Bug Reports  »   Content Protection in the Digital Home

Consumers (and professionals) first experienced copy protection with scrambled video from VCR tapes and later with CSS encryption of DVDs. But even content owners do not want to just lock down physical media. The popularity of online services like iTunes has demonstrated the importance of selling content as digital bits, both as purchased downloads, and as licensed streaming.

The explosion of portable media players such as the iPod then has extended content files from the desktop to local devices in the home. Even more, digital video recorders and their extension within the digital home opens up the possibility of storing and sharing content among a family of computer and consumer electronics devices throughout the home.

This has brought together a broad coalition of industries to develop content protection technologies that provide strong enough protection to satisfy content owners while also allowing controlled copying among computer and CE devices.

The goal is to allow consumers to be able to legitimately access premium entertainment content when, where, and how they want to. Consumers shouldn't have to care where the content came from, nor how it is managed; they only want to be able to enjoy it when and where they want.

Consumers do not want to be caught in the cross-fire between open "fair use" and attacking "piracy." And content owners want to robustly communicate the authorized usages of a particular piece of content. The idea behind these content management systems, then, is to ensure that customary use is preserved for individual consumers, while enabling content owners to use new and flexible usage models to get more content in the hands of consumers.

However, the introduction of these technologies in new CE and computer devices can lead to collateral damage, as some material can inexplicitly become uncopyable or even inaccessible. When applied to consumer electronics equipment, these technologies can restrict the customary uses of CE devices and computer equipment in ways that can seem inexplicable and random, depending on the source of the material (i.e., standard or premium content) and the interactions between old and newer equipment. For example, a DVD recorder may mark a recorded disc as protected, so that it cannot be copied further. Or an upgraded software player may require a protected connection to the display screen, and refuse to play on older equipment. These products will need much more transparent mechanisms to view and understand authorization information associated with pieces of content.

So there can be unpleasant surprises as digital content flows between new content technologies and legacy devices, and when computer-based DRM systems interface with consumer electronics equipment. For example, another industry group,.the Coral Consortium, is addressing these usability issues of "interoperability between DRM technologies used in the consumer media market" (www.coral-interop.org). Its voting members are HP, Intertrust, Philips, Matsushita (Panasonic), NBC Universal, Samsung, Sony, and Fox. The Coral Consortium's goal is to "develop a set of specifications to bridge gaps between disparate DRM systems and safeguard against impedance mismatches that are common when communicating between them."

guys, i am also a TV show lover, there are some hot DVD TV shows i really like and want to share to you---

Entourage DVD set http://www.stardvdcity.com/entourage-seasons-16-dvd-boxset-p-386.html
Queer as folk DVD set http://www.stardvdcity.com/queer-as-folk-seasons-15-dvd-boxset-p-329.html
Boston legal DVD set http://www.stardvdcity.com/boston-legal-seasons-15-dvd-boxset-p-233.html