Property owners have every right to do whatever they think is necessary to protect their property. Homeowners can build walls and add security. Content owners can add copy protection schemes to their digital content.
Unfortunately for content owners, digital rights/copy protection schemes have always proven crackable. No matter how smart the good guys think their programmers are, the bad guys have programmers that are just as smart. More importantly, the good guys have to build the perfect protection scheme, impenatrable by any of infinite number of possible attacks. The bad guys only have to find out where the good guys screwed up. Its a lot easier to be the bad guys and crack the copy protection. Which is exactly why every effort to fully protect digital content has failed.
Its an ever escalating war. Every time the bad guys crack the code, the good guys come up with a new way to try to protect their content.
Over time, the protect schemes evolve and mutate. Every few years, the good guys come up with a completely new approach. A different way of trying to solve the problem.
Call it Digital Rights Management Evolution
But this creates a problem.
As DRM evolves, the playback software and devices will change to enable encoding and playback of content using the latest and greatest versions of DRM.
So whats the problem ?
Many of us are not going to take the time to re encode the content we already own to make sure it continues to be compatible with the new playback devices we are buying. Most of us wont even know that we need to as we go through different media playback environments over the next years.
All we are going to know , is that we have files on our hard drives that we cant play back.
My advice ? Any and all digital content that you purchase and OWN, with any sort of copy protection, crack it, and make a backup copy for your own personal storage.