Flash drive vs. Blu-ray, anyone?
Sony’s Blu-ray could as well lay claim to genuine Megatron heritage (if you watched Michael Bay’s Transformers movie). That is, when Blu-ray won the drawn-out DVD format war this month. But pray this win isn’t deja vu. Back in the ’80s, VHS’s victory over Sony’s Betamax was tainted with insinuations that VHS had brownie points other than superior technology - such as, umm, the availability of porn in VHS. Back to present day. There’s always that nagging problem with the cheap, brittle, and easily wearing-out DVD format, especially now that Blu-ray comes in mega gigs. And the problem is that it can accelerate piracy. I woke up one day realizing that what the Blu-ray format needs is a new rival such as — tadaaah, flash drives, which kindof remind me of those expensive Atari cartridges of yore. Oh have you heard of those artists experimenting with flash drive releases? Maybe this is nuts but the upside to flash drives is that if they were the universal portable format today, they’d last. They’d help unify storage and media players. Plus, it would be expensive to peddle around pirated copyright material in flash drive format. (Hey, it’s moot. I’m not sidling up to those behemoth corporations.
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I don’t see Flash being any harder to rip than optical media. In fact I think it would be easier. In the end once you have ripped it, it doesn’t really matter what format you choose to store it in, since you can just play back the raw file on the computer.
Also flash would be considerably more expensive that optical, at least in the near future.
In the end it only takes one person to rip it, then everyone can copy it. BluRay rips are already around. Even if you managed to invent some kind of bulletproof DRM system (impossible), with modern tvs being digital all you need to do is tap into the signal somewhere, even if the signal on cable is encrypted it will be exposed somewhere. Of course its much easier to find the key and decrypt the data directly plus you get things like the menus.
In the extended future quantum computers will make cracking DRM easy. I guess the only alternative will be to beam the movies to your tv using quantum encryption, even then you can still tap in. I guess every bit of media sold would need to have watermarking, and possibly enforce DRM on every single TV (once again never going to happen, thankfully because of the same greed that puts DRM on things anyway since each company wants their own version of DRM to be the one so they can make money off it or use it against competitors)
Do you really think this would stop piracy? You must not have heard of torrents because most pirates use the internet now, very very few actually have any physical transactions.
From where you are at Matt, you mustn’t have heard of China. Heard of the 3rd world? Come on. Chinese pirates use Torrent but ultimately — the goods are sold as CDs.
Flash drives are cheap enough to use for many things, and they fit well in your pocket, and they don’t scratch. Optical disks are less portable and they can scratch. So, my question is, say in a few years, would I buy a 1 terrabyte optical disk for say $20, and the player/burner for $100, or a 1 terrabyte flash drive for the same price… Hmm.. Well, I’d buy both.
This is BS. Everyone knows that as soon as you remove mechanical (aka “disk”) drives the performance increase is remarkable. Blueray blows compared to (the potential growth of) flash drives
Yes, flash drives are only going to only get better. Soon, most file sharing will be done on the street I think. When people can share terrabytes of media on the street, it’s game over for commercial publishers. Flash drives will be key to this happening. Laser disks will still be good for cheap archiving back at home. It’s hard drives that will become less popular I think. Ones not better than the other, it’s about using the right tool for the job.