I was fiddling with the Gateway Connected DVD Player, a $200 gizmo that lets you stream music, videos, and photos from your PC to your TV using a wireless network. I have to admit it was pretty slick, once I got the player and my 802.11b router close enough to talk to each other.

Then I started wondering: Could I stick a movie into my PC and stream it to my plasma TV? Could I excerpt my favorite bits from The Simpsons, store them on my hard drive, and watch them when I felt like it? That's when I ran headfirst into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Today you can insert a disc into your DVD player and watch it on your TV. You can put the same disc into your system's DVD-ROM drive and display it on your monitor. But you can't legally put the DVD in your PC and stream it to your TV over a network. Why? Because the movie industry worries that if you can stream media files to other devices, there's nothing to stop you from swapping them over the Big Bad Internet.

DMCA Blues

Before manufacturers can build DVD players, they must obtain a license from the DVD Copy Control Association. The DVDCCA license requires drive makers to implement the Content Scrambling System, which prevents consumers from storing digital movies on their hard drives or streaming them across a network. The DMCA, passed in 1998, prohibits tampering with copy-protection schemes like CSS. So if you try to hack CSS--by, say, using DeCSS software off the Net--a coven of copyright attorneys will swoop down and start gnawing on your entrails.

Hollywood never intended to forbid streaming legally purchased movies over a home network, says attorney Bruce Turnbull, a partner with Weil, Gotshal, & Manges, which represents major players in the DVD hardware arena. "The issue is making sure that you stream the content across the network in a way that preserves the protections of CSS," he says.

In fact, Turnbull says, in 2003 the DVDCCA began the process to approve a technology called Digital Transmission Content Protection, which will let protected content pass from a PC to other devices on a network. Gear using DTCP may show up later this year.

The DMCA is "about putting content owners in position to dictate what kinds of new equipment you're allowed to have," says Fred von Lohman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has spent five years fighting the DMCA.

In other words, just as Hollywood tried (and failed) to kill off tape recorders and VCRs, it's now trying to control how you play DVDs--and it has a federal law to back it up.

The DMCA is also about fear of the Net. Now, I've swapped files online. Every time the RIAA sues more college students, I download another batch of MP3s, laughing maniacally the whole time. But I don't do it instead of buying music; I do it to sample new artists or grab songs I'd never dream of purchasing. Does that make me an evil person? I think not. Will it get me sued? I hope not.

Instead of harassing file swappers, I wish content creators would figure out how to use the Internet to deliver their content intelligently. But that's me--and I'm just another Internet scofflaw.

Contributing Editor Dan Tynan is referring all questions to his attorney.