Macrovision Wants Old DRM to Work Forever

Macrovision’s best-known form of copy protection inserts noise into analogue video signals to make it difficult to get a good copy of the DVD or VHS recording. A company named Sima has products that eliminate this noise when digitising such video, as any good digitiser would do. Macrovision argues that this is a violation of the DMCA, and a court sided with them in June. Now the injunction is being reviewed, and several organisations are siding with Sima and Fair Use, including the American Library Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Home Recording Rights Coalition, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If it isn’t overturned, this decision could make it illegal to develop products for making copies of commercial analogue recordings