[ModBreak] The contents of this site are somewhat outdated and it will no longer receive updates, but it was actual when it was written a year ago. The first HD-DVD and Blu-ray devices have now made it into some rich folks living rooms and there is little to be done about the DRM now but hack it. Though this site has not yielded any result, at least I know several thousand people a month have read it and may have become a little bit wiser or at least learned something new :)

I will continue using the DRMadness.com domain as a Dr. Madness blog (planned, anyways), but I will keep these pages on here for future reference. [/ModBreak]

In the near future, media will be revolutionized by the introduction of HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the successors of the DVD. These two will be able to carry movies in much higher resolutions, dramatically improving image quality on your HDTV or monitor. This is what we all know. What most of us don't know is that it's going to cost you thousands of dollars extra to actually be able to enjoy these high definition movies!

Interested? Want to prevent this from happening? Enter the world of DRM Madness!

So what's this all about? If you want an in-depth explenation, you can use the navigation panel to the left to find all the detailed information you want to know. If not, here's what it all comes down to:

To protect their copyrighted works, the content providers (movie studios) have pushed a very elaborate DRM (Digital Rights Management) system which HD-DVD and Blu-ray will use. The system requires that your output device (TV, monitor, beamer/projector) supports HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection). If it doesn't, you will either get a blank screen or a low-resolution image (no better than DVD). The big problem is, a lot of HDTV's being sold right now don't support HDCP, by far the most monitors sold today don't support HDCP, and the chance your new beamer supports HDCP is so small it isn't even worth mentioning. So you're going to have to replace those to view your HD-DVD/Blu-rays the way they're meant to be viewed. (note: in the USA HDCP is a bit more common than in Europe)

Imagine what that will cost you. And we haven't even mentioned that the cables you need to use are extremely expensive even for a few feet from a cheap brand, and you'll probably need several if you're a bit of an enthusiast. Or that 'they' can just disable your player and you're going to have to buy a new one to play new movies! And what about the costs spent to create this copyright protection system? Ultimately, the consumer is going to have to pay for it!

The worst of all is, not only do we have to spend all that money just to play this HD content and are we essentially financing our own discomfort, this system (including it's other parts like AACS) wont actually protect their content! Which is what it was made for, after all. There are already ways around this system and surely the movie pirates wont let this system stop them. A movie only has to be ripped once and put on the internet, and everyone will be able to download it.

So in conclusion, we're all going to have to spend a lot of extra money to play high definition content because the content providers want to push a copyright protection system that will not prevent piracy at all!

And then there's that movies today are already grossly overpriced, not even counting the money you spent to watch it in the theatre already, and now they want to disable the viewing of those movies on devices that are quite capable to do so? And why? Because they want to enforce some flawed copyright protection scheme?

What are you going to do? Bend over and ...? If you want to do something about it, click here and Stop the Madness! Alternatively, you can read more here.

Keep in mind, if we dont stop them, they're not going to stop. They probably wont be happy until they can put a plug right into your head and stream the protected content directly into your brain. And you'll be the one paying for the plug too ;)