MOVIELABS: THE DARPA
OF HOLLYWOOD
Also known as Motion Picture Laboratories
Inc., MovieLabs is a nonprofi t research
project funded by studios including 20th
Century Fox, Universal, Paramount, Sony,
and Warner Brothers, to the tune of $
million dollars. It’s dedicated to improving
the quality of Hollywood fi lms. Ha ha—just
kidding! Instead, the money will be spent
developing technologies to make the images
of movies recorded via camcorder worse
than they already are, to prevent unauthor-ized users from tapping into your home
network to steal your movies (which is, you
know, a huge problem), and to create net-
work tools that sniff out packets that contain
copyrighted material—although how these
sentient sniffers know if a fi le is copyrighted
is anybody’s guess.SONY TO PSP OWNERS:
OH NO YOU DON’T
Sony has been aggressively updating the
fi rmware on its PlayStation Portable ever
since the initial release of the device last
March, fi xing minor
bugs and add-
ing new features
such as a slick
web browser, AAC
audio support, and
support for video
packaged with
DRM. But there
might be another
reason why Sony
appears so indus-
trious—each fi rm-
ware update also
patches security
holes that can be
exploited to run
unauthorized code,
such as emulators
for games origi-
nally developed for
other gaming sys-
tems (from whichSony receives no license fee). The kicker is
that new PSP games automatically install
these fi rmware updates and require them in
order to run.MICROSOFT: CONSUMER
ADVOCATE?
Bill Gates reiterated Microsoft’s support for
HD-DVD, calling the DRM on Blu-ray discs
“anti-consumer” (which is weird coming from
a guy who supports a “Trusted Path” DRM
video standard that will display high-defi ni-
tion video on only DRM-compliant monitors).
At issue is a feature called “Managed Copy,”
which permits limited copying for personal
use (such as copying a disc to your hard
drive for streaming to any television in the
house). While both high-capacity DVD for-
mats support Managed Copy, only HD-DVD
makes it mandatory for all discs, which works
well for companies that, say, make operating
systems that act as “media centers” in your
living room.KEEP THE RIAA ON YOUR
RADAR
If you’re sick of the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) suing
the pants off 12-year-olds for copyright
infringement, and don’t want to end up
in court yourself, you can now fi nd out
if a particular album is produced by an
RIAA affi liate prior to purchase. Just surf
to http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/ and type in
the album name to see if it’s free from the
RIAA’s clutches.quickstart THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL
DRM
Watch!
10 MA XIMUMPC DECEMBER 2005
This battle between
consumers and The Man is
heating up. These are notes
from the front lines of the war
against digital-rights management
Savvy PSP owners have found ways
to run game emulators on their
handhelds, but Sony is working hard
to put a stop to it.THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALLconsumers and The Man is
heating up. These are notes
from the front lines of the war
against digital-rights management
Savvy PSP owners have found ways
to run game emulators on their
handhelds, but Sony is working hardThe RIAA Radar online tool lets you see if a prospective album
purchase will benefit the RIAA or not.