> customers. Now copyright industries are trying to start a perception > that responsible manufacturers keep secrets from their customers. > > I know a bit about the Macrovision and DVD situation, and what I've > just heard about ATI makes more pieces fall into place. The movie folks are scared. Its not (to them) a conspiracy, they are quite openly terrified of the net. In a sense rightfully so (It costs a lot to make a film, especially the horrendously inefficient Hollywood way - think $100m ($20m for the asian way)). Over 2/3rds of the films make a loss, and may of the profitable ones only recover their value over a long period. Unfortunately like the music folks they miss the rather important fact that only -one- individual has to crack a movie. It took one pirate with a dv camera to ensure that the star wars episode 1 movie was everyhere. They also mostly miss the problem that an analogue copy re-rendered to digital is copyable forever (watermarking is partly aimed at this). If they sat down and thought about it then they'd realise - Internet sharing only works if you know who to get the copy from. That works for the feds as well as the pirates - ISP's are rather short of money and would love small bounties for shopping movie/music pirates - who also tend to clog bandwidth - Hitting lots of pirates in rapid succession will rapidly reduce the number of people choosing to offer other peoples movies. It only takes small claims court work to go after most of these people and get the message across Once your pirates have to go very underground nobody can easily find the stuff and you are roughly back to the status quo. > They also use language strangely. For example, proprietary software > may be "trusted", but free software is never "trusted". Proprietary > software may be "robust", but free software is never "robust". The folks I've talked to are beginning to realise that "robust" means a tamperproof IC with only analog links to the outside world except for an encrypted imput stream. Watch for a chip vendor announcement in that kind of area in the next week or two Alan
