Blu-ray Managed Copy

The idea behind Blu-ray Managed Copy sounds good—it'll let you make one full-res backup copy of a Blu-ray disc, and studios are required to support it beginning next year. But needing brand new hardware is just the start.

"Managed copy" has been slouching its way toward our living rooms for years now, but the technology that can make backup copies of films will finally come to all Blu-ray discs on December 4, 2009. Unfortunately, no Blu-ray player yet has the ability to make one of these copies, rendering the whole scheme pretty pointless until consumers purchase the new players (available at some point in 2010) that are capable of contacting an authorization server over the Internet, verifying that this particular disc is allowed to make a copy, making the copy, then slathering the whole thing in a heavy marinade of DRM.

Oh, and no one said that these managed copies have to be free, either.

Four years of technological wrangling have devised this rough beast, one which sounds about as far removed from actual consumer desire as it is possible for a consumer-oriented product to be. And it's all brought to you by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which the US is currently trying to export to the rest of the world through the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).