I was really looking forward to sitting down and watching a nice High Definition movie on my freshly upgraded PC using the XBOX HD-DVD drive.

But alas, this is impossible using my current hardware.

The movie industry, has forced a set of disturbing requirement to be able to play back HD content. Your recently acquired, perfectly capable widescreen LCD monitor will not work. Neither will your laptop screen.

The movie industry is requiring end-to-end encryption on all digital signals, using something called HDCP. So if you are using an analog VGA connector, theoretically you should be fine. But that DVI connector? Nope! YOU COULD BE A PIRATE TRYING TO STEAL THE DIGITAL BITS!!

So even though you have hardware that is perfectly capable of displaying high definition resolution, you are going to be required to purchase new and painfully expensive hardware – for no reason other than greed and paranoia.

I’ll tell you what is going to happen. Somebody will figure out how to crack the encryption on the disc – just like they always do – and nobody will care to grab the digital stream.

They wonder why people steal movies… People steal movies because the industry has forgotten that not everybody is a millionaire.

It used to be that people stole movies because they couldn’t afford the movie. Now people are going to steal them because they cannot afford to replace an HDTV with another HDTV that the movie industry “trusts”.

In other words, this technology intended to reduce piracy is only going to make it worse, I guarantee.