As you know, Tivo and I have been having some unlove recently. I missed The Daily Show last night. I almost missed the Gilmore Girls season premiere. I am running out of DVDs to watch during the dead hours.

But now, at least, I know why. PVRBlog reports that TiVo can now stop you from keeping your recordings.

I like to think that I'm a man of taste, culture, and morality, and I hope that rubs off. So, my natural conclusion is that my Tivo killed itself out of shame.

DRM has its place in the world, don't get me wrong. Even though I don't think that what we term "Intellectual Property" is really "property" in any meaningful sense, nor that copyright infringement is "stealing" does not mean that I think it's okay, or that I dispute that it is and ought to be illegal.

But let us get this straight: the purpose of DRM today is not to protect copyright. It is (as, for example, the XRML specification says) nothing more and nothing less than a mechanism to enable new business models.

It's not a matter of "Now we have a way to protect our media from those evil pirates!" Instead, it's "Hell's Bells! Before, we had to actually sell you a physical copy of the movie, which you could watch as often as you wanted! But now, we can charge you for things we had to give away before. We can charge you for every viewing! We can charge you extra to pause! Double fees if you rewind! An extra charge for turning the volume up too high!"

The real problem, for me, is that the technology isn't being driven by what the consumers want. It's being driven by what the industry wants. How many consumers want this? None. None at all. We get what they want us to have. And what recourse do we have? A few of the really clever among us might have something, but not most.

Remember Divx? Not the Mpeg-4 codec (that's DiVx); I'm talking about the DVD-competitor. Their schtick was that you'd only pay $5 or so for the discs, but they'd bill you a dollar every time you watched it.

If you remember, it also failed spectacularly. But I'm not boycotting Tivo, and neither are you, are you?

However, please leave a comment if you have evidence that you can build a PVR out of a <200Mhz computer (It only has to record; I can handle playback externally). Because I'm really thinking of building a MythTV or Freevo or something.