Guess how many times I had to see this announcement ? Seven Times ! Yes that’s right. They put it on all DVDs. I was not able to skip it and that is why I’m writing this article about it. Let me ask you another question. Tell me how many times users who download 24 season 4 from the Internet are seeing this message ? Zero Times ! Yes that is right. If you pirate the tv series you get a clean copy without that nice Piracy reminder that people who BUY the DVD get.

Am I the only one who thinks something is seriously out of line here ? It’s like those game copy protections that do more harm than good. Buyers have to live with the copy protection even though it could mean that the game won’t play on their computer but guys who download it ? They get a crack and can run it without DVD at all.

Let’s talk about DRM in music. Do you think that the majority of songs in Peer to Peer networks has DRM ? The stance of the Music Industry is thankfully changing on this matter and I really hope that the Movie and Gaming Industry will make the changes as well.

If I purchase a DVD I do not want to see ads against Piracy. This is insane. The same is happening in cinemas all over the country. You see anti-piracy ads in cinema. Are they going to try to convince the one guy that might sit in one of the cinemas with his cam to stop making a recording the movie ?

One could say that they try to sensitize the public but do they have to do that in front of people who actually purchased a product ? Why don’t they do tv commercials instead ? That would probably be more effective and buyers would not feel so irritated with all the anti-piracy ads in their purchased products.

The article did not contain information about the technology behind Trimark other than that the “identification code maintains it’s integrity, despite copying or ripping.” This is a very bold statement and I personally don’t think that such a system will be possible unless they implement it in music that can be purchased in digital form only.

Trimark assumes that users who spread music are purchasing it before they spread it. While this might be true for the occasional P2P user this does not hold true for the big release groups. They get their stuff directly from the producers, the factory or a retail store without a possibility to be identified.

Several cases speak for themselves where music albums have been found on P2P networks weeks or even months before the official release date.

Let us suppose they release Trimark and integrate it into all digital mp3’s that are sold:

• This does not bother the release groups who spread the music albums way before anyone else gets their hands on them
• This does not bother the users who rip audio CDs and make them available on P2P
• This does not bother the users that record Internet radio and share it.
• This does not bother the users who know about Trimark
• This does not bother the downloaders at all
• The main target as I can see it are the users who do not know about Trimark and upload some of their purchased songs to the Usenet. I’m not able to estimate the number but I personally do not think that it will be such a large amount of users.

I can only come to the conclusion from what we know about Trimark that the system will be highly ineffective. As always, the only users that are found this way are the ones that are not informed about this new system.

• Run Task Manager
• Kill the WgaTray.exe Process
• Go to System32 folder
• Rename wgatray.exe and wgalogon.dll to something else
• Restart
• End of annoying messages

[tags]microsoft, genuine, anti-piracy, ms, windows xp, wgatray.exe, wgalogon.dll[/tags]