Yep, there sure have been a lot of people over the past decade or two complaining about Digital Rights Management. For the most part I’ve been a complacent monkey in the whole thing just accepting it as a necessary evil of living in the digital age.

For those uninitiated, Digital Rights Management (called DRM) is code embedded in digital media (like digital audio and digital video files) that somehow ensure that the files are only played on the hardware that the owner of the media allows.

There’s a lot of blogs, and lawsuits, and such out there that have covered all of this. I don’t want to cover it again.

So why am I writing this blog then? Well, last night I ordered a movie from Amazon on my TiVo. Somehow, though, my TiVo in the bedroom decided it would download the movie, and not the one in the living room. After the movie downloaded, TiVo wouldn’t let me transfer the recording from one to the other. DRM strikes again.

Well, now for the ultimate analog hole. I physically picked up my bedroom TiVo and moved it to the living room to watch the movie. Screw you DRM.

DRM is simply something that makes life inconvenient at best for those of us that are honest. The thieves have ways around DRM.

In the end though I think this is a small piece in the bigger problem. TiVo has jumped the shark. The future of DVR is not in TiVo. hopefully we’ll see a re-emergence of Windows Media Center this year as the DVR to have.