Perhaps having realised that going out of one's way to inconvenience customers is not a good business model,
Hollywood may be giving up on Macrovision, the copy-denial mechanism that prevents you from connecting a DVD player to a VCR. Warner Home Video have released the Harry Potter DVD without Macrovision encoding in the UK; this means that you can plug your DVD player into your VCR and pirate it for all your friends untrammeled. Or, if you have an older TV without A/V inputs, you can plug your DVD in through your VCR and watch it, full stop. Mind you, Macrovision costs the studios a few cents per disc, and is fairly easy to bypass with (as yet not illegal) "signal enhancers".
http://onepointzero.com/
Fri Jun 14 13:11:31 2002
Macrovision also interferes with video projectors. With more and more people having home cinema installations, it must be a problem.