Apple's DVD lockdown
For an example of the kind of insanity we're in store for as Hollywood (the "content lobby") hooks up with Silicon Valley (the "hardware industry") to clamp down on intellectual property controls, consider this story from News.com's Declan McCullagh. Apple has told a third-party software provider that it can no longer distribute software that lets Mac users use their Apple-supplied DVD-burning software with external recordable DVD drives. Users can still burn DVDs on their internal, Apple-supplied drives. Apple's lawyers used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 as their rationale.
But this isn't about protecting copyrighted movies from being duplicated (you can do that with the same ease or difficulty whether your DVD drive is internal or external); it's about Apple wanting to force people to buy new computers with Apple's own recordable DVD drives, rather than upgrading their older Macs with external drives supplied by third parties. In other words, Apple found the DMCA to be a pliable tool, easily adaptable for its own ends that have nothing to do with protecting intellectual property.
As "the content lobby" pushes "the hardware industry" to build more and more copyright control directly into computer hardware like hard drives (as chronicled by Salon's Damien Cave here), we can expect this kind of rule-repurposing to happen more and more frequently.
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