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Gartner is a major, well respected research group that does a lot of industry studies and future projections. The US Government uses them a lot.
Since the recent court ruling that a video jukebox can make copies of DVDs and play them from its hard disk without the original DVD inserted in the system, the industry has been looking for the next best thing. They already have the ability to restrict play of HD/blu-ray disks if any piece of the playback chain has been compromised, so this is just another step in that direction.
Most of the new hardware (and computer playback in Vista) is designed so that if any part of the system is insecure (not even compromised) then the output quality drops down. This means that the fancy 1080 computer front end you built may drop to 480 in a heartbeat.
Once with music we could take an Lp album and make a cassette tape for our own listening. Later we could convert the CDs to tape and then make CD copies of CDs so the CDs that melted in the car did not result in a total loss of the music. After that we were able to make copies of the CDs on our hard disks and create custom CDs for our own use.
Many people want to watch their DVDs on portable devices including some handheld game devices and even the video iPod. The MPAA (movie version of RIAA) wants to have us pay again for each new format we view the movie on. (Along the same lines as the ebook DRM where you buy the same book for each new reader.)
Notice in their article the constant phrase "additional fee." Abilities we have now are things they wish to make additional revenue sources for them.
Under the guise of opening up they are waging another assault, another attempt to increase the DRM restrictions.
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