Protection Scheme under Blu-Ray is Very Anti-Consumer?

Microsoft Corp.'s chairman Bill Gates said in an interview that the copy-protection scheme on the Blu-ray discs was very anti-consumer, which would make them harder to on the personal computers. This partly explains Microsoft's decision to support HD DVD format instead of Blu-ray format recently. "The key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won't work well on PCs. You won't be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way," Bill Gates said in an interview with The Daily Prestonian.

Mr. Gates said that physical format of the Blu-ray was okay, but copyright protection scheme was not fine for the PC. He indicated that once the Blu-ray group fixes that scheme to be more consumer friendly, "that would be fine". The chairman of the world's largest software maker also said that the Blu-ray and HD DVD were the last physical formats and in future removable media will be substituted by streamed content as well as delivery of the content via the Internet.

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