A little aberration

Of all the technological advances of the past decade, the concept and implementation of DRM is the one that irks me most. As you know, DRM or, to give it its full name, Digital Rights Management, is collectively used to refer to a pot-pourri of technologies whose primary aim is to ensure that the intellectual property of content creators is respected by distributors and users alike.

Unfortunately, as with many such schemes, that attempt to place what is essentially a decision-making process into the hands of a machine (so to speak), DRM has been a long-standing failure of epic proportions. I won't go into the details, because they are easy enough to find on the Internet, but the general consensus among us geeks is that DRM keeps avenues of exploitation wide open to those with nefarious intent, all the while bothering, threatening and confusing those who merely demand quiet enjoyment of content they own.

Today, I just found a nice example of DRM aberration while playing an iTunes video in QuickTime Player. Why in QuickTime Player? Simply because every time I play an iTunes video in iTunes, my MacBook Air starts stuttering like I did when I was twelve. The only difference is that I never required a reboot to flush my circuitry.

Since the video is protected, of course, I cannot use an alternative player to open it. It has to be something QuickTime-based and, even then, not everything. For example, VLC is out of the question, as VLC is given no access to the video wrapped into the DRM protection.

Yet, QuickTime Player and iTunes let me easily take screen captures of the videos I play, as evidenced by the shot below. That's an excerpt of the first episode of the first season of Mad Men, taken because I happened to like the guy's suit.

You know what's fun? If I were watching the exact same show on my exact same Mac through DVD Player, I could not have taken the shot. In other words, if I had paid an even higher price for the exact same show, I would have been prevented by Mac OS X from using the very same key combination that I used to take the shot above.

Admittedly, there are workarounds and Apple never seemed very serious about that "no screenshots" rule when DVD Player is running. Yet, it strikes me as especially ludicrous. What is even more ludicrous is that launching DVD Player effectively disables screenshots throughout the entire system, even if the user attempts to grab part of the screen that displays nothing even remotely related to the DVD that is playing. (Compare this to an approach that would take the shot, but instead replace the contents of the DVD Player window with a flat black surface.)

What's frightening is that Apple is on the "good side" of the DRM madness scale so far.