October 01, 2003

Die, die, die

In addition to expected entries like landmines and coal-based power, Bruce Sterling's "Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die" (in MIT's Technology Review) bashes DVDs:
Most loathsome of all is the fiendish spam hard-burned into DVDs, which forces one to suffer through the commercials gratefully evaded by videotape fast-forwards. The Content Scrambling System copy protection scheme doesn’t work, and the payoff for pirating DVDs is massive, because unlike tapes, digital data don’t degrade with reproduction. So DVDs have the downside of piracy and organized crime, without the upside of free, simple distribution. Someday they will stand starkly revealed for what they really are: collateral damage to consumers in the entertainment industry’s miserable, endless war of attrition with digital media.

[via Boing Boing, who got it from Kottke] Posted by johndan at October 1, 2003 04:45 PM | TrackBack