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Boy, you really have to hand it to Digital Rights Management. Has any security measure ever been this effective? No wonder the pirates are all running away with their tails between their legs. Oh wait, that’s not what’s happening at all. It actually seems as if each new DRM and anti-piracy measure gets cracked by real pirates in practically no time. From the original “protection” for DVDs to Vista’s authentication server features, real pirates find DRM about as hard to get around as a one-foot high garden fence. The latest high-level protection to fall is the so called unbeatable DRM features in the HD-DVD format. Pirates recently posted a version of the HD-DVD movie Serenity, with all DRM protections removed, onto Bittorrent. So now the pirates will have no problem distributing the latest high-quality format. This is just further proof to what I’ve always said. Anti-piracy protections such as DRM or software activations really have nothing whatsoever to do with piracy. The companies that use these things know that real pirates will break it easily. DRM and its nasty cousins are all about one thing: controlling the ability of consumers like you to use content that you think you own in whatever fair use way that you might want to.