The Car Extends Home Entertainment Options... With Copy Protection

from the lovely dept

If you've been following the automotive electronics world, you'd know that there's a lot happening in that space right now, as everyone's trying to figure out how to move entertainment and computing systems into the car. The original applications focused on automotive tasks, such as providing drivers with additional navigation information. Then came basic entertainment options, like in-car DVD or video game players. Now, carmakers are looking much more seriously at ways to more closely link up home and automotive entertainment systems, realizing that if home entertainment is going digital, the content should flow seamlessly from one to the other. People have been talking about applications that let you download music while you fill up your car with gas since at least 2000, and more recently there have been a couple of companies introducing WiFi-enabled car stereos to make transferring your MP3s easier. Still, rather than talking about what customers might really want, the automakers seem to be going out of their way to say they're going to "avoid an automotive Napster" by making sure your vehicles are chock full of copy protection, because, apparently, everyone is just dying to trade MP3s with others racing down the highway. Honestly, it seems like copy protection shouldn't be a big issue at all in this situation. How often are you going to be moving someone else's music and videos into your car rather than your own? All the copy protection is likely to do is to cause problems when someone wants to have copies of their songs in multiple cars, and on their home stereo at once. Of course, maybe the trick is that mobile phones or wireless iPods will replace in-dash car stereos, and a simple local area connection will connect a playing device to in-car speakers and video screens.