[geeks] iPad - NOT a 'Miss' for me I'm afraid

[Nate]

> They didn't sell millions upon millions of iPods by ignoring folks that
already owned music on CDs, they made ripping CDs trivial... I expect the same
facility for DVDs (if not VHS tapes) in any movie player without an optical
strive.

We got lucky because audio CDs have no encryption/DRM so there's nothing
illegal in the US about making a perfect digital copy for your own fair use.
(When CD-ROM drives first came out, there was no such thing as digital audio
extraction, then digital audio extraction was proprietary to particular CD
drives, and for years wasn't even bit-perfect.  And MPEG-1 Layer III audio
(MP3) was adapted from the VideoCD format created by Phillips and popularized
with the CD-i console/video player.  Basically the world/Apple got lucky with
the timing of all this stuff.)  That isn't going to happen again in the US
with a product, ever.

Commercial VHS tapes have Macrovision copy protection that scrambles/degrades
the video when trying to make a copy.  Most commercial DVDs have the same
Macrovision enabled, through a per-disc royalty payment to the Macrovision
corporation that allows them to flip a bit on the disc that enables the
Macrovision chip in the DVD player, which causes the DVD composite outputs to
be crippled to prevent analog copies as well.

Pretty much everything that's a commercial video and comes from the US is
wrapped in DRM now.  To transcode a DVD digitally involves 'breaking' the weak
4-bit CSS encryption in DVDs, and is a violation of DMCA laws (at least).
Even Real Networks, who tried to create fair-use DVD storage and playback that
kept the CSS encryption intact got sued and then managed it's court case
badly, so we won't be seeing anything like even RealDVD anytime soon:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/judge-smacks-down-real-says-l
egal-issues-are-its-own-fault.ars

And what about Blu-Ray Managed Copy you say?  Good luck with that, the studios
could care less:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/managed-copy-on-blu-ray-littl
e-more-than-serial-nos-prayer.ars

And if you're a US citizen and think this is all B.S., please, write to
Congress.