Dec 19, 2007

DRM for Western Digital

So now the MPAA has appointed new sentinels. Guess they could not find anyone better than ones who name their products as Raptor and so on. The news is, if you own the Western Digital's 1TB My Book World Edition external hard drive, your media files on board will be DRM crippled for your safety. For my Safety? Hello, they are my files. If I want to share them with someone, it is entirely my prerogative. How can someone cripple them? These crippled drives will not share the media over network connections. So if you own this drive and need to access your media from a remote location, you might as well cripple yourself.

From the WD site:

"Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using WD Anywhere Access."

And guess what file extensions have been included into license authentication. Over 35 extensions. This includes AAC, MP3, AVI, DivX, WMV, and Quicktime files. And why not — Windows TMP files too.

But I Guess the more you want to complicate things, the simpler they can become. Users have already found ways to share files from this device by zipping the files or renaming the extensions. I Just do not understand why these big guys want to stick out for MPAA.

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