The Mercury News reports on a cautionary tale wherein a technical "glitch" by Cablevision has invoked copy restrictions on all unscrambled digital TV programming delivered to Cablevision's 3 million subscribers in metropolitan New York. (Cable glitch shows potential power of copy-blocking). In other words, if you want to record a rerun of the Simpsons - too bad. You can still use devices like TiVo and ReplayTV, since they use the plain signal going to your television, but not recording devices specially designed to integrate with your cablebox. The problem has been going on for three weeks. Apparently, it is easier to let the system block consumers from recording everything then to turn off the copy protection until the problem is fixed. After all, without copy protection someone might digitally record pay-per-view (although how the current system stops people is beyond me. Guess I'm just not as bright as some of them cable execs).
Of course, frequent readers will recall that the FCC is considering mandating similar technology, see LawMeme (FCC Seeks Comments on Proposal to Mandate DRM). Gee, that idea is looking better and better by the minute.
In quasi-related news, WIRED has a follow-up to yesterday's story on Electronic Programming Guides that briefly looks at some of the consequences of DRM (Who's Running the Digital Show?).