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DRM and the Myth of the Analog Hole
Art Grimm writes "Movie studios want to punish legitimate customers for legally purchasing content, while the real pirates go right on stealing. ZDNet's George Ou writes: "There seems to be a persistent myth floating around the board rooms of the movie companies and Congress that analog content is the boogie man of music and video piracy. In fact, they're so paranoid about it that they're considering a mechanism called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that punishes law-abiding customers for content that they legally purchased. But ironically, the real content pirates who make millions of bootleg movies have no intention of ever taking advantage of the so called "analog hole" because that is the slowest and lowest quality method of stealing content.""
The real analog hole that the studios are trying to eliminate is the massive amount of legal content already in people's homes that the studios think is stopping people from buying new content.
Pirates are just a useful scapegoat.
I was recently looking for a DVD player/recorder for my parents. They wanted the player for two reasons, one to record shows they like, and two to send some home videos off to my sister in England. When I went to a few stores to check out the models they had, I asked one of the sales staff if the recorders could encode region free DVDs (so my sister could pay them on her TV). He looked at me like I was some kind of crook and actually said: "here in Canada we obey international copyright law".
Sure I could have reencoded the DVDs after they were recorded, but that is beside the point. My parents own the copyright to their home videos and should be able to do whatever they want with them. This is just another case of the industry hurting the consumers.
We didn't buy.