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Is Windows more difficult to operate than a household appliance? I don't think so.
[+] A requirement for universal user experience
Let's look closely at the development paths of the major mobile devices. The first type we think of is PDA. Since its first appearance as an "electronic business notepad", the device has taken a road toward the smart phone. In an effort to break away from the limitation of the business market, it is leaning toward another end: entertainment, which makes it more like PMP (Portable Media Player).
In addition to traditional PDA functions, the PMP-like model also enables movie playing and offers larger memories. You can get more information on this model of Palm, one of the leading PDA manufacturers at: http://www.palmone.com/us/products/mobilemanagers/lifedrive/
The history of the mobile phone is known to everyone: integrating a number of functions, from the camera, PDA, to MP3 player. To avoid extinction, MP3 player manufacturers are beginning to produce PMP to develop into a higher end market.
While the mobile phone is developing toward the featured game console functions, the game console manufacturers are eroding the PMP market by offering built-in media playing functions; as a counter-attack to the handset manufacturer, the digital camera is providing built-in sending/receiving Email functions. Follow the trend, the portable digital camcorder will be the next target of the integration into mobile phones.
Predictably, future terminals will fall into two major categories: the handset-oriented terminal with generic all-in-one functions, and the featured non-phone device that offers professional functions for hardcore players.
With such a diversified portfolio of terminals, a more important topic is surfacing: is a universal user experience needed for the increasingly numerous kinds of mobile device?
[+] "Windows experience" is the mainstream user experience.
In the future, one person could have a number of terminals at the same time. Even if all-in-one units would become pervasive, it is also possible that such products become fad items and consumers change one every half year.
The key to save the trouble of learning how to use so many kinds of terminal device each time is the user interface. If all devices could share a similar operating method, they would be much easier to use, and the device replacement frequency would increase substantially.
That is why a universal operating system is necessary for every mobile device. Traditional mobile phones do not have many complicated functions. Making phone calls, sending short messages and checking phonebooks are what most people expect from them. However, when many functions are integrated into one device, it is important to provide universal user experience.
Although it is hard to sense or describe, the importance of an easy-to-use interface and consistent user experience has significant weight in the heart of consumers. As a result, some operating systems or mobile devices brands would prevail over time.
When it comes to the integration between the Windows-based IT products and the consumer electronics, a common argument is the latter should be easier to use. However, Windows-based products are not so easy to use, therefore not fit for the "household appliance mindset".
Although there is still room of improvement for the Windows interface on mobile devices, Microsoft's idea of extending the competitive advantage of Windows to mobile devices is frightening from the viewpoint of "extend the user experience".
Most of us have the experience of using household appliances, and the majority of those between 15 and 45 years old also have the experience of operating a computer. "Windows experience" today could be seen as the mainstream user experience, which is comparable to that of watching TV. Obviously, that is a force no one could afford to ignore.
[+] Integrated user experience of digital home appliance and mobile device
In addition to its own diversified functions, an ultimate mobile device might be used as the remote controller for other household appliances. In fact, with mobile phones, remotely controlling toy cars or transmitting music files around the house through wireless means, such as Bluetooth and WLAN, are applications already in development.
That means the communication between mobile devices and household appliances is becoming more and more frequent. In the past, the method of operating a TV set or an audio system might vary substantially from brand to brand. The user interface of Brand A might differ from that of Brand B, even though they are the same type of product.
However, to realize the dream of digital home, allow dozens of digital appliances and their control center: the computer to communicate smoothly with the mobile phone, and reduce the complexity of operation, it is extremely important to provide consistent user experience.
In today's market, Microsoft is the only one capable of providing such user experience, from household appliances to mobile devices, and the software giant is working on its way toward that goal. The effort may seem fruitless in the short term. Yet compared with other rivals in this field, that might prove to be a real competitive edge.
In a market with hundreds and thousands of competitors, there might easily be calls for a leader. However, will the mobile terminal industry and digital home industry end up to be another IT industry, which has a very thin profit margin because manufacturers struggle under the heavy burden of license fee for the operating system? Let's wait and see.
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- Today in History
New Landscape in China's Telecom Market (7) The Pricing of 3G Value-added Services - 2008/07/27
New Landscape in China's Telecom Market (6) Insight into 3G Price War in Taiwan - 2008/07/20
From Idea to Business (2) How to Estimate Your Income and Cost? - 2007/07/22
New Era of Online Advertising (2) from Exposure to Deal - 2006/07/23
Ultimate Mobile Device (5) Universal User Experience - 2005/07/24
The methods of multimedia storage should be considered in line with the copyright management.
[+] Audio and video are the mainstream of the mobile device market.
With the steady decline of storage costs and the increase of the storage medium capacity each year, a trend has been shaped, leading to much smaller size and larger capacity. As a result, many handheld terminal devices begin to offer built-in memory expansion slots or micro drives.
In the meantime, the development of the wired (mainly ADSL and Cable) and wireless (mainly 3G and WLAN) broadband has enabled real-time transmission of bandwidth demanding files and contents to users' terminals.
Nevertheless, technology alone is not enough to change the specification of product. The most important driving force behind all this is manufacturers' expectation on consumers' demand for mobile audio and video services and the consequent changes in their strategies.
The most typical example is the built-in camera, which is now a must-have function of every handset, although it is only for taking static photos. Today, no consumer would ask: "can this handset take pictures?" any more. Instead, they would ask: "how many pixels does this handset have?" With the increase of the number of pixel, the storage capacity has to increase, too.
By June of this year, the amount of sold global MP3 handsets has surpassed that of sold MP3 players. In addition to proving the "MP3-and-nothing-else" trend among handset consumers, it also implies that the MP3 player is the next victim of the handset.
Now that the handset allows playing music, will they be able to play movies next? With the advent of the 3G era, each handset will have two basic functions: making video calls and playing streaming media. They will be expensive in the beginning, but as the market grows, everybody will be able to afford such handset sooner or later.
[+] Video phones and PMPs will play different contents.
For most people, the largest question concerning the 3G mobile video function is: who will be interested in watching a 2-hour movie on such a small screen? Also, there is the problem of power supply and the GB-grade size of current movies.
In my opinion, those who want large screens and satisfactory effects had better go to the cinema; those who could put up with small screens could watch TV or DVDs on PCs. Watching video programs in outdoor (mobile) situations is either entirely an action of time killing or for something that one cannot miss (e.g. live broadcasts). The programs will not be very long.
In that case, a proper format of content would be streaming media, which enables playing simultaneously with downloading through broadband. As the content will not be stored in the mobile device after playing, content providers could rest at ease with the copyright protection issue.
Hardly will anyone download a movie from a PC to his/her handset to watch it outdoor. If they do have such a requirement, a better option would be to buy a portable DVD player, which is larger and offers better movie quality, or a PMP (Portable Media Player), which is a fad in today's market.
Using hard drives as their storage media, PMPs have relatively bigger a size. However, they present better effects with their large screens. SONY PSP, for example, is a product designed mainly for gaming. It uses a special kind of disk called UMD (read only) as its storage medium and additional memory slots to allow MP4 movie storage.
As a mobile audio and video device, whatever terminal it is, the critical role of the content can be seen. One that has no content to present will have little value and would hardly be appealing to consumers.
[+] The hard nut of the copyright management
What content providers are afraid of the most is another MP3 tragedy. Apple's online music stores have very low profit margins for the music files they sell. They depend entirely on iPOD for their income. Most iPOD buyers use the product to play MP3 music they get from unknown sources.
Now that PSP has adopted the special UMD format, it must have a way to prevent illegal copying. Since SONY has its own film studio, it does introduce UMD-based movies, such as Spider-Man II. Nevertheless, there are not many such movies, and only SONY does not sufficient to support the UMD format.
For games, a special format would be OK as long as there are enough game developers that support such format. For movies, however, it's another thing. If a consumer buys a PSP to watch movies, he/she will have to face the question of "how many movies support the UMD format?"
That is a dilemma. Currently, PMPs are mainly hard drive-based. Consumers can download movies without considering their copyrights (in fact, some manufacturers have already developed PMPs that enable the copyright protection). PSPs enable full protection, but have to face the challenge of content shortage.
Predictably, there will be copyright protection mechanisms on such portable audio and video media players and content providers that support such mechanisms too. However, that will not stop illegal contents from flowing throughout the Internet for free download just like MP3 contents do. No content provider is bigger than the Internet.
Concerning copyright management, I have a new idea. Currently the products are certified and authorized through hardware and software. Is it possible to do the certification through the GSM or WLAN network of the telecom operators and charge fees for movies through telecom bills? Maybe integrating wireless modules could generate new applications.
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- Today in History
New Landscape in China's Telecom Market (4) Dealing with Existing Subscribers is Key - 2008/07/06
Ultimate Mobile Device (3) Video, Storage, Copyright Management - 2005/07/03
Will the handset end up being the terminator to all other mobile devices?
[+] Yesterday's science fiction proves to be what life is today.
Black Jack is one of the master pieces by Tezuka Osamu, the most famous Japanese comic artist in 1973. For many people, it is also a memory of their childhood. The book was so classical that it was made into TV series in October 2004.
I watched a few episodes at the home of a friend, which brought me back to my life as a little boy. However, some of the scenes were set in contemporary life and I did not know if that's because the TV series were made 30 years later or not. For example, in one episode, a teacher who was concerned about a student injured in a car accident called the hospital with a handset.
It was not until the 1990s when mobile communication technologies started their commercial use. The first users had to suffer from high prices and the clumsiness of the handset. 30 years ago, when most of those technologies were still in military or university laboratories, a teacher could hardly afford a handset even with the salary of his entire life.
Yet it is not an issue only about the price. A scene of "making phone calls anywhere, anytime" in a cartoon series 30 years ago could be nothing but a science fiction, for there was not such a concept in the real life, and it was not so common to allow a teacher to own a handset.
Today, everybody is accustomed to carrying a handset. Or, even if not, people also have been accustomed to see others carrying one. Handsets have turned into fashion items, with people replacing their mobile phones every year. For manufacturers, however, it is a time of thin profit margin, which seems to be the doom for all high-tech products that become well-infiltrating.
[+] The pressure of the cross-industry integration
The pressure for handset manufacturers is obvious. With the global communication market getting more saturated each year, the time of high-speed growth is gone. The only hope left is the sale growth in emerging markets (e.g., mainland China) and the development of new functions to enter new application fields.
One of the challenges in emerging markets is consumers' demand for lower prices. Entering new application fields, on the other hand, requires changing consumers' user experience and introducing the cross-industry integration. Particularly, new functions mean bigger challenges, as they require not only upgraded hardware, but also related communication and content services.
One of the first proposals for the cross-industry integration is the camera phone, which has been marketed along with the MMS service for years. With the increase of the pixel amount, the built-in camera has become one of the basic functions of the handset.
Smart Phone, which appears a little later, attempts to integrate the personal calendar, business card management and other functions into a single handset. In addition, it allows software installation for diversified function extension through an opened operating system.
The business market-oriented smart phone has its limits. Manufacturers know that the next hot topic is entertainment. Perhaps out of the inspiration of the hot sale of iPOD, a lot more handsets made this year offer the built-in MP3 player, which has become another most concerned function after the digital camera for handset buyers.
[+] All-in-one terminal as a portable pet
For entertainment, of course, there's movie in addition to music. With the advent of the 3G mobile communication time, the video phone is becoming a basic function. As a result, every 3G handset would have a built-in video camera and recording videos would seem to be a natural function of the handset.
And there will be video players too. Handsets are taking a road toward the portable multimedia player for playing pictures, music and movies. Maybe the current popular Portable Media Player (PMP) would be integrated into the handset one day.
Another heavy-weight component of entertainment is gaming. Manufacturers started to provide built-in mini-games as early as in the black-and-white handset years to allow time-killing. Today, color handsets enable direct Java game downloading from the websites of telecom operators. Will the handheld game console become the next integrated target?
We have plenty of other imaginations for handset functions, for example, air conditioner/refrigerator remote control, or satellite-based positioning/navigation. One day, when the artificial intelligence is mature enough, we might talk with our handsets when we feel lonely, because they would have become our electronic pets.
Maybe there are many other science fiction whims waiting to be realized decades later. For manufacturers caught in the turmoil currently, however, a common question is: will an all-in-one ultimate handset be the expectation of the future consumer, or, will the handset end up being the terminator to all other mobile devices?
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- Today in History
Web 2.0 Think Again (4) "Private Property" and "Class Inequality" - 2007/06/10
Ultimate Mobile Device (1) Age of Hybrid Handset - 2005/06/19
Pricing is a Handful for Internet Business - 2005/06/11
PMP is currently at the early adopter stage, but it is not expected to go any farther.
[+] PMP, an expensive tool for professionals
Stimulated by the hot sales of iPOD and other MP3 players around the world, manufacturers are now on the move to launch the next wave: Portable Media Player (PMP). Shortly after the introduction, the product has been overwhelmed by compliments. Some brands have even got out of stock.
As its name indicates, PMP is different from MP3 players in that it can store and display photos and movies. Of course, as movies could easily be dozens of GBs in size, most PMPs choose to use hard disks as their storage media and, therefore, look quite clumsy.
Why don't they use optical storage media? If PMPs are mainly used to play movies, it will be ok to use small-sized DVD as the storage media. Yet the problem is if they could be connected directly with computers, it would seem strange to use CD or DVD. Doesn't it save a lot of troubles to download movies directly into PMPs?
The new product, which I once called jokingly "the fast food box", is nothing cheap. It ranges from USD 300 all the way up to USD 600. To a large extent, the price depends on the following factors: the size of the built-in hard disk, availability of external memory card slots, LCD display size and resolution, and brand.
Surprisingly, most PMPs have brilliant LCD displays fine enough for both photos and movies. Even more surprising is the duration of their batteries, which could be up to five hours, long enough to watch two movies.
Who will carry such a thing around just to be able to watch movies? Of course those people are early adopters. My visits to many electronic stores have confirmed that the majority of these people are travelers and photographers (who use the product as a memory to store their digital photos when they are outside).
[+] The challenge for watching movies on the move
As a matter of fact, portable DVD players have been on the shelves of 3C stores (or duty-free shops at airports) long before the introduction of PMPs, which is a solid proof of the demand for watching movies on the move. Personally, I had an experience of bringing a notebook on travel to be able to watch movies onboard a plane, but ended up with getting that notebook out of power.
Yet it is not easy to convert movies into the right format for PMPs. In the first place, you need to know what compression format your PMP supports, the subtitle format or the sound effect format, otherwise you would have to watch silent movies, or movies without subtitles.
Also, most movies are converted from DVDs. For many computer players, maybe it's no big deal to download a free software online, install it, use it to grab a movie with the copy-proof protection into his/her computer and compress it into the format acceptable for the PMP. For general consumers, however, this is too much.
In addition, we all know that, just like MP3s which are used to play illegal music in most cases, PMPs also can be used to watch illegal movies. It is not difficult at all for skillful computer players to download movies that have been converted into the right format from a P2P network.
As a matter of fact, most ordinary consumers do not know where to get movies. With a bought or rented DVD, it could really be a hard nut for them to convert the content into the PMP. In addition, isn't it illegal to crack the copy-proof protection with a special program?
[+] The opportunity of substitutes?
In fact, many portable devices are being integrated into handsets. At least it is very clear that the integration of handsets with digital cameras goes along that path. As handsets offer increasingly more pixels and additional slots for memory cards, this trend is inevitable.
Currently, digital cameras still have a superior position in terms of pixels over handsets. Yet one day when the pixel is no longer a problem (for example, when a 5 million pixel handset sells at only USD 200), the integration of digital cameras and handsets will be achieved, and standalone digital cameras will be forced onto a special purpose-oriented path, for some hardcore players.
For handsets, the next even more powerful wave of integration will be that with MP3s. In addition to the function of high-pixel cameras, handsets are expected to be able to play MP3 music. Pretty soon, handsets will integrate with MP3 players.
With the arrival of the 3G time, watching movies will be a basic function for all handsets. The only headache for handset manufacturers at this point of time is how to jam a 40GB hard drive into a small handset. It seems that PMPs still have a role to play as long as no major breakthrough is achieved in the storage technology.
Nevertheless, PMPs do have a distinct advantage: the larger LCD display. To watch movies, you would want a bigger display, even if it is a portable device. This is a problem for handsets, the answer to which will lie on the technology breakthrough in the user interface for handset manufacturers.
Despite their hot sale at the present time, PMPs will get into a sale bottleneck pretty soon. Just look at the identities of the user and the usage of the product, you will see it is true. The trend is to take a road towards smaller size and cheaper price. What can be predicted is, compared with handsets, PMP will become a special-purposed device for some hardcore players.
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- Today in History
Web 2.0 Think Again (2) Upper-class Society and Lower-class Society - 2007/05/27
Web 2.0 Think Again (1) It's All about Relationships - 2007/05/20
Brief Study at Portable Multimedia Player (PMP) - 2005/05/29
Copyright. The right to decide who gets to have a copy of stuff you made. In a society that respects private property, it's an absolute necessity. You can't do without it. Sadly, there are several myths surrounding copyright. Allow me to explain them.
"Copyright doesn't involve me, since I'm not an artist."
A lot of people think this. Yet we're confronted with copyright every time we buy a book, a CD, or a DVD. Those are the obvious cases though. Less obvious is the copyrights you have to pay for when you perform a play, or play some music in a public room you own, like a dentist playing some top-40 tunes in his waiting room.
Even fewer people realize that when they're in an elevator, and they hear some faint music in the background, someone had to pay copyrights for that. So even if you're not an artist, copyright has major implications in your life. You come into contact with it every single day, and pay for it more often than you think.
"Copyright is what goes back to the artist for making some music"
In a perfect world, that would be so, but in reality most artists see very little of the money you pay for a CD. That 16 USD CD you bought yesterday? Well, less than a buck goes back to the artist. And that's a best case scenario. Depending on how good a deal the artist managed to get -- which is linked to fame, and naivety -- it can be as little as a few cents per CD.
The music industry is big business, and most of what you pay goes straight to the stockholders of the big media consortiums. In fact, a lot of CD's could be half the price they are, and still be profitable, with the artist earning MORE than what he gets now. You can thank the Big Five for that. You don't know the Big Five? Let me tell you about them.
They are Viacom (MTV, CBS, Paramount, ...), News Corp (FOX, The Times, lots of book publishers, even the L.A. Dodgers, ...), Vivendi Universal (Universal, MCA, Polygram, Motown, Decca, ...), AOL Time Warner (AOL, Time, Warner, CNN, HBO, Comedy Central, People, and loads more) and Walt Disney (Disney, ABC, Buena Vista, ESPN, ...).
Outside of the US there is also Bertelsmann, which owns a lot of European media companies, but is not of any importance to the home market of the Big Five, the USA. If you want to see what these companies exactly own, check out
The past decade's wave of media mergers has produced a complex web of business relationships that now defines America's media and popular culture. These relationships offer a massive opportunity for cross promotion and selling of talent and products among different companies owned by the same powerful parent corporation.
Examine the charts breaking down what each of the five U.S. media giants now control (as of February 2001). Also included on this list is Bertelsmann AG, which in globalizing has bought up several large American media divisions.
| | It is the second largest global media conglomerate, after AOL Time Warner.  | | Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation Ltd. has media holdings in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Latin America and Asia.  | | | This privately-owned German media conglomerate has interests in 600 companies in 53 countries. | |
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 |  | | |  | |||
| It's the third largest global media conglomerate. FY 2000 revenues topped $25 billion. | | | | | | This giant's subsidiary Universal Music Group is the number one music company in the world, with roughly 22% of the 1999 global market. | |
| |  The $165 billion mega-merger between AOL and Time Warner, approved by the FCC in January 2001, is the largest media merger in history. The new company promises to offer a powerhouse of integrated communication, media and entertainment across all platforms -- computer, phone, television and handheld wireless devices. | |  Sony made its name with electronics, but it now has more than 1,000 subsidaries worldwide, many of them key media partners. | |
Together these 5 companies have almost an absolute control over all media (including the news outlets!), and if you don't play their game, you don't get to be famous. Since they produce most music and movies out there, they can dictate CD and DVD prices, which is why you're getting ripped off any time you buy a cool song or a nice movie.
And suppose someone famous manages to become an independant artist and still be successful, even though they won't get airtime anymore on the well-known radio stations or playtime on MTV. Then they'll still earn less than they should, because all the copyrights that people have to pay that aren't directly linked to the purchase of the CD have to be payed to international copyright organisations, which then redistribute everything to the copyright holders.
Now, they don't know who got played where, since most copyright taxes they levy are for bars playing some radio music somewhere, or for radio stations playing songs (yes, copyrights get charged to both sides) they don't have an objective way of knowing exactly how much a specific song gets played.
So, that's why they use a fixed distribution key, to split up all the earnings between the different parties involved. The thing about the key though is that it is designed in such a way that the Big Five relatively get more money than independant artists.
Again, the system is skewed so most money goes directly to the shareholders.
"Copyright covers the artwork for a limited time, and after that it goes to the public."
Theoretically, this is still so. But in practice it doesn't work that way anymore. I'll explain why.
First of all, copyright law changes all the time, and always to the detriment of the average citizen. Most of the time it's to increase the length of time it covers. In some cases copyright lasts until over a century after the death of the original artist by now. Which means that for over a century after the artist's death, you have to abide by the wishes of whoever inherited the copyrights if you want to do something with the artwork.
In fact, copyright law gets changed faster than it expires.
Disney lobbied heavily to get copyrights extended so Mickey Mouse
didn't revert to the public domain.
Good old Mickey still earns them a lot of money, and they didn't want
to lose the cash cow, err, mouse.
So they threw some money against it and bought themselves some laws.
Now Mickey won't become public domain in the next 30 years, and most likely
whenever the expiration date on the copyright comes close
they'll just buy another law to get it extended again.
Secondly, copyright covers more than the original artwork.
It covers all the performances and translations of it.
An example of this are the works of Bach.
Even though the original musical scores have reverted
to the public domain by now,
all the performances that have a decent audio
quality are still covered by copyright,
so unless you're willing to play his music yourself,
you can't get away from under
the rule of copyrights.
Another interesting example are theater plays.
You not only have to pay for the copyrights on the play itself,
but also for those on the translation.
You pay copyrights twice, for a single play.
Thirdly, it's no use being allowed to copy something,
if you don't have a copyable version of it.
This is a problem that centers around the most interesting
consequence of the digital revolution, a relatively unknown
law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, or DMCA for short.
The DMCA introduced a new aspect to copyright, apart from extending the duration of it. It has made it illegal in the US to circumvent the encryption on something to which copyright applies (which is just about anything). The most obvious explanation of what this means in real life terms is what happened with DVD's. DVD's, as you probably don't know, are encrypted using a mechanism called CSS. Whenever you want to make a player for DVD's, whether it be software or hardware, you have to get the keys to unlock the encryption. And the only way to get the keys is to get a license from the DVD consortium, which not only costs a lot of money, but also forces you to play by their rules. Their rules means that your player has to be broken on purpose in several ways.
Firstly, it has to respect the zones on a DVD. The DVD consortium cut the world up in 5 regions or zones, and you can't play a DVD bought in one zone on a player bought in another zone. This is how the Big Five destroyed the parallel import channel.
People would buy movies in Japan and sell them in the US before they were available there, for example. This has now been made impossible. Why? Because the Big Five don't make as much profit on parallel import movies. They don't want a large part of the profit. They want all the profit. There is another, even more irritating, way in which DVD players are broken though.
You can't skip past commercials. On some DVD's you can, but the DVD producer (the Big Five) can mark parts on your DVD in such a way that you can't fast-forward past them. This takes away one of the more powerful reasons to go with digital mediums, being able to instantly skip to anywhere in the movie.
This actually takes away something
you could do with VHS tapes.
So, in a way, DVD's are less functional
than what they are meant to replace.
Now, that's all interesting, but you're probably wondering what this has to do with the DMCA. Well, to play a DVD you need to get past the CSS encryption system on DVD's, and there are only two ways to do that. Get a license from the DVD consortium, and receive the decryption keys in addition to a leash around your neck, or circumvent the encryption.
This last thing is what is made illegal by the DMCA, meaning that the only way to make a player, is to follow the rules of the Big Five, as dictated by law. When you complain about this to the Big Five, they'll claim that they need the DMCA to make sure nobody can illegally copy movies.
Of course, this would be a valid defense, if it were true.
The cool thing about digital stuff, however,
is that it's always a string of 1's and 0's.
Meaning that if you copy the entire DVD, not just the contents, you get a perfectly valid copy too, without having to decrypt the DVD. No, the true reason for the DMCA, as bought by the Big Five, is a lot more devious.
Control. Absolute control over who is allowed to play DVD's, and how they have to play them. And total control over the pricing. DVD's are a lot more expensive than videotapes, even though they cost less to manufacture. Just think about it.
That the only legal way to access a DVD is through a licensed player has another interesting implication. Even when the copyrights revert to the public, you'll still not be able to make a copy of what now is considered public domain, since there will still be the access control. This means that the Big Five can keep charging people for access to the same works forever, directly opposite to the intention of copyright law.
When this argument was brought against the DMCA, it's backers claimed that works would be released to the public in a copyable form when they reverted to the public domain. That's a nice promise, but there is nothing binding about it. Copyright holders are not bound by law to do this, and even if they were, their heirs could just go "not my promise" when eventually, in a hundred years, their works become public domain.
Another claim the backers of the DMCA made was that you could always use VHS tapes of movies instead of DVD's when you wanted to have the access you're allowed to by law, but the problem there is that VHS is dying. The companies that own the copyrights on the movies are the same companies that make the VHS players, and obviously the same companies that make the VHS versions of those movies. It is in their best financial interest to move people over to DVD as soon as possible, and so they will. In ten years time you will not be able to buy a new VHS player, and you will certainly not be able to buy a new VHS movie.
Currently, it's just the movies that are threatened by this process, but when you look at the developments on the horizon, it gets gloomy pretty quick. Music is planned to be migrated to DVD's. Books will become electronic. In a century free access to media, any media, might be an addendum in the copyrighted history of the planet earth, available now for rent at the low, low, price of howevermuch they will charge you for it. And the question does need to be asked: what will happen to libraries? The answer is simple, either they will become corporate slaves, or they will die. Just like the rest of us.
And if you thought that was bad, it gets even worse. Recently a number of new, rather horrible, trials have been popping up. All involving the DMCA in some way or another. They all center around someone who proved the encryption in a product sucked by breaking it, after which the company that owned the product replied not by making their product more decent, but by silencing their critic, via the DMCA.
Companies don't stick to the US only with this either, they go after anyone on the globe doing things they don't like, as proved in the case of the Russian programmer Dmitri Sklyarov, who was sued by Adobe for writing a program that decrypted their PDF format without knowing the decryption key. Even though he wrote this program in Russia, and therefore shouldn't be covered by the DMCA.
This has produced an international chilling effect, where research into data encryption (and therefore the circumvention of it) has seriously diminished, because the researchers have to come to the US for their livelihood, and they fear getting arrested. At least one document exposing a serious flaw in a known encryption protocol was not released because the researcher fears the US response.
On another level, lobbyers are working hard to getting DMCA-style laws enacted in the entire world. They've already succeeded in Europe, where in 16 months the European Copyright Directive will be enacted in all the member states of the European Union. This is a law even more restricting than the DMCA. So soon, wherever you will go in the "free" world, you'll have to comply with the DMCA, essentially putting digital chains on most of what is written, said or done, reverting the planet to a digital version of the middle ages, where freedom of speech can be found nowhere.
Now, I don't believe people will accept this. Maybe they will for some decades, but eventually most likely a parallel circuit to the shove-it-down-your-throat variety of media selling will occur. But it's going to get worse before it gets better. Laws are being proposed as we speak to introduce copyright protection into every piece of computer hardware sold, essentially outlawing linux and the Free Software movement (because the user could disable this hardware protection if he has the source code to the operating system), and putting a nice big leash around every PC user's neck.
And the only reason they can do all this is because nobody knows.
I know. And now you know. But the population in general doesn't know about this, and they are oblivious to the fact that each day they lose a little freedom. So tell them. Whenever you get the chance to explain what I told you to someone, do so. If enough people get angry about what they're doing to us, maybe, just maybe, things will be influenced for the better.
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