There are advantages for both consumers and owners with this scheme, says Shamoon. "It supports the copy/no copy commands but it also lets you buy the movie you just watched at the end, or send it to 10 friends," he says.

The new techniques, promises Shamoon, will be both secure and painless. "Having been around the block a few times, we've learned a lot," says Shamoon, who once worked for the Secure Digital Music Initiative, creators of a vaunted protection scheme that was defeated in October 2000. "Our new products are as easy as buying something on Amazon, except you don't have to wait for UPS to show up."

But just as Shamoon overestimated the strength of SDMI, some experts argue, Hollywood and the digital rights management industry have failed to realize that the search for secure content is a Sisyphean exercise.

Today's copy-protection technologies are less frustrating than those of the past, but they still threaten to enrage and alienate consumers. Take the case of Microsoft Office XP. The copy-protected software is full of problems, says Tom Cramer, 21, a server technician for Compaq in Colorado Springs, Colo.

"I have a licensed copy and I've had to call Microsoft to reactivate it several times," he says. "When I reformatted my laptop, it didn't pick up that it was the same machine. I've since changed laptops; and the license says that I can have it on one laptop and one desktop but when I bought a new laptop, I had to call again."

"If this is the kind of protection that gets into a digital device, I'm going to be upset," he adds. "If I have to call a record label to say, hey, my MP3 player broke, give me another license, I'm not going to buy the device."

Even the tightest and smoothest forms of protection promise to be not just annoying, but also beatable, say experts. History is on the hackers' and crackers' side. Every attempt to handcuff content -- even cable and satellite TV -- has failed. And the reason is simple: If you can see or hear the content once, you can find a way to copy it. Episodes of "South Park" may originally only be legally available to cable television subscribers, but they're also easily available via the Net. One digitized, uploaded copy opens Pandora's box.

If users can't decrypt the stream, reset the index of the CD or recode the television to allow for digital output, they'll simply record another way, notes Touretzky. "People don't care all that much about the superior quality of digital content, compared to price and convenience issues," he says, pointing out that MP3s became popular even though they sound worse than CDs. "So, if people can't grab the digital data stream, they'll just set up a microphone next to their speakers and take the one-time analog quality hit in order to rerecord the data in an unprotected format. Granted, this is a lot less convenient than ripping CDs is now, but they'll do whatever it takes."

Ultimately, Touretzky and others argue, copy protection and the Net are technologically at odds, magnets repelling each other in opposite directions. "It's the nature of the Net to pass information from anywhere to anywhere," says Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten, who was threatened with legal action by the Recording Industry Association of America for planning to give a paper on how to reverse-engineer SDMI. "It's the same with PCs: They can handle and process information in any way that you like. Copyright protection is the opposite."

Society must either give up on copy protection or the general-purpose PC and the Net, says Felten. And no matter how hard Hollywood tries, Felten argues, society will eventually choose the latter because "the sheer value of the Net and computers is so much greater than any value that copy protection can provide."

Not even Hollings' Security Systems Standards and Certification Act will keep Hollywood's content safe, some argue.

"Congress may as well legislate that water has to run uphill," says Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University. "All the legislation in the world can't change the fact that you have this content and if you listen to it or see it, then you can copy it."

"[New technologies and laws] won't work any better than the Federal Prohibition Bureau for curbing illegal alcohol use during prohibition," says Cianessi. "Society will continue to slowly evolve around legislative obstacles, just as it always has."

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