DRM - a student/consumer point of view

Rather than go on a long-winded rant about ideals against Digital Rights Management (DRM), I will simply post some of my experiences with it.

DVD Movies
I am a computing science student in university living on my parents' basement. As such, I have an old hand-me-down TV and no DVD player. The TV is from the late 70's and has no composite inputs and no S-video.

When I purchased my first laptop with a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive I figured I could use that to watch my small collection of DVD movies. To make sure others could watch with me in the basement I purchased a cheap S-video cable to hook up to the back of my VCR. Due to some sort of DRM called Macrovision it was thinking that I was using the VCR to try to record the DVD, and thus the image from my laptop was scrambled when sent to the TV. The image only gets scrambled while playing DVD's. As a result, I tried plan B.

I decided to try the DVD playback on the Playstation 2. Again, because my TV has no composite inputs I was forced to hook up the Playstation 2 to the VCR. Again, the copy protection thought that I was trying to record the DVD onto a VHS tape (who would do this?) and scrambled the image.

The only way I could finally get DVD's to play on this DVD was to use VLC on my laptop. VLC uses a different DVD playback library than other media players and may actually be illegal under the DMCA. The same applies for playing any DVD movies in Linux. Lucky for me, I am in Canada and the DMCA does not apply here.

Music CD's
I no longer own a CD player. The first and only CD player I owned was an old Sony Discman which broke several years ago. My preferred ways to listen to music are through my laptop (which I sometimes connect to a stereo) and on my iPod Nano. All of my friends listen to music the same way.

On Christmas Eve I needed to do some last-minute Christmas shopping for a couple of family members. I walked into the music section and found several CD's I knew my family members would enjoy. However, after looking on the back they all said that the content is copy protected and may not work with iPods. Instead of buying 5 or 6 CD's this holiday season I didn't buy any.

I have purchased some music off of the iTunes Music Store since it seems to be the only way to legally acquire new music that is guaranteed to play on iPods and not Rootkit your computer. The downside here is that there is no way to play these purchased songs in Linux.

Conclusion
Using legally acquired multimedia can be a pain in the ass.