Monday, November 27 2006 @ 01:32 PM EST Contributed by: sde
Hi, I'm David Berlind, Executive Editor at ZDNet. Today, we're going to talk about a rather uncomfortable subject, CRAP. That's right, CRAP. Now, CRAP stands for Content, Restriction, Annulment and Protection. It's my catchy buzz-phrase for a technology that's really called DRM. Now DRM technically stands for Digital Rights Management, and it's a rather cancerous technology that technology vendors are actually building into most of the products that we're buying today.
So for example, if you own an iPod, it's got CRAP in it. That's right, it's got this technology that will restrict what you can do with your content, allows the owners of the content to annul that content-in other words, take it away from you-or protect it from being copied out onto the internet.
Now that was the original incarnation of DRM, to keep you from copying content on the internet. Now the way it works is we've got let's say a company who makes products like Apple here. And they have a technology that's CRAP that's around their products. And we'll put CRAP here because everything that happens inside of here, like video or let's say audio, for example, music, is protected by this layer of CRAP, and the only thing that can take that layer off are the devices that this company, Apple, says can take it off, for example, the iPod.
