The war between Blue-Ray and HD-DVD is still in the beginning which frustrates the consumers. One nail in the Blue-Ray coffin might have been added today by a guy who managed to hack the HD-DVD encryption. Being able to backup the expensive HD-DVD movies could win the format war. Most users will not be able to backup their HD-DVDs right away because the process sounds a little bit complicated and the author of the code did not reveal all the information how he managed to rip a HD-DVD movie but the source is available which means that many programmers will take a look and create advanced versions of it.

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Itunes is the most successful music store in the world, if you do not count stores that have their office in Russia. One of the biggest disadvantages if iTunes is that the music that you purchase has DRM protection build into them. This protection makes it impossible to play those files on other mp3 players than the ipod for instance. This turns out really bad if you want to buy a new mp3 player which is not manufactured by Apple.

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Just a few weeks ago I was reporting that Universal Studios was receiving it’s share from every Zune player sold and asked my readers to consider this before buying a Zune player because it could very well be the precedent of something that Universal, and other movie studios, wanted: A share of every media player that is being sold. Apparently they were quick to act.

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Every song that you send to someone else from your Zune is restricted to a limit number of plays before it becomes useless on the recipients Zune. This is really bad if you want to swap music files that you created on your own for example. There is however a (rather complicated) way to transfer files from one Zune to the other without those DRM restrictions. First you need to enable hard drive mode in your operating system.

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Freeculture.org held a drm video contest earlier this year and announced the winners of this contest today. All videos had to be uploaded to a public video site to make sure they would spread pretty fast around the global community. I decided to post all videos from youtube right away here at deny but you could also visit freeculture to see them at their website or bookmark their site. (do it)

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