Ripping a DVD, a federal crime in 1999, requires $22 and free software in 2026

I'm a bit confused by the title. It seems to suggest that ripping a DVD in 2026 is no longer a federal crime, which I'm pretty sure it is. And that ripping a DVD in 1999 didn't require $22 worth of hardware and some free software -> both of which I'm pretty sure it did.

What is the point of taking an actually interesting subject and injecting gpt botox into it making it 50x more words than it needs to be. I liked some details in the article and I'm not against AI prose in general but this blog post novel could've been an email. The part about server drives refusing to read dvds with css is crazy.

It's also nice that this has been solved for Blu-ray as well. You just have to buy the correct kind of Blu-ray drive, and there's custom firmware out there to flash on the drive and let you rip any Blu-ray.

What’s the $22 for, a DVD drive? I thought this was solved since Handbrake

Not the point the article is making but "Hardware Is $22" and "The cheap hardware costs less than a sandwich" makes me very glad I don't live in the US and want to buy a sandwich!

What changed is time. A clone of the NES lockout chip has been made now, 40 years after the NES. Nobody will enforce that because it didn't exist 40 years ago and Nintendo doesn't make money on NES games now, so they don't lose money on NES game piracy. The lockout chip worked, and its job was finished long ago.

I’m pretty sure I did it for much cheaper back in the day.

Also don't forget that in many countries it is illegal for you to torrent books and remove DRM from ebooks, notheless Meta was caught torrenting hundreds of GB of books without consequence

Nobody got a letter for copying a DVD at their home… I suppose if you sold them on the street corner you could maybe get in trouble maybe he’s confusing this with downloading movies which seems odd because he’s writing this as if he existed then

Is this GPT 5? In particular,

> The drive in your laptop does not do this. The cheap drive I had ordered off Amazon does not do this. A consumer drive’s firmware is, in the technical sense, dumb. It sees a disc, it reports the contents, it lets the OS handle whatever happens next. The server drive is the unusual one.

> This is worth pausing on.

The "short punchy sentences, new paragraph, 'This matters' type sentence" style is very reminiscent of GPT-5.x.

> The kind of thing every kid with a Dell tower in 2003 spent an entire weekend trying to figure out.

OK Claude.