Felten Follower Examines Crippled Music Disks 160
D4C5CE writes "Following in the footsteps of his famous professor, in his paper "Evaluating New Copy-Prevention Techniques for Audio CDs" (yes, that's pure PS), which is one of many interesting contributions to the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management, Princeton student Alex Halderman takes apart (bit by bit, literally) the "tricks on tracks" employed by the music industry to frustrate fair use."
Re:Role of OS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yah..But how long before that "option" is removed from the screen, and instead an "error" is indicated? From the way the DMCA has been brought upon, I dont see far.
Re:Role of OS! (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, Microsoft is getting all the pieces in place, look at their "Secure Audio Path" approved drivers; they're pretty clearly planning to pull the "benign warning" lynch pin at some point.
'Frustrate fair use' (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's be fair here... (Score:5, Insightful)
...as if the music industry's actions has nothing whatsoever to do with frustrating music pirates.
Let's be fair here. We all know that recent copy protection schemes do in fact (at the very least) interfere with fair use, but we can't forget/deliberately ignore the underlying goal of the music industry for the sake of sensationalism, however faulty their methods are.
OT Re:Fair use? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever games they and you (and for all we know you are they) play to pretend otherwise, their goal is to squeeze more and more money out of those who legally purchase their works, thinking that as long as the market may be able to bear more, it is their duty to extract more by further restriction of rights, whatever that means to their customers.
This is also very obvious from your / their push to extend copyright perpetually, extracting more and more, not from the copyright violators, but from those who abide by the laws.
While you / they feel it is your right to push it to the edge to squeeze every last drop from the paying public who have suported you thus far, claiming you / they are just trying to make pirates pay their fair share. The fact kicking those who have been buying dozens or hundreds of new titles every a year does not make us more loyal, and will eventually lead to changes more fundamental than what you / they complain about today.
We know your industry hates discussion of fair use. If they ever showed any signs of actually caring about preserving the rights of the customer, they might have a legitimate sympathizer or two among the paying public. An approach that exhibited any evenhandedness, restoring some of what they have driven so hard to take away, would shock their opponents. There are any number of forms this could take technologically.
I don't understand why they try... (Score:5, Insightful)
If they can't play it in the devices they have will they
a) Call it a defective cd? Most likely.
b) When they find out it's defective by design, will they
1) Continue to buy defective CDs?
2) Get a normal CD(-R) from friends or mp3 from internet?
We get more and more DVD/CD/MP3/kitchen sink consumer players. Break compatibility with those, and the MPAA will have only themselves to thank when the customers abandon them (Who the hell pays $20-25/CD anyway, that's the usual full price here in Norway...)
Kjella
Re:Which way will hardware producers go? (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe they will. If you cast your mind back a few years, it was touch and go as to wether a drive supported CDDA properly. Consumers educated themselves and bought drives which were known to work. This caused a demand for CDDA capable drives, and the other manufacturers caught up (Most of them, anyway!). These days its hard to find a drive that doesn't do CDDA.
The system works! (O.K, it sort of works...). I don't see why it couldn't work again.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't understand why they try... (Score:3, Insightful)
a) Call it a defective cd? Most likely.
b) When they find out it's defective by design, will they
1) Continue to buy defective CDs?
2) Get a normal CD(-R) from friends or mp3 from internet?
No, right about the time the users start to rally and enough of an outcry is made, the RIAA will present their solution: A new medium, be it DVDA or SACD or some other format, that has DRM built in.
They're hoping if they frustrate you enough, you'll eventually have to choose another medium, which they'll be happy to provide!
ljfrench
Re:Role of OS! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd tend to disagree. Microsoft does at least appear to have gained a clue about security recently, and if they refuse to allow unsigned drivers outright they are opening an ugly can of worms. It takes time to get that WHQL certification that marks a driver as signed, so consider what would happen in the scenario of an exploit being found in a WHQL driver and made public immediately.
The driver vendor might be able to issue a patch almost immediately, but would then have to submit it for WHQL approval before it can be installed. Even with somekind of "fasttrack emergency approval" mechanism for this situation, that's not going to happen overnight. Now imagine the outcry from those who do have a security clue if they are left vulnerable because Microsoft decided it was in their best interests not to allow them to install the patch because it was unsigned.
The security services have the definition right; a "trusted box" is one that has the capability to break your security policy. Think about it - your firewall is "trusted" right? Yet if it breaks and starts allowing all packets through, what just happened to security. Now, tell me again Microsoft, "Palladium" is "trusted computing" and this is a good thing? ;)
Re:Just semantics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair use is largely concerned with being able to copy a work. The problem that I and many like me see is that it can't even be properly argued that there IS any profit in it. The point is not profit but control, with the idea that in some time in the future this can be leveraged to make profit. It's the same reason Disney are so scared to let "Steamboat Willie" fall out of copyright. You think they're going to many a fortune on that any time soon?
2. I have little doubt that the problems that are occurring are because they're trying to -comply- with spec, not obliterate it -- namely, the problems some have noted with copy-protected compact discs are because the industry is trying to protect its content while remaining compatible with an obsolete standard.
I have to wonder if you're not just having a laugh with this one. Altering a specification, for whatever reason, is quite the opposite to complying with it. The proper method of adding functionality to a specification is to create a new one. Compare how PNG could not support animation, so a new specification was made, MNG, that could. Also compare how no-one uses MNG, because they are quite happy with PNGs and animated gifs. This is how you determine whether a standard is obsolete or not, and the same logic applies to the CD. If everyone is happy with it, it isn't obsolete... or will you be listening to sounds with a frequency out of the (44100/2) = 22050Hz that CD supports?
3. I have little doubt that when the next generation of media arrives, with effective digital rights management built in, that it will have the capability to deliver content and permit fair use...
The two are the antithesis of each other. When the day comes that I can't copy a CD to play on another stereo, or just to make a backup, I've lost all pretence of having fair use capabilities in the CD.
4.
Examples, please. I have yet to see any examples that have evidence of piracy harming small record chains, while I have seen some that suggest it helps by providing wider exposure. "Piracy" has been bandied around so long as the cause of all commercial suffering that people are beginning to believe it, even using it for an excuse for failure.
5. I think that the free market will probably be the best way to determine how importantly fair use should factor in to these new designs.
Spot on correct! So when are we going to repeal the DMCA and throw out the SSSCA/CBDTPA? Let's let the free market (including all the fair-use supporting consumers) decide whether crippled content delivery will fly or not.
Re:Just semantics? (Score:1, Insightful)
In other words, if it plays on anything resembling a CD player, you can digitally copy it.
Just because scrambling the error correction throws off Windows PCs, that does not mean it is impossible to copy the disc. It might make it impossible for the average person, but not impossible.
IANAL but... (Score:3, Insightful)
The industry likes to threaten lawsuits over technical discussions of their various techniques, but they will never actually let one of those lawsuits be taken to court because they know they'll be bitchslapped into the middle of next week by a pissed off judge. They'd far rather stick an academian with the cost of initially retaining a lawyer rather than risk having to pay his legal fees for blatantly abusing the legal system.
So they may file a lawsuit but it'll be retracted as soon as Halderman's lawer files his first brief.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what is a "pirate"? (Score:3, Insightful)
That wasn't the point I was making. My point is that these technologies simply have made it easier to aquire their product without paying for it.
"Want to know what the largest network is that distributes copyrighted music?"
That's true, but neither Napster nor any of the P2P software makers are paying royalties for the distribution of their product.
And I may be too young to remember, but I don't recall any music company suing a radio station over listeners who were recording songs from the airwaves.
Re:Role of OS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft(tm)'s Palladium scheme will require signed drivers. There is simply no way to try to enforce that level of security while still allowing end users to insert arbitrary code into the kernel. Not with any standard definition of "driver" and "kernel".
Most likely they will "compromise". You'll be able to load unsigned drivers, but when you reboot to load the drivers Palladium will detect that the OS is no longer in a "secure" state and any software that relies on the "trust" Palladium gives will be disabled. So no running WMP. And even though Microsoft(tm) has claimed that they won't use Palladium for software licensing somebody will. It's just too juicy for software publishers to resist. So you can expect that software to break. And since guarding against virii and such is one of the trumpeted reasons for Palladium, you can expect your AV software to have a fit. Who knows what it's failure mode will be. Should it not allow anything, since it can't really trust it's own binary, or it's AV database? Or should it allow everything for the same reason? Either failure mode is quite unpleasant. Or should it continue as if nothing had changed?
Now imagine the outcry from those who do have a security clue if they are left vulnerable because Microsoft decided it was in their best interests not to allow them to install the patch because it was unsigned.
Anybody with a security clue should realize that Palladium is about creating a new level of security user which is higher than "Administrator" and which only Microsoft(tm) has access to. No more. No less. It's about taking root access away from the user and giving it to Microsoft(tm). Any security administrator who willfully gives up final control of their box to the OS vendor gets exactly what they deserve. What's remarkable is how many "administrators" are going to be dumb enough to do exactly that.
Palladium is designed to make the PC an attractive platform to media conglomerates for online content. A platform which will allow Microsoft(tm) to collect a toll on that delivery. It has nothing to do with increasing security for end users. Media companies don't trust their cusomters, nor do they trust their PCs. Microsoft(tm), by assuming control of the users computer, will be able to assure the media companies that their customers PC's can be trusted, even though the customers themselves can't be.
Re:I don't understand why they try... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what I find amazing. These CD's work only in plain audio CD players. But as the incremental cost of adding MP3 playback drops to almost nothing, more and more players are including that functionality. Quite a few portables play MP3s. At least a dozen car CD decks play them. All DVD players. All computers of course. I've even seen boom boxes that play them.
And these new discs, by trashing the TOC with stupid multisession tricks, are going to have problems in a growing class of players. It's like the media conglomerates want me to go pirate their music. With their endless campaign to reduce both the quality of the music as well as the compatability and usefulness of the disc itself, combined with what seems to be endless price hikes and settlements with the FCC for price fixing. Ugh. The music industry survives despite the executives running it, not because of them.
Re:Role of OS! (Score:3, Insightful)