I understand that it’s necessary for MPAA and RIAA to put an end to piracy for obvious reasons, but they have taken some extreme steps in the past. For example, I remember when the RIAA sued a 12-year old girl. Even after knowing that the girl and her divorced mother could not pay the amount RIAA was asking for out-of-court settlement, they kept pushing the family. As a result, a few online communities donated and ultimately gathered enough money to pay the fine and support the family. It’s actions like these that sour a good cause. I am certain that majority of you would want to compensate the musician and those involved in the process fairly (the same applies to MPAA), and I also understand that RIAA and MPAA are losing their fair share of revenue due to piracy. But there are better ways of dealing with Digital Rights Management than harassing children and senior citizens who are probably not aware of what they are doing or why it is wrong.

As if filing lawsuits, DVD/CD copy protection and numerous other ways to protect intellectual property weren’t extreme enough, a University of California Engineering Professor Rajit Gadh is working on a research project that would allow MPAA to counterattack piracy by storing the original buyer’s information on a RFID tag at the time of the purchase.

The original story was covered by Wired.com, and here’s how the process works: When you purchase a DVD at a retail store and go to the retail counter for checkout, you will be asked to either pick a password or provide some sort of a biometric data, which may include either an iris scan or a finger scan. Once you go home and try to play the DVD in a special RFID equipped DVD player, which you will have to purchase separately, you will then re-enter the password or provide an iris/finger scan in order to play it (Information Courtesy: Wired.com). According to the research group, this will prevent you from sharing the DVD with friends and family. Obviously, you won’t be able to copy the disc, since the DVD’s RFID tag will store the information and prevent it from playing it on other DVD players.

I can see how iris and finger scans might work, as they are unique to each individual, but I don’t see how having a password will work. After all, you can easily give your friend the password, which he can then enter to play the movie. I would guess that RFID tags on both the DVD and the player will work coherently to make sure that once you enter the password to play the DVD in a specific player that it doesn’t work with others. That’s the only logical way of making it work. Anyways, that’s not the point.

My issue of concern is the paranoia of Digital Rights Management. Are the RIAA and MPAA so paranoid that consumers would now have to enter a password, or worse, do an iris or finger scan before they can enjoy a movie? According to reports this may be so. I am perfectly fine with embedded technologies that would help reduce piracy, but this is crossing the line. Imagine having to give a fingerprint or an iris scan to the DVD player before playing it…This would also mean that the person who actually bought the DVD would have to be the one to play it all times. In other words, your family can’t watch the movie if you are on a business trip. The password methodology is a bit tamer, but it’s still unnecessarily extreme.

Even Gadh thinks of this as a more restrictive approach to solving a problem. I especially agree with Ed Felten, a Computer Science Professor at Princeton University, and his statement on Wired.com. He said, "I think people would find it creepy to give their fingerprint every time they wanted to play a DVD. It's hard to think that would be acceptable to customers."

Restricting consumers with such limitations is crossing the line, and it needs to be stopped before it becomes a reality. I, for one, don’t want this idea to be implemented, ever. I believe the MPAA should spend its resources wisely and take a different approach to solving piracy. I would recommend that they wholeheartedly develop technologies that can possibly stop people from copying DVDs and whatnot, but iris scans and finger scans are pushing it too far.

Here’s my idea of a potential solution:

When a DVD is purchased, we can be issued a non-transferable DVD "ID" card. This card will unlock our DVD player for the DVD copy you purchase. You must have both the DVD and the ID card to view the media. The "ID" card should not be easily copied and encoded with encrypted data that must be read by the player and matched to that specific DVD and not a copy of it. In other words, the media, when manufactured, must be encoded and match the card. This will make it extremely difficult to download a movie. Additionally, if anyone is pirating the cards and DVDs it would be much easier to track them, rather than trying to catch downloaders. Maybe my idea isn’t original or new, but it seems a far cry better than the aforementioned solutions. Turn a few engineers loose on it, and it might just work. The bottom line here is that Digital Rights Management is here to stay. As the Internet has grown, so has piracy. Lets all support any logical solutions as they are proposed because we might just end up with a closet full of useless DVDs.