Digital Home Thoughts: RFID DRM Protected DVDs Are on the Drawing Board

"Ask any box office expert to name the holy trinity of movie attendance and they'll tell you: big screen, big sound and immediacy -- getting to see a movie when it's released. With improving home entertainment systems rapidly undermining the first two tenets of attendance, how long will it be before the third leg of the triangle falls? No one knows. However, if it does, some researchers at UCLA plan to be there to catch it. The group -- part of the university's Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC) -- is working on a Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme that uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to prevent the unauthorized use and copying of movie DVDs."

Somehow, I don't feel this will be catching on... ever. RFID isn't exactly the best way to DRM DVDs since an electromagnetic impulse, from e.g. a lightning strike, could in theory obliterate the RFID chip and void your DVD movie. Not to mention the worst-case scenarios the EFF could come up with. ;) Nah, I'm still hoping that Bluray and HD-DVD parties will come to a unified next-gen DVD model with a more reasonable DRM protection than this RFID idea.