DRM Hits Home

This is positive news when viewed from a certain perspective: MLB rips off fans who bought DRM videos. So Major League Baseball (a big deal in American sports) had a media download service that was protected by iron-fisted digital rights management. It was the type of DRM that called home for authorization to check if you still had permission to view the downloaded content. And the mothership had decided to go with a different DRM system or provider.

I wonder if this is high profile enough to set a serious example for the implications of consumer media DRM? I know it’s a wake-up call for me to remember to crack all of Apple iTunes Music Store purchases while the keys are still somewhere on my computer.

According to the discussion linked above, MLB may have relented somewhat and offered existing consumers a means of re-downloading their purchased content under the new system. So maybe this episode won’t provide much of an object lesson after all.

5 thoughts on “DRM Hits Home

  1. Kostya

    We already have CSS decryptors everywhere, ASF decryption in lavf (if only Reimar added a mean to pass decryption key) and hopefully will have deAACS in near future integrated.

    Still, Michael is right about DRM in his signature – it’s like breaking into house through the window…

  2. Reimar

    I’d like add a way to specify the key, but unfortunately the parsing code is a complete mess at one place and tries to convert everything to float.
    Allowing to specify it would require changing a lot of code I have no clue about, and I doubt I will have time for that any time soon :-(

  3. Multimedia Mike Post author

    @Benjamin: I hadn’t heard about the DVD audio keys. That means that we might have a complete Linux solution for playback, once the MLP support is finalized.

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