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Wall•E DVD not crippled by DRM after all
June 5, 2009 | 1:26 pm
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By Chris Meadows
In a long-overdue follow-up to one of my past posts, I just got around to screening the replacement copy of Wall•E that I received after sending my old copy in. My old copy, as I noted, would not play on my computer at all—I couldn’t even get the menus to load—and at the time there was a ot of assumption that the problem was caused by DRM (Digital Rights Management).
Although I have not had time to go through the discs exhaustively, I had no problem loading the menus or playing the content that I tried. So it would seem that the problem was not additional DRM after all, but a pressing error in a batch of the discs. Anyone else who has this issue crop up should contact Disney for a replacement, just as I did.
DRM may not have been the culprit this time, but it was a natural assumption to make given the evidence. And that, in and of itself, should say something about how DRM is regarded—that the natural impulse when something goes wrong with a disc is to blame DRM rather than a manufacturing flaw.
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Comments:
But DRM *is* a manufacturing flaw. Or should that be a manufactured flaw?
Hmm, I wouldn’t be so sure. It was almost impossible to rip the DVD using standard DVD Ripping software until these software companies released updates that got around the issue on the DVD. Several other people experienced the issue of being unable to play the DVD on a computer or PS2, but it playing fine on their DVD player. Certainly sounds like copy protection stuff to me. Might not be DRM specifically, but definitely close.
Chris is right: It could have been any number of things that were flawed, not just the DRM. In this case, be glad that it was something they were willing and able to fix… and think about this: If they’d decided the “flaw” was in the nature of the DRM SW, they probably would have declined to fix or replace it.
DRM itself isn’t a flaw… it’s just a tool, a security process. We may not like DRM, but there’s no reason to go over-the-top and start assigning every evil in the world to it… any more than its users should assign every base and dishonest impulse to those who don’t like it. It’s that over-reaction that’s making it harder for all parties involved to look at the issue rationally and work out practical solutions.
Shorter TeleRead: DRM was never the problem all along, but saying it was suited our stock ideology.
In case I wasn’t quite clear in the article: if one copy of the DVD wouldn’t play but the other played flawlessly, then the issue was not common to all copies of the disc. If it had been a function of DRM, then it WOULD have been common to all copies of the disc.
And Joe, you’ll note that even in the original article, I stated that it was possible it was a manufacturing flaw instead of DRM.
Chris, going back and reading your original article, the only place a mention of possible “manufacturing defects” appears is in the “Update” part of the post, not the post itself. I’m with Joe on this one.