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> How many people would rather hack hardware than pay money to watch TV and play video games?

It only takes one. Everyone else just uses that cracked copy.

I'm not worried about DRM working, I'm worried about it not working in a way that gets in my way as someone whose time is generally worth more than the hassle of finding movies on bittorrent.



This has an expedient solution of only making devices which are able to play DRMed media (perhaps with permissive flags), and having all authoring tools use a per-user content creator key. Then the same broadcast encryption keying that allows players to be selectively disable also allows the cracked transcoder to be disabled.

Of course, this isn't terribly compatible with general purpose computing but operating systems intended for the public have been moving away from general purpose computing for some time and tables and mobile devices are pretty close to that now.

If we go far enough down that path the makers of these handicapped devices can even get legislative help in preventing competition from more user friendly devices by outlawing their sale as was the case for macrovision.




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