Apple ratcheting up content protection

I’ve been growing annoyed with Apple, thanks to some of the decisions they’ve made in the name of business development. It seems that they’ve made another deal with the devil in order to get HD content into the iTunes Music Store — David Chartier writes in the Ars Technica “Infinte Loop” journal that the new MacBooks won’t allow you to play HD movies out to non-HDCP compliant hardware.

(Photo of Detalle de la conexión al MacBook by iBuffet under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

What does this mean? Well, High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is an insidious form of DRM that prevents video sources from transmitting to non-compliant receivers. Conventionally speaking, it was designed so that new generations of disc players would only output to HDCP-compliant TVs and projectors — and not a DVR, computer, or general-purpose recording device.

To my limited knowledge, it works by encrypting the video coming out of the device’s port, then having the devices “know” what’s on the other end of the cable. If the player doesn’t “recognize” the device that’s displaying the movie, then the player stops*. (In the screenshot in the Ars article, the MacBook error message tells the user: “This movie cannot be played because a display that is not authorized to play protected movies is connected.”)

It’s extremely vexing to see Apple implementing DRM on its display ports — and it’s pushing me even further away from choosing an Apple laptop as my next computer.

* Depending on the devices being used, the player may instead simply lower the quality of the image, completely ignoring your hard-earned dollars of investment in “high definition.”