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Actually, there's a big secret: DRM isn't about preventing privacy; it's about stifling innovation. The fewer things a company lets you do with the stuff they sell you, the less you can tinker with it, and the less likely you are to come up with a newer, better idea. And that's not just speculation -- an actual empirical study found that DRM is stopping more legal things from happening than illegal things. A blind woman who couldn't get her screen reader to read aloud the Bible e-book that she had legally purchased ended up being forced to pirate a copy. Of the Bible. Then there's the arguably worse situation that happened to me, where I wasn't able to take a screenshot of my Aliens Blu-ray to use as my desktop because Blu-ray doesn't let you take screenshots -- even though it's totally legal and I really really wanted to.

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So now I just have this.

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As tragic as it is that the world will never see the high-res collage of Hudson's freakout faces that exists in my mind, the real point here is that all the crap they feed us about "preventing piracy" is just an excuse -- the reality is that they want to use DRM to control the market. That's exactly why the MPAA and RIAA wanted to make it illegal to break DRM -- even if it meant putting your life in danger. And now that you know how their priorities shake out, it shouldn't surprise you that ...