New USB Standard To Add HDCP Crippleware

There's a new USB standard being worked on that would add HDCP (currently present in the HDMI spec) to the USB standard in order to carry compressed HD video through USB cables.

I'm going to come right out and say it: I'm completely against DRM by the principle that it doesn't work. No matter what kind of content protection you make, you can be assured that hackers will break it (usually within a day of release.)

This ultimately means that the only people who suffer ill effects from DRM are legitimate customers themselves. They're the ones who are going to run up against the restrictions DRM systems have inside them. Because your DRM scheme has been hacked so quickly, no person pirating your content is ever going to run into the restrictions you place on the content. They will, in essence, have an intrinsically better end user experience than your legitimate customer. Just the simple fact that pirates will have a better experience enjoying your content than legitimate users should tell you how ridiculously broken DRM systems are. They fail at their basic premise: to hamper content pirates.

Which is why it annoys me that no doubt the movie studios are behind this latest effort to add HDCP DRM to the USB standard, which currently does not contain any DRM crippleware. Great, another ubiquitous connection technology that will be infected with this plague. Rob Beschizza of Wired says it well:

If it prevails, it can hardly call it the Unversal Serial Bus anymore, could it? Perhaps they can rename it the Universal Studios Bus.

Anyway, it's that old joke about how speakers would one day have internet connections to check to see if you're allowed to listen to your own music, except that it's for real. Nothing will stop it because nothing will stop us buying the worthless, crippled junk that shall be built with it.

Indeed.

USB, Kleer plug into digital TVs [EETimes]
[via: Wired]