Digital Rights And High Definition Concerns

DRM or digital rights management has been the downfall of music and video pirates all over. While there are ways off getting around these stubborn walls, laws about having high definition dvd and Blu-ray disks protected persist. Managed copies of high definition and Blu-ray disks would allow the user to only make a certain number of copies for backup of his or her legally bought movie, cd, or software.

The system proposed would have movie studios operating clearing houses online to review customer records and decide who can have a backup copy of the media and who can not. This would trigger the customers media player to either receive the media or not.

This is a hotly debated idea with consumers since it will involve a great deal of new technology, and new technology means adapting again to new media. Clearing houses would have to keep records of customers permanently to limit how many backup copies each person can make. Next you would have to have constant connection to the internet using a dedicated name or IP address so you could be properly verified. This is because clearing houses would have to keep track of the media players as well as the users. Lastly, when who has the rights is up in the air, content producers would be stuck in between the two sides causing drawn out legal battles over media libraries and extra charges for backup copies.

Laws enacted in the 1960's keep studios from making money off their media in a way that would limit free market competition from other groups. This laws make studios dump interests in movie theater chains and make movie theaters stop taking support from the studios. This would challenge a studios right to interfere in the distributing of these materials among media players when they clearly have a stake in the way their content is being handled.

There is also a human rights angle to this. Permanent connections into our computers such as these media centers could lead to infringement of privacy on your home computer. If the media you create at home is automatically being played on the same player, then someone would have access to that sensitive media. If documents like books start being passed through this type of media, your home documents may be subject to the same type of viewing. It also puts consumers in that place of being constantly connected to this authority who is monitoring their media. What else are they monitoring at the same time? What will government access to this monitoring be like?