Gates: Blu-ray DRM is 'Anti-Consumer'

As part of a speaking tour at universities across the United States, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates sat down with Princeton's newspaper to discuss the road ahead. When asked why Microsoft chose to support HD DVD over Sony's Blu-ray format, Gates replied that Blu-ray's copyright protection scheme is "anti-consumer."

"The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won't work well on PCs," Gates said. "It's not the physical format that we have the issue with, it's that the protection scheme on Blu-ray is very anti-consumer." Gates also questioned how much next-gen DVD formats will even matter, saying content will soon be streamed directly or stored on a hard disk.