San­Disk puts DRM on mem­ory cards (CNet News.com)

And I give it two weeks after going to mar­ket until it’s cracked. Plus it’s hardly as though it takes par­tic­u­lary advanced tech­nol­ogy to man­u­ally cir­cum­vent copy con­trols: whilst we’ve still got ana­logue I/O for our dig­i­tal devices, it’s per­fectly pos­si­ble to cir­cum­vent pretty much any DRM tech­nol­ogy out there, crack­ing efforts aside. Got a line-in on your sound­card? Got a TV tuner with S-Video or Com­pos­ite input? There’s your home piracy studio.

And if we can do it, the only peo­ple you’re fool­ing when you say it’s not pos­si­ble are your investors: the pro­fes­sional pirates are yards ahead of you.

(Gosh this post makes me sound like a rav­ing Marx­ist, doesn’t it?)

Any­way, the point is DRM is only ever going to suc­ceed in a lim­ited capac­ity. Then, the masses will revolt and over­throw the bour­geoisie oppres­sors and their con­trol of a false com­mod­ity! Social­ist order will rule!! erm. Then, cir­cum­ven­tion will become the norm, rather than a tem­po­rary force. Inno­va­tion will be out-innovated. Until DRM is at the point where hard­ware is in some kind of sta­sis, and soft­ware can be updated at the whim of con­tent pur­vey­ors. I don’t say cre­ators, because content’s cre­ators aren’t gen­er­ally the ones heav­ily push­ing the agenda we’re see­ing from var­i­ous record­ing lob­bies — and also because I do find myself agree­ing that the own­er­ship of ideas is a fun­da­men­tally flawed concept.

Aside: I think this fits with­out dif­fi­culty into my polit­i­cal views — Lib­er­al­ism fol­lows the prin­ci­ple of government/legislative inter­ven­tion only where this is seen to be of greater ben­e­fit (e.g. where there is no pri­vately operated/owned alter­na­tive to state-owned/operated infrastructure/services)… and the notion that indi­vid­u­als rather than the state be cre­ators of wealth is fairly irrel­e­vant here, because there’s no defined need in lib­er­al­ism for the cre­ation of wealth in all spheres, plus the present intel­lec­tual prop­erty cli­mate that we see exists because of leg­isla­tive (read: gov­ern­ment) inter­ven­tion in mat­ters best left to free mar­ket forces. I’ll stop myself from launch­ing into a full-scale rant here… hope­fully some other time.

So, I think San­Disk are dig­ging them­selves a hole. Rant over.