I've been following the on going war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray.
I will NEVER be buying a Blu-ray drive, but wanted to share with you, and see what some of your people think about what Sony's is doing.

Read about it here, if you don't yet know much about it yet.
http://bluraysucks.com/boycott

Also very intresting -
http://bluraysucks.com/?id=7&x=boycott

I understand the need to protect a product from piracy, I am all for people who make something getting the money they deserve...

Sometimes though it seems like the copy protection itself makes the product less worthwhile. This is just an opinion, but a good example might be the Starforce copy protection being put on games/software. One of my computers had problems with the CD-ROM drive after that...

The same with Sony's rootkit that came with some music CDs they were selling...

Also if I am going to buy a movie that costs upwards of $20 I want the ability to backup the media...

I agrre with you.

As for the blue ray rhis would be good just for gaming and data. Like if you want to ghost your HDD.

I think that blueray is a great idea, although the cost is huge..

Think about it. When DVD's came out, they cost a lot. Some people bought them, some didn't. Now look a few years later at how people are buying a hell of a lot more DVDs than the videos (which will soon be completely obselete). Compare that with the Blueray drive.

The blueray drive will cost a bomb when it comes out, but as time passes it'll become more and more common. The price will lower, it'll become another universal disk that everyone uses (like DVDs are now - computer wise and dvd player wise)... and it'll be the next thing if you know what I mean.

Then eventually blueray will become obsolete and a completely new type of disk and drive will come out that is more reliable and large than a blueray one... the times are just changing and everyone will have to learn to accept it.

Note: I don't back up Sony at all, and i'm not getting a PS3 straight away when it comes out: too costly. I'll stick with my 360 for a while (and we want the wii!!!)

Oh and as for HD-DVD I don't see anything special. I didn't even know there was a "war" going on hehe... because as far as I see it I couldn't give a damn who wins. We'll get both in the end and then something bigger and better will replace it.

If you look back into the past, the entertainment industry was against VCRs. Ive read that Vista will downgrade the quality of HD videos so that you cant make a real copy of a movie. If you look up Windows Vista on Wikipedia they talk about how the industry is getting MS to lower the video quality in Vista so people cant make complete copies of the movies they buy. This is with HD not Bluray so Im not sure I like either

To be honest with you, I'm just looking forward to holographic HDD's and Organic CPUs. I am of the mind that, on a normality, I usually wait until a technology is prooven (Vista being an exception, of course ... lol) before I commit to purchasing it. Neither BlueRay, nor HD-DVD provide any significant improvement over conventional media; and, they have alot to proove to the world before they will be accepted main-stream.
Historical LOL's: Anyone remember the BetaMax tape? Yeah, I'm old; but the point is, few people bought one (despite the awesome picture/sound quality that still surpasses the VHS clones) because the manufacturer (Sony) didn't want to play nice with the rest of the industry. For that reason alone, most people will wait until the market stabilizes before the make a decision.