MARCH 2005 MA XIMUMPC
T
he entertainment industry thinks of them
as the Four Horsemen of the Digital
Apocalypse: the Internet, MP3 audio
compression, Diamond Multimedia’s Rio MP
player, and Napster. By the time all four had
become household names, we knew the revolu-
tion had begun. Anything that could be digitized
could be duplicated, downloaded, distributed,
and and enjoyed in ways never before possible.
But revolution and chaos are like Europeans
and Nutella: Where you find one, you’re sure
to find the other. The entertainment industrial
complex, appalled by file sharing and terrified
of the Internet, lobbied a gullible, greedy U.S.
Congress into passing the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act, a heinously overreaching law
that tramples on consumer rights. Record
labels, meanwhile, grudgingly permitted a few
web sites to sell legitimate digital-audio tracks,
but failed to develop universal compression
standards and digital rights management
(DRM) schemes, a uniform licensing policy, or
even a consistent pricing model.
So now you can buy a DVD-Video, but it’s
illegal to decrypt the disc and create a Divx file
that you can play back on your PDA. You can
buy a song from iTunes, but the copy protec-
tion isn’t compatible with your Rio Carbon
player. Or you’ll put an audio CD in your CD-
ROM and watch helplessly as the copy protec-
tion crashes your system. Good job, guys!
In the midst of all this bedlam, control is
conspicuously shifting back into the hands of
an industry that still regards the Internet and
digital distribution with a level of panic and
horror befitting an Ebola breakout. Fortunately,
there are still ways to exercise your fair-use
rights, whether the industry likes it or not.
We’re about to show you how to get around
the technological blockades, so you can reap
the humungous benefits of the digital-enter-
tainment revolution.