Frank Caico's Blog

Okay, this is not a rant about the quality of Hi Definition television. That is actually a no brainer - the visual quality is remarkable and quite evident to anyone with eyes.

No my friends, this is about Hi-Def's ugly draconian shaperone: Digital Rights Management (DRM). The movie studios and big television content houses are worried about your ability to make perfect digital copies of their content. So they (and electronics manufacturers) have settled on a DRM scheme called High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). This scheme allows them to fully protect any Hi-def content transmitted through HDCP devices. Non HDCP-compliant devices cannot even unlock the digital stream in order to display/listen/record it. HDCP compliant devices play nicely, but they must honor its dirty little pact and consumer unfriendly requirements -- such as not being able to make 1:1 recordings of HDCP material (even at the cost of Fair Use).

This may sound reasonable to you, but talk to me in a year or so when you find you can't access digital content on your computer. Digital content that you wish to legally access via your Windows Vista computer. Why? you say. Why wouldnt I be able to do this? Ah - because that fancy digital LCD display you bought is not HDCP compliant. And it cant display the DRM'ed HDCP digital stream coming accross its DVI cable. Oh it is HDCP compliant (some of the new ones are)? Ah, well that doesn't matter much because that fancy new video card you are using (even if it says it does) doesn't support HDCP properly. And since Windows Vista is going to honor the HDCP specification (it really has no choice in the matter) you are going to have to make sure that everything in your PC is HDCP compliant, and enabled if you want to use or view any HDCP DRM'ed content on your computer.

So I ask you, is Hi-Def content worth all this trouble? Are consumers going to replace every piece of electronics in their home (PCs, TVs, DVRs etc) just to upgrade? Time will tell, but in a wierd way I hope not. Its my beleif that all this tight control stifles innovation and keeps smaller players out of the game. The HDCP specification is proprietary and an implementation of HDCP requires a license - which costs money. Writing software or making cool innovating electronics is hard enough without a large barrier to entry like HDCP licensing.