DRM Take II — Digital Personal Property 356
Diabolus Advocatus writes "Ars Technica has an article on a new form of DRM being considered by the IEEE. It's called Digital Personal Property and although it removes some of the drawbacks of conventional DRM it introduces new drawbacks of its own. From the article: 'Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects. For instance, you might loan your car to a friend, a family member, or a neighbor. You might do so on many different occasions and for different lengths of time. But you are unlikely to leave the car out front of your house with the keys in it and a sign on it saying, "Take me!" If you did, you might never see the vehicle again. It's that ability to lose control over property that is central to the DPP system. DPP files are encrypted. They can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here's the trick: anyone who can view your content can also "steal" it irrevocably. The simple addition of a way to lose content instantly leads consumers to set up a "circle of trust" that can be as wide as they like but will not extend to total strangers on the Internet.'"
why do they keep trying? (Score:5, Insightful)
what are they trying to achieve?
surely after years of being beaten to a pulp they MUST have learned that any attempt at controlling is more than futile?
DRM will fail. (Score:5, Insightful)
With every new push, however, the average consumer comes closer to running head-first into these limitations. When you have people's files start disapearing off their hard drive when there is no physical product, they might finally join us in asking: "Why the Hell is a collection of ones and zeroes being treated this way?"
The harder DRM advocates push, the more the consumer becomes less ignorant of their questionable ownership philosophy.
Still smells like DRM to me... (Score:3, Insightful)
On a side note... I would think that "stealing" mp3s would open up a whole new can of worms. What are you going to do when your "buddy" down the street refuses to "return" your music library, call the police?
Emulating the physical world... (Score:4, Insightful)
One would think they would eventually see the change of paradigm that's been going on for... 30 years?
oh yah.. this is gonna work. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why treat it as physical media? It's not! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why do they keep trying? (Score:5, Insightful)
what are they trying to achieve?
surely after years of being beaten to a pulp they MUST have learned that any attempt at controlling is more than futile?
They keep trying for the same reason that politicians who push for shitty laws keep trying: they know that they only need one major victory and everyone will be stuck with it forever. That's why they don't read something like this:
and come up with a response like this: "but if I could make an infinite number of perfect copies of my car while retaining my own copy, at low or no cost, what would be my incentive to use a system designed to make me lose control over my car or any other property?"
nice try (Score:1, Insightful)
"For instance, you might loan your car to [...] But you are unlikely to [...] If you did, you might never see the vehicle again."
Yeah... that's because I can't copy my car.
Consumers will never treat digital media like physical objects.
IEEE, you fail again.
Fail. (Score:4, Insightful)
Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects
That's great, except for one small problem. Digital media have none of the characteristics of physical objects. Build business models that recognise this, or go out of business. Those are your only two choices. Trying to force consumers to treat digital media like physical objects is no more likely to work than the car industry trying to persuade people to treat the sea like a road.
Re:It is only DRM+ (Score:5, Insightful)
And anyone with a "link" to the key can assume ownership. So if you, or any of your friends' computers are compromised, they can "steal" your DPP protected stuff. And you can never get it back.
Of course, there is little reason to steal; people who want the files in question would simply get DPP-free versions. Only malicious sorts and vandals would bother, since there'd be no real gain from the act. But if you have a falling out with your friend, it doesn't look like you can "change the locks" so to speak. If I give a house key to a friend, and for some reason stop trusting him, I can change the locks on my house. This doesn't seem to support a similar mechanism. Also, unless you store the playkey online (which has its own problems), a hardware failure in the playkey storage device will cost you your files. Returning to the house analogy, it would be like your house burning down (okay, becoming inaccessible forever) because you lost the key to the front door.
It's very simple.. (Score:1, Insightful)
There's no way in hell that any sort of DRM will be ever successful.
Re:Betting Pool (Score:3, Insightful)
This would create a market for hacker/thieves to create malicious software intended to transfer, thus steal, your DPP.
Pawn shops (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, to protect against loss, can I insure it for a penny on the dollar and the recover my losses if something happens to it?
The problem with most current schemes is that are extremely consumer hostile. I might have a CD stolen, but I can buy a used one very cheap. Digital music must be cheaper to distribute, no loss, no theft of the CD, but we still pay the same amount for the music, and have not option of buying it again in the secondary market.
Likewise, if some steals a car from me, I can have the cops do something about it. If someone steals my iPod, nothing is likely to be done. Not the cops, not Apple, not the labels will help me recover my property. They will, however, happily profit off the crime. OTOH, if I put a few songs up for people to copy, I will be liable for millions. Go figure.
In articles like this, the conclusion is often not the interesting item. Very often the conclusion is impractical and ineffective. What is sometimes interesting is the process they went through. For instance, one of the IEEE mags recently published a methods of secure offsite testing. As far as I can tell, while it prevents the cat from getting a degree, it does not protect against feeding answer to the traditional students. So it is not 100%, but the methods they use are interesting. It would be nice if the summaries would include some interesting bits, rather than just a naked conclusion, which is rather useless.
It's still DRM... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's still another attempt to make reality match "legality" instead of the other way around.
'If someone else copies your file, you will be punished by loosing that file'...
Fuck. That. Shit.
The current (and as it has always been) paradigm of free copying of data, is the best and most honest way of dealing with data.
"He who lights his taper off of mine does not diminish mine"... Jefferson, IIRC.
Whoever came up with this idea should lose their computing licence.
Adding a layer of indirection (Score:4, Insightful)
The core idea here is quite clever, it's kind of a Prisoner's Dilemma situation, where if you decide to be non-cooperative with whoever gave you a piece of media content, you can gain exclusive control over it... but if everyone decides to be cooperative, then everyone has shared access to it. This would provide a strong incentive for people to limit the sharing of their purchased content to people they trust, which would prevent unlimited sharing.
Very clever.
However, it ultimately suffers from the same fundamental problem as any other DRM scheme: Bits are too easy to replicate. While the idea specifically allows for unlimited replication of the content, it still requires strong DRMish control over the "playkey". Effectively, it just replaces the problem of controlling access/ownership of a large pile of very-copyable bits (the content) with the problem of controlling access/ownership of a small pile of very-copyable bits (the playkey).
While reducing the scale of a problem does sometimes make it more tractable, I don't think it really helps in this case. You still end up with some bits that must somehow be moved and shared, but without the possibility that they may be copied. How do you do that? No one knows. You can try to lock it up in secure hardware (effectively a dongle), but even if you succeed, you've just created a major hassle for end-users -- which is exactly what this scheme is supposed to fix. And, of course, really securing that key is very hard, and doing it cost-effectively darned near impossible.
And I don't see any possible way this could work without some sort of on-line interaction. When I "take ownership" of a playkey that I've been given access to, how is it that everyone else loses the ability to use that key? Obviously there must be some sort of central system involved, if not for each usage of the key, at least periodically, to check in to see if the possessor should still have access to it.
Perhaps there's another even more brilliant technical idea underlying the rather clever social hack, but I doubt it.
Re:The miss the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus, what about all the artists who refuse to give up creative control to anyone? You do realize that many artists have second jobs to pay for their living expenses, while their art is their hobby?
Re:DRM will fail. (Score:5, Insightful)
No they won't.
Years of piss-poor software will lead them to think that it's "just one of those things" and power cycle their system.
If that doesn't work, they'll just buy a new one because what they had must have broken.
Re:why do they keep trying? (Score:5, Insightful)
Social engineering. They want to change the way in which we understand data.
Currently we tend to think of any sort of information as something to be shared freely. It's what we as a species do. I think that tendency to swap data among ourselves is what led us to amass the information that makes up our present culture and technology. It's a pretty basic thing in human beings.
But it's a pain to monetize data on that model. It didn't matter when distributing the data was expensive, since you could charge for the distribution. So as distribution costs for data approach zero, the challenge for the media cartels has always been to reframe our understanding of data, so that we think of it in the same terms as a car or a house. I believe that's why the term "intellectual property" was coined in the first place.
The trouble is it didn't work. It turns out that if you take a tune and try and rebrand it as some sort of household accessory, people still treat it as a song. So this is the logical next step: make that song behave more like real property, and see of that shifts people's thinking.
I can't see it helping myself. It's DRM, and it's always going to fundamentally, inherently insecure. But you can see where they're going with the idea.
Uh, right... What a crock of shit (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright is a social contract which has time, and time, and time again been abused and violated by large corporations and their lobbying groups. This DPP nonsense is a sop to their war on the public domain and the rights we are used to enjoying.
This proposal? Well, let's smoke some MPAA/RIAA crack and spend a fortune making computers work in a way that suits their old business models.
You can't treat a number like property (Score:3, Insightful)
When you boil the matter down to its essence, digital content is simply a bunch of very long numbers. You can't treat numbers like property. Imagine trying to treat the number 17 as property. It doesn't work.
Because they have to (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like when a five year old tells you he can't find his shoes because he lost them. But he doesn't want to get in trouble so he'll say a gypsy took them. And you know the kid is lying but when you press him - he'll start to describe the gypsy. "He had purple pants, a gold shirt, and a moustache. He had a little monkey with him."
Much the same with DRM. They've lobbied for it, they've pushed it, they've gotten people to buy it and then yanked the key servers and left them high and dry. It can't be a swindle, they just haven't found the correct solution yet! So we go around and around with the industry talking about how to do this the right way. The truth is that there is no right way. The truth is that DRM is a lie. It can't work. Ever. Whenever you hold both the lock and the key, it stops being about cryptography and starts being about how to game the system.
Read up on how people beat DRM systems. Like DVD Jon. He's not a gonzo cryptographer. He didn't break DVD by his sheer mathematical skills. No. He was a kid with a machine code monitor who found the decrypted key in memory.
But like any good lie, you have to keep telling it once you start. Because the minute you say "well as it turns out there wasn't any gypsy" that's when you get in deep trouble. Imagine the class action lawsuits that would result! No, telling the lie over and over is much cheaper. So let's hear it for DRM2. I'm sure it'll buy the industry at least six more months before the next bored kid from the Netherlands comes along.
History shows rejection of imitations (Score:4, Insightful)
First, it is not correct to assume that patronage is the only alternative. There are many other models. But I want to focus on this claim:
Something like this actually happened in the 1950s. But it was resolved without the law. Musicians, fans and the industry decided against imitation.
Up until then the market for music had focused on songs, not particular recordings. There were many recordings of each song, and listeners did not mind a whole lot which one they bought. But with R&B music, the particular arrangement of a hit became more and more important. Instead of simply producing covers of popular songs, labels started to clone them, imitating everything they could, from using the same arrangement to hiring the same backup singers. Musicians protested, calling the clones "theft." Labels and radio stations said they would have nothing to do with them (though they didn't always follow through).
But what really changed the situation was the listeners. They wanted to hear the real thing - the original they had heard on the radio, not a knock off. The clones - and the covers simply faded away.
If you are sponsoring a musician (maybe you're Coke looking for music to use in advertising, or maybe you're a group of fans who have pooled their money for a sequel to Firefly), what would you rather do: pay for something that people will see as a cheap imitation, or put your money into something different?
Sure, people like things similar to what they already know. This is part of cultural change. My description of clones in the 1950s is drawn from Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll, where he also writes:
A lot of the best innovation comes from taking something old and mixing in something new. Is the Mac GUI just a rip-off of Xerox? Is it bad that Linux is a reimplementation of UNIX? Was it bad that Shakespeare wrote his own versions of other people's stories?
Frankly though, I don't know that I'm really disagreeing with you. As you point out, the culture industries already put much of their effort into retreads and sequels.
The obvious question is... (Score:4, Insightful)
...why?
"Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects."
When we see things like this, we need to sit down and have a hard look at the intent here. The fundamental nature of digital media is that copying is essentially a zero-cost event. The entire point of "DPP" is to break the nature of digital media.
Why? Why are we breaking the natural advantage of this new format? This isn't much different than pouring ink all over the pages of a book, so that they can't be read. Ultimately, we have to realise that we're doing it to make digital media fit the mold of traditional media.
Yes, I know you're thinking "but that's exactly what it SAYS! Make consumers treat digital media like physical objects." No revelation here--just repeating the blindingly obvious.
My point, though, is that the digital media breaks the economic model. We need to fix the model, not break the media. DRM is backwards. DPP is backwards. They're making the media fit the model (by kneecapping it), not making the model fit the media.
Reality is that digital media are here. A model that doesn't change to adapt to reality is one that HAS to die eventually.
Re:It is only DRM+ (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's not an easy problem, and as compression improves, option #2 there will get even harder over time.
Look at it from the artists point of view (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm writing a game for Xbox right now and I will do everything in my power to protect it. I want every person who plays and enjoys the game that I've spent many hours writing to pay me for my hard work.
I am not evil, I do not want to hold people back, I am not much more greedy than the next guy, it's just that I've spent a lot of time working through engineering textbooks and learning cryptic shader code to write this game and to me each copy of that game doesn't represent the effort it takes to ctrl+c, ctrl+v. To me that game represents the work that I've put into it
.
I pay for music that I listen to, not for the record companies, not because it takes great effort to copy the data, but because the artist have put their heart and souls into the music. They have put a lot of work into it and deserve to be payed.
If you don't like the big record labels don't listen to the music they produce.
Re:You down with DPP? (Score:5, Insightful)
Forshame, whoever tagged the parent offtopic.
That's why I hate getting first post, although the last time or two I didn't get downmodded. Some mods just automatically mod down a first post.
As to the actual topic,
It's DPP, data other people's what you get it
There's no room for rights management, there's just room to hit it
I wish the charlatains who keep trying to come of with new Digital Restrictions Management software would get honest jobs. There's no way to stop bits from being copied, and like DVDs, the key has to be with the encrypyed media. It's like leaving the key to your front door under the doormat; the first time somebody finds it, your TV is gone. Only with DRM it's several hundred copies of your TV that's gone.
Trying to sell bits is stupid, but not quite as stupid as trying to keep people from copying them. Bits are like air -- to sell air you have to wrap a balloon or a scuba tank around it. The people selling "digital content" need to learn to do the same. Don't sell movies, sell DVDs. People LIKE tangible objects. Don't worry about the "piracy", nobody ever went broke from piracy.
Whare would Photoshop be if it weren't for piracy?
You can't compete with free, but you can use free to sell stuff. The trouble with the media moguls is their own greed. If it weren't for their greed they'd not be taken in by the DRM-writing charlatains (who must be laughing at their poor stupid clients), and they'd use free to their advantage.
Cool! An Anne Hathaway/Ali Larter love scene (Score:2, Insightful)
Someone "steals" it, hacks it, and re-posts the un-DRM'd copy so everyone has it.
Not advocating that, as I'm against it. But how is this protocol gonna stop the thing they actually wanna stop?
It's kind of like outlawing guns. The law-abiding citizens now have no guns, but the outlaws still have theirs.
Re:why do they keep trying? (Score:3, Insightful)
what are they trying to achieve?
Production of creative works in the context of a free market system.
It can be shown mathematically that under certain assumptions a free market results in the optimal use of resources. Unfortunately, those assumptions do not work for things like recorded music, where the marginal cost of production is essentially zero. Hence, a free market CANNOT be used to efficiently to determine allocation of resources for music production. If you tried a pure free market, you'd end up with massive underproduction.
There are two known ways to solve this. The first way is to completely remove things like music from the free market. Have wealthy patrons, or the government, pay for music production. The results are freely copyable. The advantage of this is that the public can consume all the music it wants. The disadvantage of this is that the public doesn't really have a say in what is produced--they get what the patrons or the government wants.
The second way, which is what we currently use, is to artificially, by force of law, give music those attributes that make it so it does work with a free market system. That means we have to treat copies essentially like loaves of bread--you can't copy them for free. You can only obtain copies produced by the manufacturer (but once you have a copy, you can give it away or resell it).
The big advantage of this approach is that market forces decide what gets produced. The disadvantage is that it makes music cost too much (remember--the economically correct price for digital copies of music should be zero), so you end up with underconsumption. Consumers use less than they want to.
Re:why do they keep trying? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It is only DRM+ (Score:3, Insightful)
when are these PHBs ever gonna learn?
The real question is: when are you going to learn? If you keep buying stuff with DRM, they'll keep making stuff with DRM. Money is the only thing they'll listen to, and by giving it to them, you're saying "DRM is awwwwwwwwright!".
They will instead pay for ever more draconian laws paid for with treasonous bribes, and shovel ever shittier DRM down our throats
With your money.
Support stuff that doesn't have DRM. Show them that they can make more money by doing that.
Re:The miss the point (Score:2, Insightful)
How about artists making money from selling vinyl records, which can't be copied (it's a huge hassle, and the already available MP3s would suffice in a digital collection). Also, sales from concert tickets, T-shirts, band art, and anything else the starving artists can think of to support themselves.
The majority of bands and musicians also have DAY JOBS because most cannot support themselves on music alone. All the internet does it help increase their exposure.
Re:why do they keep trying? (Score:3, Insightful)
and come up with a response like this: "but if I could make an infinite number of perfect copies of my car while retaining my own copy, at low or no cost, what would be my incentive to use a system designed to make me lose control over my car or any other property?"
You made me think of universal assemblers [wikipedia.org] just there. I wonder what it would be like once *everything* is just information... from your car and house to donor organs. I wonder what those far distant future people would think of digital personal property....
The advent of universal assemblers would probably be actively resisted for the purpose of preserving an outdated economic model based on scarcity. Rather than celebrate the new era of plenty that this would achieve, many of our most powerful economic and political forces would fight it tooth and nail before they would adapt to the new world it would represent. That this is so likely almost makes me ashamed to be a member of this species.
Re:IEEE Buggywhips (Score:3, Insightful)
It's been all downhill since they bought into that "kibibyte" nonsense.
Re:It is only DRM+ (Score:1, Insightful)
DPP Feature (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like something Douglas Adams would dream up.
Of course, the writers on Star Trek have been envisioning this feature for years - what other explanation do you have for all the episodes when software or other data is sent from one place to another and mysteriously lost at it's source.
The most scenarios involve the Voyager EMH.. he seems to be forever in peril disproportionate to his status as a piece of software.
It sounds like LCARS has been designed with a particularly viscous strain of DRM. Whether this has been designed into the system by Starfleet engineers or 21st century intellectual property lawyers is unknown.
Re:It is only DRM+ (Score:5, Insightful)
What about option three? People stop designing cars, watches, etc, because once they sell one, anyone with the "replicator" can get theirs without the original designer being paid
In a world where everything costs nothing, what would they spend money on?
Re:It is only DRM+ (Score:3, Insightful)
What about option three? People stop designing cars, watches, etc, because once they sell one, anyone with the "replicator" can get theirs without the original designer being paid?
Repeat after me: the market is not the only way to promote the creation and distribution of valuable goods.
Re:The miss the point (Score:1, Insightful)
What the hell -- patronage? No, creative types will have to do something else during the day and then produce art at night. If they can make money producing something scarce (live shows, authorization for use of copyright material in commercials, etc), great. If not, creative types are going to produce art anyway -- because they're creative.
I just don't buy the argument that artists won't produce if there's no direct financial incentive. Where recording facilities are cheap, people have plenty of free time, and writing music is fun, why should there be an added financial incentive? No. Copyright ought to protect an artist's work against uncompensated commercial exploitation.
Re:It is only DRM+ (Score:3, Insightful)
Much like nobody wrote books or music before copyright existed?
Re:You down with DPP? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't say bring it on. They will be throwing big money at it, and I'm almost sure it will have some mechanism to autoupdate or perhaps ban non-compliant devices from being "authorized" to play files, similar to how modchipped Xboxes get permanently banned off of XBL. If a device gets permanently "cracked" in a way where it can't be updated, a new line of models come out, and newer music content will not be able to play on those.
I can forsee a scenario where it ends up like BD+, where its an arms race. The BD+ guys patch and invalidate all cracks, then 2-3 months later, that gets patched and the cycle starts all over again. There are even areas where it has been years and stuff has not been thoroughly cracked, such as satellite. There are probably people who have managed to crack it, but it won't be something the public will have access to.
And DPP already has sort of happened. I remember the early Sony ATRAC players that required checking in and out of music. More than three copies of a song checked out. Rerip, or rebuy. Even Sony realized that this started irritating consumes to no end and dumped OpenMG and SonicState for more generic MP3 capabilities. This also reminds me of SDMI, an initiative that tried to get all MP3 players to organize on some DRM standard with both security and watermarking. However, it got broken wide open by some researchers (even with the DMCA hammer ready to pulp them), and Apple didn't bother including any of the capabilities in the iPod, so when Apple grabbed the market, SDMI became pointless.
I doubt DPP, or "SDMI 3.0" is going to take off. First, if there is software, it will be broken. People will not buy MP3 players that add DRM to their existing libraries. Finally, if music companies ship DRM protected media that cannot be read by the CD standard (DVD-R, SD), people just won't buy it because it doesn't work with their existing stuff.
However, this could end up being reality. It would take record labels releasing their stuff on a new copy-protected format, digital audio player makers (Microsoft, Apple, Creative) to support the format, crack resistant software on PCs and Macs, and a network infrastructure to quickly ban cracked PCs/devices. It can be done, but it would be having to rip up a large established base.
Re:You down with DPP? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not exactly. If you leave your key on the front porch, someone can come in and take your TV, then your TV is gone - eg you no longer have your TV - we havent (yet) come up with a way to instantaneously copy something like a TV at a cost that is effectively 'free'.
Anything that could be considered "information" (such as music, books, music, etc) that is stored in a digital form *can* be copied for a cost that is so insignificant so as to be effectively 'free'. *AND* if someone makes a copy, two copies, or a million copies - nothing is "gone" - you have not been deprived of the original.
To most sane people, this is considered an advantage. Yes, it poses problems for the people who like to keep artists and authors as slaves, and who feel a sense of entitlement anytime anyone anywhere in the world hears or sees something that has origins in work done by one of their slaves. But that business model is obsolete, and continued attempts at artificially sustaining it are themselves becoming a form of entertainment in their own right.
DRM is dead! Long live DRM!