PeaceLove sez, “‘Surly media nerd’ Annalee Newitz has posted some hilarious predictions about the lame holiday crap of the future. Her DRM prediction rawks!”
DNA DRM: The latest solution to the problem of media copying is a digital rights management (DRM) scheme that relies on identifying the DNA of the consumer. When you purchase a piece of media, your licensed copy is encoded with 13 unique sequences of nucleotides from your genome. Each time you hit the power button on your new DNA DRM Zune media player, a hair-thin needle painlessly pierces your flesh and feeds a drop of blood into an embedded genome sequencer. If you are the registered owner of the media, you are permitted to play it. If you aren’t, the media is deleted from your device and a record of your transgression is reported to the central media certification authority. You will be forced to pay an extra “unlicensed play penalty tax” to license it next time. The only thing good about this system is that biohackers can take the DNA DRM Zune apart, remove the embedded sequencer, and use it to figure out if they have cancer.