Engadget has a column on the official death of one of our favorite products, DVD Decrypter:

The scene – as I imagine it – was straight from the movie Brazil: in the dead of night lawyers from “a certain company” cut holes in the floor of the apartment above the “offender’s” flat. Quickly, these men in black repelled down ropes, tasered the unsuspecting software developer, and presented him with legally-binding contracts. In their ever-so-subtle way, they explained that the software developer had two options a) sign over his life’s work now or b) fight the good fight, go broke, go to jail, and *then* sign over his life’s work. Not surprisingly, DVD Decrypter’s author chose option a.

For those unaware, DVD Decrypter was a DVD archiving program that had garnered the respect of novices and hardcore users alike. Simple to use yet full-featured, DVD Decrypter laid the groundwork for those among us who like to do such things as create our own media servers or watch our DVDs on our Smartphones, PDAs, etc. It was a great program whose uses were far greater than the assumed nefarious purpose of distributing DVDs over the Internet.

As the MPAA struggles with trying to put the digital Genie back into the proverbial bottle we’d like to point out that everything that this proprietary product does is still available, for FREE, from open source software on the net. While it will be easy to shut down people who sell such software they better start planning how to live in a post-Copyright control world.