You can sign up at Real Player to be notifed when realdvd becomes available again for sale: http://www.realdvd.com/join

and thank for mentioning Lew Wasserman, He is a very important and facinating figure who is not referenced enough. I can recommend Dennis Mcdougal's bio of Wasserman. Although I haven't read the more recent bios.

"The first thing we do, let's [censure] all the lawyers". – Henry VI (Part 2)(Act IV, Scene II) [edited for democratic society]

After Sony's rootkit DRM mess, I refuse to buy music from ANY artist on Sony records. I'd rather download torrents and scan them for viruses first (not that I'm advocating doing that … not any artists on Sony right now that I can't live without).

Computer software companies have gone down this road too. I remember years ago when Apple stopped selling computers with floppy drives in them, well I upgraded one of the Macs at work and needed to re-install QuarkXpress but the installer key was located on a floppy. So I contacted Quark to see if they could help me and they offered to SELL me a software key on CD. I hung up on the lady and quickly found a pirated one online (yeah, later I found I could have made a disk image on one of the older machines and burned that to CD but you get the idea). Thankfully Adobe started making a superior product (InDesign) and I no longer have to deal with those Quark fools

Anyway the BIGGEST problem with the movie and music industries is their tendency to treat their customers as their enemies. Either through politicization of every movie or song or by treating all their paying customers like potential thieves and making their products less usable in the process.

Heck, if the book publishing industry were to treat its customers like the movie and music industries, all books would be printed holograms and painful to read, but hey, at least you couldn't photocopy a page.

I'm surprised the whole Sony thing didn't spur some innovation. It'd be pretty easy to make a CD player that'd run "by remote" from a USB or even a serial port, with a pure audio output for the PC input. No worries about DRM ever again. I know there'd be quibbling about quality loss, but CD's are so good now I doubt hardly anyone will notice. And to heck with the RIAA, nothing to complain about, lets you listen to music while your optical drive is doing other things, same as you could with two drives. It'll even remove a "need" for hard drive copies on machines that only have room for one CD or DVD/CD drive.

And if it's just never been thought of before, I hereby claim the IP rights. Hmm, wonder where I can find a lawyer around here…

I'm going to be the Devil's Advocate here (I need the work). I can see the movie industry's point. RealDVD adds extra DRM, it keys the fair-use copy to the drive it was made on to prevent further copying, sounds like it won't even allow you to clone your hard drive without wrecking the copy. But apparently nothing prevents you from making a "fair use" copy on a different machine, or hard drive, you just need an original disk. Here we are hanged by our own privacy concerns. With all DVD's serial-numbered, there could be a central web site RealDVD could check with to see if a copy was ever made, and not allow anymore without some explaining. Which has all the appeal of gun registration, they know where to go when the law goes south on us. Offhand there's nothing requiring you to validate you still have the original, and haven't sold it, by occasionally sticking it back in the machine, which I vaguely recall being discussed as a much-loved (possible?) chore for M$ Windows users. Proven innocent, but they keep checking that you still are and you keep having to prove it; not good.

I'm going to assume this is more than industry neanderthals saying "File on computer! Me can copy file!" and someone actually studied this. I loathe the automatic assumption that people will likely do the wrong thing if they have any chance to do so. But, I see their point, as it stands it can be used to make illegal copies. And RealDVD made their own mess on this, they've made a car that can go 200+mph and swear it's legal because it's made for sticking to the speed limit. This needed better market research than that.

Guess I was wrong.

Not to mention the ridiculous upgrade policy. I bought a scanner for work and quickly discovered that they'd included software that was 4 generations old AND they wanted to charge me for the upgrade. Ridiculous.

Sorry John, I won't be risking the security and usability of my computer to pick up your CD (I'm actually bummed about that. I promise I won't steal a copy off a torrent site or anything).