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Google Video Mired In DRM Mess

Google Video is a curiously anti-consumer approach to broadband video that diverges from the company's corporate ethos, writes the tech blog Boing Boing. "For the first time in the company's history, it has released a product designed to fill the needs of someone other than Google's users," the blog says. Google Video provides video search and video sales, but the company leaves the sales price and method completely up to the content provider. Moreover, the company slaps down its own Digital Rights Management system that restricts how users play and use the videos they buy. Without modeling any one type of copyright system, Google imposes its own version of how copyright should work on its users, just like Apple does with iTunes, says Boing Boing. For example, when you download a restricted video from Google, it locks that information into your account and software player. There will be no shifting of that file to another place on your computer (or to anyone else's computer), because the video player must communicate with Google before determining that you are permitted to play it. By encrypting its video files, the company has also rendered it illegal for competitors to create their own players for Google's video files, even if they can decrypt them. What tech freedom fighters (and ultimately consumers) want to know is, why? Why would Google take steps backwards like this, leading us into a legal broadband video world that locks us down in proprietary software chains? It just means consumers will continue ripping BitTorrent files--unless video providers can adapt and open things up.

Read the whole story at Boing Boing »

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