Edited by author 08-29-2002 03:43 PM
I can certainly see Apple's reasons for doing this; it makes financial sense -- if not PR sense.

But if making iDVD work with external drives isn't a clear case of reverse-engineering for the purposes of interoperability then what is?

Here's my question: Why does Apple pay a royalty to the DVD consortium for each copy of the software? This document suggests licensing is a one-off fee. What aspect of the software is covered by the $1/unit license fee? Perhaps there's a clause I'm currently unaware of (let me know) but AFAIK the only element would be CSS, which the DVD-CCA licenses seperately.

Burning DVDs doesn't require CSS, though, since DVD players are supposed to be able to play un-CSS'd DVDs. Most commercial discs are CSS'd but doing it is optional. So yes, you could include that feature, and maybe Apple has (I don't own it to see for myself) but why would anyone want to do that? If you're burning a disk on your iMac, then surely it's either for yourself or your friends -- you don't need or want it to be protected, right? (And if you did, you'd want something better than CSS, but I digress)

Seems like a poor excuse one way or another; either it's not the real reason, or it is, but they were foolish to go with that "screw the consumers and get screwed by the DVD consortium" business model in the first place.