Instead of meeting halfway with consumers, the music and movie industries seem to have shifted their attention to hardware and software media players in a war of attrition.
As a result consumers are being ripped off. A Byzantine maze of restrictions, poorly thought out and being debugged on-the-fly by end user guinea pigs stops people from viewing or listening to things they have legitimately bought. (I can’t watch UK DVDs in the US for example which really pisses me off). This is clearly going to get worse.
Is there already a specific consumer rights group to tackle this? If not, someone like Cory Doctorow would be great as a DRM Czar.
Below, Jenny, AKA The Shifted Librarian, wrestles with a Kafkaesque DRM nightmare:
“I spent about an hour trying to play back a disc I legitimately bought and went as far as installing and updating a 3rd party application to my system that would allow me to do so, and now I’m only being given a temporary license, where’s my rights as a consumer?”