Do away with video copy protection!

Video formats change every few years.  We had VHS years ago and now we have machines that can convert your VHS tapes to DVD format.  Awesome.  Now we have Blu-ray disks.  The market is ever changing, though.  These will soon be replaced with a digital downloadable format from the internet.  The disks, especially blu-ray, and the downloadable videos from iTunes and wherever else are protected from being copied.  So what happens when we go all digital and store all our movies on hard drives or even in the cloud?  How can we copy our disks to the next format?  I mean, the players that play disks won't last forever.

And now what about these downloadable videos from iTunes and various other places, like Amazon Video.  They're all copy protected.  They'd be fantastic if you could play them on any player you wish directly to your TV, but depending on what place you buy these from you have to have a different box to play them on.  So, what if we have to have a computer hooked to our TV?  Why do that if all we want is just to watch videos we bought online?  The one answer is to stream it to your favorite media box.  Even I can't get that to work most of the time, how do they expect your average Joe to do this?

If we could only get rid of the protection, so we could put it into a format we can actually play on our TV boxes, we'd be all set.  Copy protection makes things way too complicated.  The music industry learned this a long time ago.  Now we have music we can play and copy to ANY player we want.  No complications.  I completely understand the industry's frustration of copyright violations and I understand they want that kind of control over their media, but copy protection makes things complicated for those that want to be able to play what they bought.  Sooner or later they need to come to trust people with your media and content.  People already have found ways to copy things they shouldn't.  The point of copy protection is lost when people find ways around it.

In conclusion, we need to end this digital copy protection that is on all media, now.  It complicates things and the point of it is defeated already, therefore lose the protection and sell the media unprotected just like music. It's time we move on.