What's wrong with copy protection?
There is an excellent review of the latest industry copy protection schemes soon to be forced upon you, without your knowledge, and without your choice. When big business buys a president, this is what you get. Although, many of these schemes will move on regardless of who is president and who complains. When you can no longer "tape a movie" nor watch your Barney video more than 5 times, it'll be too late. I've included a snippet below of the full article.
Ron Rivest asked me,
"I think it would be illuminating to hear your views on the differences between the Intel/IBM content-protection proposals and existing practices for content protection in the TV scrambling domain. The devil's advocate position against your position would be: if the customer is willing to buy extra, or special, hardware to allow him to view protected content, what is wrong with that?"
First, I call it copy protection rather than content protection, because "content" is such a meaningless word. What the technology actually does is to deter copying. Such technologies have a long history in computing, starting with the first microcomputers, minicomputers, and workstations. Except in very small niches, all such systems ultimately failed. Many failed because of active opposition from their buyers, who purchased alternative products that did not restrict copying.
There is nothing wrong with allowing people to optionally choose to buy copy-protection products that they like. What is wrong is when: