ATi, Lying About HDCP Support?

[Big B]

Well, that's what DailyTech (Anandtech's sister site) is saying.

Most of ATI's recent retail products are currently shipping with advertisements claiming that the products are HDCP-ready. On ATI's website, the term HDCP-ready was also used, for example on the X1900 series specifications page. Curiously, ATI's professional products such as FireGL list "HDCP-compliant". We spoke to ATI and asked it why the terminology difference and what the difference was in its view, between compliance and ready. Unfortunately, we did not receive a sound response to that question. In an interesting turn of events, today ATI has begun to silently remove references to HDCP-ready on its consumer products.

Hmm...looks like the red team has been caught red handed. More importantly, if HDCP support is something you want, you may want to double check your video cards before purchasing. The full article can be had over here.

 

[Anti-Trend]

I have been keeping up with this as well, and it seems that most media sites are bashing them because the licensing fee for the HDCP support is relatively inexpensive for OEMs. However, none of these sites so far have taken into account the additional cost of the HDCP decoding chips which need to be manufactured and physically designed onto the boards they are producing. DRM is expensive for consumers and ineffectual against true piracy by nature, and this whole fiasco is proving that point once again. I am not saying we should be pleased with ATI for lying about the matter, but that DRM shouldn't exist just to ensure the margins of huge, greedy and overly-rich corporations in the first place. What ever happened to fair use?

-AT

 

[Big B]

What happened to fair use? Down the toilet with the goldfish.