Digital Home Thoughts: Ritek's New Anti-Piracy Scheme: RFID'd Optical Discs

"Will RFID chips be coming to DVDs? Ritek Corporation, the lead company behind a new drive to use RFID chips to authenticate optical media, would like to say 'yes.' The reality is that any such technology has likely missed the boat for the upcoming generation of HD optical media. It does give us a glimpse of future potential weapons in the war against piracy... [B]y using RFID technology, companies could essentially trace the "history" of a disc, from its youthful days at the disc factory to its later days in your DVD collection. Using this information, it would be possible for properly equipped playback devices to identify pirated materials and refuse to play them. How does this differ from any other anti-copy scheme? Ritek hopes that it would eventually be possible for playback devices to read the chip and then look at the content on a disc and determine if they are pirated, the company said. Because the COD information is disc-specific, movies could be printed in lots that are authorized for specific discs."

Ahem... Give me a moment to whip out my pulpit... OK. This is where anit-piracy meets anti-privacy, and no one will be a winner in the end. I have nothing against RFIDs in theory (they'll sure speed up checkout in the hardware store), but in practice, everyone seems to want to use them to see what I'm doing, when I've done it and who I did it with. I can't say I have the answer to thwarting DVD piracy, but I don't believe RFIDs are the answer. It may seem like a rather benign sceme now, but just wait 'till they've got "perceived customer approval" (that means they think we're OK with it). That's when they start encoding the DVDs and players to start calling home to let the studios know just how often you watch the new uber-platinum editions of Star Wars, what parts you watch over and over and what parts you skip entirely. Evil, I tell you, evil! OK, rant time's over. Thanks for listening. :)