CPRM kicked into touch?

CPRM for HDs may be kicked into touch

Old Andrew Orlowski's turning up the heat on CPRM. Kevin Macken votes for a boycott:

CPRM in any implementation is intolerable for the consumer and 4C knows it. So how do you get consumers to accept it on removable media. Try to get it put on hard drives and then compromise to removable media "which IBM and Intel have insisted all along is what they wanted to achieve." to quote your article.

Bait and switch, pure and simple. Microdrive was looking real juicy to me as its price falls. But I plan to boycott anything that has CPRM. I hope you will join me in getting the word out. Boycott CPRM enabled media!

Up yours, Hollywood!

And Derek advises vigilance:

I don't understand why this new stance is a good thing? Removing fixed media drives from the CPRM spec is all well and good, but also removing the disable/enable command from removable media drives is very bad.

While CPRM on hard drives would have been horrendous and could have possibly prevented the use of any open source OSs due to licensing requirements, CPRM on removable media drives could still have the same effect, just not as severe, as it would prevent use of removable media on open source OSs. I don't know about you, but I would be pretty upset if I couldn't use a whole class of devices on Linux because of licensing reasons.

Even for those running only Windows OSs, removing the enable/disable command for removable media is a problem. If I don't want to participate in the music rental or other similar markets, I should be able to disable CPRM. Because it acts as a unique identifier, and it would have to have APIs that supported its retrieval, all sorts of software could abuse this ability in order to track users (just think what banner ads using Java could do if Java supported getting that ID).

Please don't let down you guard. Your vigilance is much appreciated.