Digital Home Thoughts: CinemaNow's DRM-to-DVD Burning "Irresponsibly Defective"

"An anonymous engineer examined CinemaNow's Burn-to-DVD specification and was shocked to find that it deliberately introduced errors in the Digital Sum Value (DSV) checksum values. The errors are introduced by the CinemaNow software in order to create a DVD that is difficult to copy. Unfortunately, the "protection" errors fall near or beyond the tolerance of most standalone players' built-in error correction algorithms. Thus, a movie purchased from CinemaNow and burned to a DVD is likely to stutter or even fail to play on many standalone DVD players. The engineer summed up his comments on the CinemaNow system with the following statement: "I'm against people being fleeced by this kind of crap. How can you sell someone content on media that is so heavily compromised, especially on a format that so heavily relies upon its error correction system to maintain playability? It's mind boggling!""

I think "Irresponsibly" is putting it kindly. I would say "Intentionally Defective", which is far worse in my opinion. I understand the need to make their burned DVDs hard to copy, but introducing errors into the stream is not the answer. This kind of stunt is not only bad for CinemaNow - in fact, it may prove fatal - but it's also bad for the entire digital movie download-and-burn initiative. Hopefully, this won't discourage other companies from trying their own methods, but rather encourage them with the fact that no one has yet beat them out of the gate.