On This Week in Law #213, the hosts were discussing DRM and the upcoming X-Box One, and speculation, based on a Microsoft patent, about whether that system might move away from standard DRM to “visual DRM“—an Orwellian system where the Kinect looks around the room with its camera, counts the number of people watching a movie being played, and asks for greater fees if it determines there are “too many” people in the room for a standard consumer/home license (go to around 1:05:13 for the beginning). Peter Biddle of Intel then mentions an experience he had years ago with secure digital music industry (SDMI) people trying to implement some kind of DRM for music similar to that used for DVDs and movies. He got frustrated and sarcastically suggested that the group lobby Congress to enact a law requiring every citizen to have a neural shunt embedded into the base of their neck to shut off the person’s eyes and ears when the device detects that they are observing watermarked content that they don’t have a license to watch or listen to. Instead of laughing at the absurd joke, or expressing dismay at the utter evil of this proposal, it generates a buzz of excitement among the music executives, and one of them asks, “can you do that?”
You must log in to post a comment. Log in now.