV in my bedroom only has one set of A/V inputs. I have both a VCR and a DVD player. I had to buy a switchbox because if I simply chained them together, I couldn’t watch most DVDs due to Macrovision.

My friend had a similar problem when trying to hook up all the various devices to one of his TVs. He also has a VCR that is only marginally affected by Macrovision, so he’s still able to make copies, making Macrovision useless.

A friend wanted to buy a copy of an old mini-series, but at the time, it was only available as Region 2, despite being an American production. Someone else I know bought a bunch of DVDs at a pawn shop, and then discovered that he couldn’t play them because they weren’t region 1. He bought a brand new copy of the movie Across the Universe and it wouldn’t play in his player due to the added copy protection. Sony’s response? "We can’t guarantee that all of our DVDs will play in every DVD player." Huh? That’s exactly what the DVD specification is supposed to ensure!

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It’s comments like that that make me want to headbutt that fucker into a coma.

I don’t buy DVDs anymore, because they just don’t work. "Invalid Region Code" is ridiculously common from DVDs I buy here, in my home town, in my home country. I’m not importing them, I’m not trying to copy them, I’m not ripping them – I’m just trying to play the fucking thing in my DVD player.

The only way I can watch some of the DVDs I have is to rip them, and watch them on my computer.

I’m over it, I tried playing by their rules, but I no longer have any qualms about simply downloading what I want from the ‘net. I’ve given those fuckers money for a product that doesn’t work yet they say "no one has to think about DRM". Fuck ’em.