It disappoints me deeply that not one vendor told entertainment to get stuffed. The closest thing I've gotten to a statement from a vendor that's been in the back room with entertainment came from ATI, fresh from its AMD buyout and jazzed about a recent win. "We're one of the first to ship Blu-Ray player software with our hardware." Later in the discussion, I was told that "ATI has reduced the risk of unauthorised access to the frame buffer." Given that frame buffer access enables recording video to disk, I didn't have to ask who was considered unauthorised.

It would seem that the Internet, being so anarchistic, won't have its arm twisted so readily by the entertainment lobby, but Internet rights restrictions come through your telecommunications equipment. It would take an act of Congress to force a change to firmware of networking devices to restrict traffic based on content. There will be no broadcast flag for files that don't start life as commercial content. The vendors who make the components and operating systems that run our laptops and desktops see broadband digital entertainment as the next frontier, the next great driver of sales and services. The entertainment industry declared that there is no path to riches but through them, and that path requires paving over a few of your freedoms.

Unless, that is, you download your entertainment through BitTorrent. Does it meet the definition of "irony" that it's far easier for an unskilled person to do this than to deal with HDMI, HDCP, broadcast flags, frame buffer blocks, and other nonsense created specifically to frustrate consumers' efforts to enjoy digital entertainment?