Hard Drives now coming with copy-protection drm.
According to wired magazine the new batch of Western Digital hard drives come with built in copy protection that thwart you from sending file of the mp3, divx, and mov variety across a network: both local and external. I’m not shitting you. Not only do I have to deal with the MPAA, and the RIAA trying to make it illegal for me to back up my legal content, but now I have to deal with hardware companies who have jumped in the sac with them. I have a media server in my house where I keep backups of all the media I own. I stream from this one server to all the other machines in my house. If I were to use these drives, I wouldn’t be able to send backups from my laptop to say…my desktop…across the local area network. It’s officially here people, fascism… corporation’s making laws, and furthering their own interests, instead of people making laws to keep corporations in check. It makes me sick to my stomach. But, there is a little bit of information in that article that gave me a chuckle. Apparently you can circumvent the whole thing by not installing their “required” software. I never install hardware software for hard drives, and I don’t know why anyone would. So, again, this is the case where the law abiding citizens get screwed, and the real “pirates” go on pillaging. RIAA/MPAA/Western Digital… can you please, for the love of all that is holy, stop screwing the average citizen with your shoddy software, and crappy attempts at locking down your media. Hackers, and pirates will continue to find ways around your stupid as DRM. Hell, anyone with half a brain can find out a way around it if they really wanted to, so stop hiring monkeys to write your code, and start fixing the problem by abandoning your draconian policy change plans on file sharing, and actually coming to terms with the new digital age. GET WITH THE PROGRAM!
Actually the article is incorrect. The WD MyBook external drives don’t allow you to copy certain media formats from one MyBook drive to another MyBook drive. While nowhere near as bad as what was said in the article, its still enough to stop me from ever purchasing any of their products(I never have, and certainly won’t start).
The drive stores and retrieves whatever files you put on it. It has one particular feature, optionally installed, that allows access to your drive from the Internet at large, and this one feature limits the filetypes you can share.
Who would have thought wired was wrong… go figure! lol. Anyway, my general opinion still stands, WD can go to hell, and under no circumstances will I buy their drives! Thanks for the clarifications.
Companies need to really think hard before making decisions like this one. I won’t be buying their drives either, whether they choose to fix this or not. I have a zero tolerance for this sort of thing.