Rooted Android Don't Play Nice with Android Movie Rentals

If you have rooted your new Android device, be prepared to not be able to rent movies and music from the Android Market. Google recently announced that when the newest version of Andriod becomes available to all devices, DRMed content will be restricted from playing on that device. Google claims that this due to an agreement between Google and the content producers. When a user with a rooted device attempts to run the content on their phone, they will get an error, "Failed to fetch license for [movie title] (error 49)".

Do content producers have the right to put this protection on this software? Sure. Will this prevent content from being either illegally distributed or prevent those users of rooted devices from accessing the restricted content? Not at all. In fact, this will encourage many users to get the same content from "other" sources. Though, this point is also debatable. A rooted Android device, much like a jailbroken iDevice, is "untrusted". One cannot expect an "untrusted" device to follow the rules of content restrictions. If we all can remember when Apple tried to restrict jailbroken iDevice users from accessing purchased iBooks content. Eventually, about a week later, hackers figured out a way to re-enable that content for jailbroken iDevices. The same will happen with rooted Android devices and their restrictions. This could be just a good will gesture from Google, telling content producers that they are battling piracy as much as they are. Most likely, when this measure from Google becomes defeated by hackers, Google will just say, "Well, we tried."

Image Source: techaloud.com