The Coming Cultural “Lockdown”

Of course, referring to “Hollywood” movies as “Culture” is often a stretch.

I was going to link to this yesterday but never got around to it. Ken Fisher at Ars explains the consequences of AACS adoption. From Alan Wexelblat at Copyfight:

It’s not clear to me is where we go from here. In under a year we’ll have Macs and Vistas playing next-gen DVDs. All new movies will come out on those disks… Consumers will be forced to upgrade their players if they want to play the new disks and maybe have to re-buy their first-generation DVDs

This will do nothing but place another roadblock in the path of Independent/DIY Culture (not to mention independent computing). On the other hand, it might just fail/be rendered moot in the face of DRM-less Internet downloads and IPTV. Important year or so ahead.

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
—John Gilmore