Ed Foster notes that DRM can bite the average user back pretty hard - preventing you from watching content you legally bought:

"I recently let my girlfriend borrow my DVD player because hers went out," the reader wrote. "Well, I thought, that's okay because my computer is hooked up to my TV and I had a DVD drive on the computer so I can still watch my movie collection. Boy, was I wrong. It seems that three out of the last four DVD movies I had just bought will not play on my computer."

The DVDs that wouldn't play were "Flags of our Fathers" by Warner Bros, "We Were Soldiers" by Paramount, and "Battlestar Galactica 2.5" by Universal, the reader said. "Each time it comes up with 'Macrovision distribution failed' error message and playback is not possible. These movies were purchased at WalMart just days before, but here I am with legal copies of DVD movies and I can't play them. A couple of days later when my DVD player was back, the movies play just fine on the player."

For the folks out there that want to chime in about how this is an "edge case", and few people have a PC hooked to their TV? I think XBox with Media Center counts, and that's becoming fairly popular - and the same asinine DRM is baked into that kind of device. More and more people are using iTunes to watch stuff (we regularly watch stuff through iTunes, without an Apple TV - all we needed was the PC that's hooked to the TV already, and we use iTunes there to stream from the Mac. I don't know whether Apple has the same level of stupidity built in that MS does, but give them time - as AppleTV picks up, the MPAA will ask for it.

The bottom line on this is simple - it doesn't stop pirates - they use easily available software to bypass the controls. The people it stops are law abiding but not technically deep people who just want to watch stuff they already own.

Technorati Tags: MPAA, stupidity