It looks as if only a buying strike by consumers could prevent the lunacy whereby the movie industry is seeking to create total confusion and chaos in the world of Digital Video Disks by having the industry agree that movie disks made for the US market will not play on players sold in Europe or Asia, and vice versa – but now another serious snag has arisen, which threatens to disrupt the harmony between the computer and entertainment industries. According to Electronic Engineering Times, the personal computer industry has issued a list of critiques of the technical specifications proposed by Hollywood and the consumer electronics industry for DVD copyright protection. The present proposal requires that the intelligence needed for copyright protection should be built into the drive itself, so that if material was identified as a movie, then any attempt to load it into memory or write it to disk would be blocked. The computer industry objects a saying that the proposal would make DVD-ROM and DVD-recordable drives too expensive, and philosophically opposes the idea that a measure of control should be in the drive rather than being an extension of the operating system. No way will we simply accept it as is, Alan Bell, project manager of storage systems and technology at the research division of IBM Corp’s Almaden Research Center told the paper. The computer industry’s Technical Working Group is also exercised at the idea that the currently unregulated personal computer industry should accept a government-regulated copyright system as proposed by Hollywood.
