IEEE Working Group Considers Kinder, Gentler DRM 236
slave5tom writes "An IEEE working group is trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Its scheme will allow unlimited copying of encrypted content, which will require a playkey to activate. Trying to add a cost by making the playkey 'rivalrous' (what you take I lose) and rescuing the big content players from the brink of oblivion does seem futile, but it is entertaining to watch them fight the inevitable."
lame (Score:5, Insightful)
Turn to page 5...paragraph 4, sentence 3, word 4. Write it in the box. Insert dongle to continue. Serial numbers, online activation, warder, blah blah blah, and the list goes on.
Guys, no matter how you want to fuck with the technology, you can't erase one simple fact: At some point it needs to be viewed by a human, listened to by a human, interpreted... by a human. That means that at some point the data comes out analog, and can be scanned, manipulated, copied, and everything else.
DRM will always be an excercise in fail.
PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:3, Insightful)
There are examples of successful DRM out there. The PS3 is probably the most biggest. The PS3 has been out a long time now and it's looking like the DRM isn't going to be cracked anytime soon. The machine is definitely in the second half of its life right now and the most high profile attack was geohot's ultimately useless hypervisor hack.
No. This is BULLSHIT (Score:1, Insightful)
There can NEVER be "kind" or "gentle" DRM. DRM is, by its very nature, a blight on consumers who have paid fair and fucking square for the content, and will ALWAYS infringe on their fair use rights (unless they've figured out how to put judges inside the media). It also violates the Four Freedoms.
IEEE needs to cut this shit out RIGHT NOW. No DRM, no way.
Re:PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony's DRM has succeeded mightily in stopping me spending money on their products. The Sony amp and speakers I bought in the 80's look embarrassed at the way their maker has pissed its good name away.
Re:Sounds kinda like a shit sandwich (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
To access the content inside, however, you'll need the playkey, which is delivered to the buyer of a digital media file and lives within "tamper-protected circuit" inside some device (computer, cell phone, router) or online at a playkey bank account. Controlling the playkey means that you control the media, and you truly own it, since no part of the system needs to phone home, and it imposes no restrictions on copying (except for those that arise naturally from fear of loss).
"tamper-protected circuit": you may gain some "ownership" of some encrypted media files, but you have to give up ownership of your device.
You can just as easily label what they still control as the "content" and the encrypted files on your device as the "key". Interchanging those labels is just semantics, since you still need both parts to hear the music. The end result is that you gain no additional control over the content, and you have sacrificed control over the hardware.
No thanks.
Re:PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:4, Insightful)
And for every disgruntled consumer that won't buy their system because it carries DRM, would you care to take a guess at how many non-disgruntled consumers are pressed into playing by Sony's rules?
I don't know the number, but I'm willing to wager it's a lot higher than you'd like it to be.
Re:At least there being honest (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, with no scarcity there is no reason to pay for all the crap coming from hollywood with generic plots, sub-par acting, etc. but if you are truly good at what you do, you are almost always successful.
Just about every artist or product "killed" by piracy wasn't very good to begin with.
Re:PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know the number, but I'm willing to wager it's a lot higher than you'd like it to be.
Yea, the number is sitting at around 36 million at the moment. I'm sure execs over at Sony are losing sleep over the 8 guys on Slashdot who didn't buy one because of the DRM though.
rights (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knows, it may yet work - if it manages all rights, not just the distributors rights. For example, I want my user rights to be just as important - if it fails, it has to fail "open". If the company goes out of business, I must still be able to use the stuff I paid for. Likewise, it must automatically unlock/decrypt the content when the copyright term is over and the stuff enters the public domain.
Treat my rights as a consumer as equally important as the rights of the distributor, and we can talk about DRM. It's probably still a stupid idea, but as long as the "R" in DRM is entirely one-sided, remind me why I should even consider it as an option?
Re:Sounds kinda like a shit sandwich (Score:3, Insightful)
Sweazey argues that a truly non-rivalrous system makes commerce too difficult, even impossible, and that we need to create ways for the digital world to mirror the constraints of the physical one.
On a philosophical level, I am opposed to artificial scarcity for the sake of profiteering. It scares the hell out of me. However, playing devil's advocate for myself, it *could* work to allow sharing, resale, and the other benefits currently enjoyed by physical items.
However, as the parent poster rightfully states, the whole tamper-protected circuit notion is nice on paper but going to be impossible to implement while actually "giving" it to the same people who hold the data.
Re:At least there being honest (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets see here, Zombieland made $102,297,496 with a budget of $23.6 million (see http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=zombieland.htm [boxofficemojo.com]) . And that isn't even taking into consideration any sales from DVD sales. I'd say that is a lot of money made in profit. Note that they've made over 50 million dollars in -profit- not just sales but profit after they've paid everyone.
Can you show me a great movie/game/etc that really -has- been killed off by "piracy" and not just the fact that it didn't appeal to a wider audience or that the movie/game/etc was terrible?
Technology is coming along at such a fast pace that you don't need a studio to make a movie, you don't need theaters to make a profit. The internet is full of examples of this. In the '80s and earlier, yeah, you needed professional equipment, today? You can go out and buy a camcorder that will shoot HD video, a computer and programs that add in special effects, etc.
So go on, find an example of something "killed" by "piracy" that was truly killed by it.
Somethimes I think ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:At least there being honest (Score:4, Insightful)
And there are also ads and the like to generate revenue. Look at Google, it had a profit of over $6 billion last year, and yet it in essence gives away its chief product(s)! I don't have to pay $30.00 for a license to use Google's search engine, the majority if not all of their downloadable programs are free, the majority of Android save for a couple of Google created programs are open source, etc.
Again, there are very, very few people/companies that have been "killed" through "piracy" and had a good program that appealed to people.
Re:EOL (Score:3, Insightful)
So when the publisher is no longer interested in maintaining the DRM servers, I still lose my 'property'?
This is why I prefer DRM for rental instead of ownership. Renting movies and music on-line is cool. It's cheap and there's instant gratification. Purchase of content that way... yick.
Re:PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:5, Insightful)
The big content producers mostly want you to be able to do this as well. The big problem is that they want to be paid for it.
The formula is simple: if some action has value (like format shifting), they want to be paid.
This is why I think "DRM done right" is not possible. DRM *is* rights management. It's all about stopping you from freely using the content in arbitrary ways.
How would you define "done right"?
Re:Sounds kinda like a shit sandwich (Score:3, Insightful)
Great. So the 6th 9 hacks it and posts a torrent. The cat is out of the bag.
Re:At least there being honest (Score:4, Insightful)
The vast majority of movies either lose money or break even, so the big studios subsidize them with the profits made by the big hits. Picking a single very successful movie and trying to make an argument about the entire industry then isn't going to work.
No obviously not, because something has to be made before it can be pirated, so piracy cannot "kill" a game or movie. It can significantly reduce the probability of a sequel, presumably, but as we're talking about probably and decisions made behind closed doors that's tough to prove.
What we do know is that from time to time a loose lipped game company executive mentions that they de-prioritize PC ports of games because of piracy. This usually leads to widespread condemnation from PC gamers of course so it's not surprising that mostly they prefer not to discuss it. But I frequently read on Slashdot that "PC gaming is dying" and it's being killed by consoles.
Business is not, entirely, about rational financial decisions. If a team of people work on a big, complex project for 3-4 years and when it launches, 90% of players are pirates, that takes a serious emotional toll as well as a financial one. The next project, whoever is in charge may well look at PC game development, the piracy rates, the extra server and support costs involved in supporting the pirates etc and say "fuck that".
What a load of crap. Film technology has been advancing rapidly for more than three decades, but I fail to see movies produced in peoples bedrooms taking over the cinemas. After all, isn't the most successful movie yet made also one of the most expensive?
Re:lame (Score:4, Insightful)
You're still free to jailbreak your phone and the iPhone emulator in the iPhone SDK allows you to run any program you want AND decompile/debug it.
You're full of FUD and I suggest you get off the Internet. Now!
Re:Sounds kinda like a shit sandwich (Score:5, Insightful)
1. I receive an encrypted copy of $BIG_MEDIA_PABLUM$. It requires the super secret playkey to decrypt. The super secret playkey is stored in an unbreakable TPM.
2. My software requests the playkey, uses it to decrypt $BIG_MEDIA_PABLUM$ and hands me a plaintext copy.
3. I have a plaintext copy. I no longer care a whit about the playkey. Even if the TPM is unbreakable, and the "rivalrous" revocation mechanism impossible to defeat, what does it matter? I have a plaintext copy.
As with any DRM system, this "kinder, gentler" system requires that all the software on a system be aligned against you(and, to keep it that way, typically involves hardware measures that make it hard or impossible to replace that software, even if you wish to opt out of the "ecosystem" entirely). Thus, no matter how "benevolent" the terms of the DRM are technologically capable of being such a system will necessarily be an enemy of software freedom(or even the potential possession of software freedom) and will, in practice, be as restrictive as desired by the company or consortium that exercises cryptographic control over "your" hardware in perpetuity.
Re:PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:5, Insightful)
"The conversation on /. is often driven by those who reject DRM, but what about those of us who would accept it if it were done right (like me)?"
Nothing personal, just an honest response:
/. consider people like that to be the sheep who are primarily responsible for many of the world's ills. You really should get this idea through your head: if DRM ever truly became successful, eventually you would be kissing your freedom and privacy goodbye. And I would hold it against the sheep who helped allow it to happen. I'll pass on all that, thanks very much.
Most people on
Re:PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:3, Insightful)
DRM needs to be turned on its head. Every day, people give up all kinds of personal information. I would like that to be protected by DRM that I control.
So, for example, if I don't like Facebook's latest privacy policy I should be able to revoke their right to my data. If I get tired of the grocery store tracking my purchasing habits, I should be able to turn it off with a click. Want to change physicians or insurance companies? It should be simple to block your old doctor or insurance company and grant access to your new doctor or insurance company.
Why can't the IEEE understand this? (Score:3, Insightful)
I expect this kind of greed and stupidity from content makers, but the IEEE? Or are they accepting money to do something they know won't work?
Re:"Tamper-protected": The only real DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
The "tamper-protected circuit" is yet another attempt to bring about trusted computing [cam.ac.uk], the idea that while you physically own a computer, there are parts of it that if accessed in non-approved ways, stop working. It's the only real way to implement unbreakable DRM... or at least, it makes the target the hardware, which can be much more difficult to crack than a software implementation. Think encrypted RAM with the key stored in such a "tamper-protected" chip, gooped up with epoxy and a self-destruct mechanism if it detects an attempt at physical access. They're just framing the idea in a different way; the result is the same.
If this ever actually took off, it could split the internet in two, between open and "trusted". Avoid these things like the plague, and refuse any hardware or software that uses them.
Re:lame (Score:5, Insightful)
Not according to Apple, who consider it a DMCA violation. Never mind the retarded acceptance of fighting the manufacturer for control over your property.
Totally irrelevant, since you have to pay Apple $99 to load it on a non-Jailbroken device and not at all to others.
There is no FUD here. Apple is totally hostile in the mobile front and that's dangerous.