You know, I sometimes wonder if there is any sense left in the world.

In one corner we have multi-billon dollar companies who insist that they have to "protect" their content so onerously that its questionable if it will be worthwhile trying to deal with them.

In another corner we have... us. We just want to watch our TV, our movies, heck even our own DV camcorder output - without any artificial sillyness about which "TV" we are allowed to watch it on.

The latest annoyance I just read about will be coming to desktop PC's near you with Longhorn (whenever it actually manages to be released).

Apparently Longhorn will query monitors to find out if they are "HDCP" compliant (basically copy protection for high quality video); and if they are not, Windows will either refuse to play that video (from your HD DVD or downloaded content) or it will deliberately ruin the image quality by discarding pixels and re-interpolating the results.

Let me repeat that.

You will either not be allowed to watch it, or they will spend a lot of CPU time to deliberately make the video look much worse.

And due to wonderful (heavy sarcasm there) legislation such as the DMCA if you happen to get a hold of one of the zillions of patches that will appear a week after this restriction comes into effect you could be sued, fined, possibly even jailed - for exercising your fair use rights.

Gee, I wonder how much media companies and display manufacturers have contributed to congresscritters election funds?

All is not lost.

The FCC rejected the broadcast flag, even though the MPAA et al are still fighting that fight.

And we as the consumers have the ultimate vote - our pocket book.

I wonder what would happen to their plans if every user who bought such protected content returned it to the store demanding a refund?

Or asked for refunds for Longhorn for "making my monitor look fuzzy"?

I know media companies want to forget about fair use, and they hate the Betamax decision... but have they ever considered that fair pricing without ridiculous DRM would probably drive their profits up and lower their expenses?

Sarcastically yours,

Bill