I recommend that everyone get some education about the free DVD conflict that has been ongoing for several months. With depressing predictability the mainstream media is towing the party line, saying that the cracking of the weak DVD encryption will somehow mean that people will be copying DVDs. Ignored is the fact that (1) pirates in Asia have been copying and selling DVDs for months without decrypting them and (2) it is more expensive to decrypt and then copy a DVD then it is to buy a DVD in a store. An excellent story by Rob Landley at Fool.com gives the whole story, and an advocacy site called OpenDVD.com has been established.

I cannot help but be reminded of the introduction of the music CD way back in the 1980s. Whatever the advantages of the format, the retail price of a CD was and remains well above the price of a vinyl LP, even though CDs are cheaper to produce. Initially this was what I would consider to be plateau pricing: a CD was better quality than an LP, and therefore was priced higher. But now, with virtually no access to vinyl music, the price remains the same.

Enter the DVD. Like the CD, it is designed to provide significant advantages over its predecessor medium, in this case the video tape. But these advantages come with a high price. Copying is impossible. One cannot "backup" a DVD as one might copy a CD; one cannot even make a video tape copy of it. As well, regional coding make playing DVDs from other parts of the world difficult or impossible. And, of course, they cost more than video tapes to purchase, though, I expect, not to produce.

While we can count on industry to maximize its profits, sometimes by questionable means, we can also depend on the hacker ethic to resist that which it considers excessive. So it is with open DVD.