Another DRM d’oh
Use restrictions management (DRM) at your own risk. According to The Register, the distributors for Steven Spielberg’s latest film Munich have managed to fsck up the movie’s application for the British Bafta awards:
Steven Spielberg’s Munich has effectively been knocked out of the running for next month’s Bafta awards after a batch of DVDs sent to voters eligible to judge the UK award were coded incorrectly for European viewing. Copies of the film were earlier held up for a month in UK Customs. When they finally made it out of cold storage British Academy of Film and Television Arts voters found they were encoded as Region 1 DVDs. That meant they would only be playable on multi-region DVD players. But the DVDs was encrypted so that they’d only play on proprietary DVD players supplied by Dolby-subsidiary Cinea so even that approach was doomed. A spokeswoman for Munich’s distributors blamed a “lab error” for the SNAFU. She said UK screenings of the film would be arranged to make sure voters saw the film but it’s unlikely there’s enough time to arrange this properly before the second round of voting, which ends on Thursday.
Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen.