Last week when I was flipping through the channel guide on my DirecTV/TiVo receiver I came across an unusual message, it read "Recording of this program is not allowed by copyright." This was for the letterbox version of the movie "Jarhead," other pay-per-view versions of the movie were recordable. This is outrageous as far as I'm concerned. The integrated DirecTV receiver/TiVo DVR cannot connect to a computer, in fact without serious hacking it's impossible to move content from the device to any other digital medium, now the studios have added another level of digital rights management to their top-level products on pay-per-view.

If this intrusion into my living room doesn't scare you, check out this story from Engadget. It appears as though Philips is "trying to patent a method for flagging digital TV content to not only prevent viewers from changing the channel during commercials in live broadcasts, but to actually lock out fast-forwarding capabilities during ads in recorded programs as well." I think that may be the most intrusive, ill-concieved, immoral, unethical and hopefully illegal bad idea I have ever heard, to put it mildly. — Brian Ward

Go to story from Engadget