File under: whatever
From ArsTechnica:
Breaking the law: one-third of US residents rip DVDs
One-third of consumers in the US and UK have made a copy of a DVD within the last six months, according to a report from Futuresource Consulting. The firm surveyed 3,613 people in the US and 1,718 in the UK to discover their "home piracy" habits, and attempts to paint a somewhat ugly picture of casual copyright infringement even though a majority of users who make copies are doing so "legitimately" (for personal use).
36 percent of UK respondents and 32 percent of US respondents have made a copy of a DVD within the last six months, which Futuresource says is an increase from only a quarter of survey respondents in 2007. Respondents in the UK who copied DVDs primarily made copies of movies and TV shows, although movie copying dropped between 2007 and 2008 while TV copying went up.
Unsurprisingly, the preferred method of copying DVDs were some of the simplest. Roughly a quarter of both UK and US consumers who made copies of DVDs connected a DVD player to a DVD recorder using a composite/S-Video cable, while roughly another quarter of the two groups preferred using a single PC application for burning DVD copies.
Where is Jack Valenti when we need him? My favorite:
"We are facing a very new and a very troubling assault ... and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry ... whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine [the VCR]."
"[Some say] that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had. I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
The idea that the morons in the film studios think that they can implement an unbreakable encryption is fallacious at best.
Whatever scheme they come up with is a direct challenge to thousands of hackers and is totally defeated in under a month (complete with disassembled source code).
