Will they ever learn? Hollywood still pursuing DRM: Via Freedom to Tinker.

In today's New York Times, we read that Hollywood is working on a grand unified video DRM scheme intended to allow for video portability, such as, for example, when you visit a hotel room, you'd like to have your videos with you.

What's sad, of course, is that you can have all of this today with very little fuss. I use iTiVo to extract videos from my TiVo, transcoding them to an iPhone-compatible format. I similarly use Fairmount to rip DVDs to my hard drive, making them easy to play later without worrying about the physical media getting damaged or lost. But if I want to download video, I have no easy mechanism to download non-DRM content. BitTorrent gives access to many things, including my favorite Top Gear, which I cannot get through any other channel, but many things I'd like aren't available, and of course, there's the whole legality issue.

I recently bought a copy of Disney/Pixar's Up (Blu-ray), which includes a "Digital Copy" of some sort that's rippable, but the other ones are rippable as well (even the Bluray), so I haven't bothered to sort out how the "Digital Copy" works.

So what exactly are the Hollywood types cooking up? There are no technical details in the article, but the broad idea seems to be that you authenticate as yourself from any device, anywhere, and then the central server will let you at "your" content. It's unclear the extent to which they have an offline viewing story, such as you might want to do on your computer on an airplane. One would imagine they would download an encrypted file, perhaps customized for you, along with a dedicated video player that keeps the key material hidden away through easily broken, poorly conceived mechanisms.

It's not like we haven't been here before. I just wonder if we'll have a repeat of the ill-fated SDMI challenge.

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