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Music Media

Companies Abandon The Sinking Ship That Is SDMI 136

Posted by timothy from the do-they-carry-plague? dept.
wiggles writes: "Cryptome is mirroring a federally filed notice which discloses that a small number of companies (9) have joined the SDMI, and a large number of companies (27) 'have been dropped from the [SDMI] venture' i.e. either kicked out, or jumped ship. I put my money on the second possibility. The list of companies 'that have been dropped' is staggering in scope. Some of the more notable names include Encoding.com/Loudeye Technologies (famous infrastructure provider for streaming music), Guillemot (French maker of kickass graphic cards), I2GO.COM (American maker of high-capacity solid state mp3 players), LG Electronics (Korean makers of all kinds of consumer electronics), among others. One wonders how many more defections will follow, as the SDMI group continues to try (and fail) to achieve the impossible. As Bruce Schneier says 'Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.'"
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Companies Abandon The Sinking Ship That Is SDMI More

Companies Abandon The Sinking Ship That Is SDMI

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  • Time for a new definition of "Realistic" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As Bruce Schneier says 'Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.'

    Precisely. The only reasonable business models are those that pass along the benefits of cheap copying to the public, and that treat people as valued customers rather than as criminals to be controlled.

    Unfortunately, these are the types of business models that companies following the old paradigm like to dismiss as "unrealistic".

    On a "lighter" note, it's really funny that Intel is so heavily involved in copy protection given that Andrew Grove (1) escaped a Communist country, (i.e. a place that limited personal freedom), and (2) wrote "the book" on strategic inflection points and the danger they pose to companies that prefer to stay set in their ways. Can you say "deliberately placing yourself on the wrong side of history"?

  • Re:Guillemot does more than video cards.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let's see here. 48,000 samples per second * 8 stereo inputs * 32 bits per sample (assume 24-bit sampling, and word-alignment) yields under 3 megs a second. A modern IDE drive can easily handle 10 times that.

  • Godel's Theorem and SDMI (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am a bit supprised that this group has not recalled Douglas Hoftadter's discussion of the recording entitled "I cannot be played on record player I" in "Godel, Escher, Bach" (see Chapter III et. seq.). If I understand him correctly, the failure of SDMI is not meerly a fact but is required by the logical and mathematical laws that sustain all existence.

  • Re:Not absolutely impossible, but close (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The reason why vinyl disappeared so fast had nothing to do with consumer acceptance, and everything to do with industry pressure.

    Remember cutouts? Those records with a little notch in the corner? As part of the contract between a record store and the record distributors, the distributors agree to take back any unsold product. So a record store can order 25 copies of a record, and if only five sell, they can send back the remaining 20. The distributors then cut off the corner, and liquidate the "cutouts" at reduced prices.

    In order to eliminate vinyl, the record distributors simply informed the record stores that they would no longer be accepting returns on vinyl. Within a month or so, vinyl was GONE.

  • Who are my dumb, and why are they damned? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If I were you, I'd think long and hard (insofar as it would be possible for me to do so) before calling anyone else dumb.
  • That's the burst speed your thinking of. The sustained data rate on an IDE drive is much lower than that. When you have to seek to 8 different spots on the disk constantly during your writes it will be even slower than that.

    Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
  • With 8 inputs, 4 outputs and S/PDIF I/O?

    I don't think so!

    ttyl
    Farrell

  • Guillemot does more than video cards.. (Score:3)

    by farrellj ( 563 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @07:01PM (#176729) Homepage Journal
    They make one ofthe best/cheapest digital recording cards out there. For about $300 (US), you can get a card that supports 8 inputs at up to 48 KHz sampling, plus 4 out puts, S/PDIF I/O, and two MIDI interfaces! It comes with a special edition of Cool Edit, but is supported Cubase and all the other biggies. You need a fast HD, though, no IDE if you want to do all 8 imputs at the same time!

    And it is a well done card...I can turn up the volume on my studio monitors, and I still hear no noise...very nice!

    ttyl
    Farrell J. McGovern
    Amature Recording Engineer
  • Theoretically yes, practically no.

    If they controlled 100% of the hardware, it would be impossible (and that's assuming they did it perfectly), it might well be uncrackable.

    But in the real world, the cat is out of the bag, systems they do not control exist, and there will be a way to crack everything.

  • Is it really not possible to make things uncopyable?

    Well, if it can be read, it can be copied. It's that simple. Copying is just reading something and writing what you've read elsewhere (i.e., what the Unix 'cp' command does). That's where SDMI is going to lose - they're trying to make reading and copying out to be separate operations, but one is just an extension of the other.
    _____

    Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
  • effectively forced the manufacturers of DAT recorders to incorporate SCMS, thus killing DAT as a consumer format.

    And MiniDisc is in basically the same boat, if I'm not too much mistaken. Ah, all the potentially excellent technology we've missed out on because of stupid legislation. :/
    _____

    Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."

  • if you stop paying for the product most people will stop supplying (I am talking about original designers)

    What this means is that something is scarce in the equasion. That would be the capacity of people to compose music good enough that many others want to hear it.

    So, what the market seeks is a way to pay for that and distribute it in the most efficient way possable. A middleman who keeps >90% of the wholesale price and prevents a method of distribution that costs next to nothing is not efficient.

    As a consumer, wouldn't you be willing to pay $1.50 - $1.80 to your favorite artist to produce the next CD (as high quality mp3's)?

    If you were a musician, would you write and produce music for ~$1,000,000 a year? ($1 each for a single platinum album)

    In other words, if the market was working here, we'd be paying for the scarce thing (composition and production) not the unlimited thing (reproduction of the work). Likely, many would pay a small amount to get that in a convieniant form (a CD) as well, but not $15 - $18.

  • Sure he might find out after. But is he really likey to take it back to the store now? Probably not. He'll just live with it.

    Or have the kid next door 'flush the filmware or whatever he said' and remove the 'feature'.

  • But very few of these, other than the video cards, can be used as replacement blades in that machine that brought them to fame . . .


    [*hushed whispers*]


    oh. Never mind . . .


    hawk

  • > If you wrote a program that you wanted to sell, how would you feel about people making pirated copies of it, and not paying you a cent?

    Well, since that is illegal, you take them to court (assuming you have the program under copyright and didn't Open Source it). Of course, under Copyright, they can still use that software as they want, even running it backwards, disassembling it to see how it works, etc.

    The problem with all of these things like SDMI is that they are ACCESS CONTROL, not COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. As has been noted many times, you can't prevent copying (bits are bits). Copyright law actually ALLOWS copies (Fair Use). Copyright does NOT allow redistribution (creation of new copies for others).

    The problem with all of these things like SDMI is that they are ACCESS CONTROL, not COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. Is that copy I made a Fair Use backup copy or a copy I'm selling? Or is it a backup copy that I later decide to sell? The Software has no way to know without reading my mind. Thus, each and every one of these schemes ultimately means that you assume EVERY person is a crook, and deny them their LEGAL rights, in order to prevent theft.

    Of course, using the alternative, the court systems, that has been there for hundreds of years, is, I guess, to low-tech and difficult for all these high-tech companies.
  • then it becomes not water. you still have not made water not wet.
  • man I hope so :) If Leonardo DeCaprio is jumping off you know this is true... Lucky bastard. :)
  • You _can_ make water not wet. Just freeze it! I mean
    But once it's frozen, it's no longer water, it's ICE...

    --

  • LG is much bigger than you realize (unless you realized that it was a 100k person, $100 billion chaebol (a Korean conglomerate))

    Perhaps if they said "Lucky Goldstar" the name might start ringing some bells. Or just "Goldstar". Or maybe "Zenith".

    Yes, that's right, it's one of everyone's favorite makers of relatively cheap, relatively well-made (ahem) electronic equipment. Which has the advantage of being based in a country with somewhat lax enforcement of IP laws.

    So LG is a big loss to SDMI - but otherwise, you're right on with your assessment of the other loser & no-name companies bailing out.

  • But in the real world, the cat is out of the bag, systems they do not control exist, and there will be a way to crack everything.

    Accurate, but you forgot the logical conclusion, which is the real reason that any sort of copy protection scheme is doomed:

    It only has to be broken once.

    Once anyone breaks the copy protection on a digital work, they can make the unprotected version of that work available to the world at large, for effectively zero cost and at almost zero risk. This is the real reason any sort of digital copy protection scheme is doomed; not because it's technically or politically difficult to implement, but because if it fails even once, it's effectively useless.

  • like a millionaire that has no money
    like collard greens that dont taste good

    ...but not a real green dress - that's cruel!

    Oh wait, that's another song :)

    Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!

  • Frozen water is called "ice". Ice is not wet unless it melts and becomes water again. That other thing related to water is called "steam" ... So, the analogy is still valid. mvh // Jens M Andreasen
  • The truth is there never is a victory in such a battle, just a reprieve. Just because some people have realised copy protection doesn't make sense, doesn't mean that you won't have someone else come along to try to prove the contrary. As an example, how many times have you tried telling your parents something was possible, when they had long ago learned from experience that it wasn't.
  • Don't talk about your rights as a consumer! Consumers are pieces of market share to be exploited. You have rights as a citizen.
  • >Why didn't DAT kick out analog tape from its market? All the non-SCMS disadvantages of DAT you mentioned apply to analog tape. And analog tapes are STILL mentioned in those ads for music albums on TV.
    -------------------
    Because of the huge install base of analog tape. Tape players are everywhere, build into cars, in stereos, walkmen, portable stereos, etc. Even CD which offered some real advantages over tape (generally better sounding, doesn't degrade, no rewinding) took a long time to replace tapes. Sound Quality just doesn't sell that well. The only real advantage of DAT over analog tape is it sounds better. It was more expensive, less available, and you had to go out and buy a new deck to play it.

    To sum up DAT had the disadvantage of both tape and cds without having the benefits of either. Sounds like a good reason for it not to catch on.
  • Then you have the other music player that costs less and plays every audio format under the sun. Hmm which one do you pick?

    Since the uncrippled player gets sued out of existence, there will be no choice. Just wait a year or two and Hilary Rosen's "if we don't approve it, it won't happen" will be the law.

    Don't compare it with Divx, compare it with DVD. We've already lost that battle, but does anyone care?

  • HahaHA! A victory! (Score:3)

    by revscat ( 35618 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @07:08PM (#176748) Journal

    Friends, let us gloat. Briefly, to be sure, but let's gloat nonetheless. We said it couldn't be done. We *showed* them it couldn't be done. Did they listen? Nay! Their foolish efforts to stop the free-flow of bits through weak-ass crypto hacks not only had the Good Guys(TM) alternately furious and aloof, but I'm sure there were information theorists who were just passively humored. "They wanna do what? Morons! The 'enemy' has physical access to the ciphertext!"

    So a big ol' raspberry to all the suits over at the RIAA, MPAA, etc. Fuck y'all! You are going to have to change your business model, bribe politicians into starting a War on Copyright a la the notorious War on Drugs, or just start offing people a la the Church of Scientology. But any way you go against it the genie is out of the bottle and ya can't stop it.

    Or maybe I've just drank too much Jolt. I actually found some today. RaH!

    - Rev.

  • Re:Ironic (Score:3)

    by ljavelin ( 41345 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @07:31PM (#176749)
    In that IBM is joining the venture, while 27 others are leaving.
    How does this affect their "most-favored-big-company" status here on Slashdot?

    Yeah, that part sucks. Sure, 27 winky companies are gone, but IBM is worth 100 of 'em.
    And too bad IBM is a big drive manufacturer too... as mass storage is the core of tomorrow's consumer electronics. Geez, this is BAD news.

  • SMDI an Impossible task? I'm afraid not. (Score:5)

    by ljavelin ( 41345 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @07:14PM (#176750)
    It only takes a few large and powerful players, along with some crazy legislation to make something like SDMI a potent industry standard.

    Sure, I agree: you'll be able to break any copy protections. But the industry can make it ugly and painful to do so. Just wait for a couple generations of consumer-level home electronics, and we'll find more and more protections baked into the hardware.

    Yep, the consumer will pay for all this in real dollars and in their personal freedoms. All in the name of protecting the industry's profits and obsolete business models.
  • and he would of been right.
  • and how trivial is it to melt water?
  • Well, we'll just have to see what we can do about that now wont we?
  • but in the end it is still wet.
  • that's assuming that you dont have extensive resources, like, say, the NSA.
  • Bravo. Brilliant. :)
  • One correction: s/ciphertext/plaintext/
    ------

  • SDMI (Score:3)

    by sometwo ( 53041 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @07:21PM (#176758)
    Hmm The consumer has a choice between 2 music players. One has the neat, new SDMI. "It helps the consumer by making sure they are playing only the music that we say you can play!!!!" (with at least 4 exclamation points) Then you have the other music player that costs less and plays every audio format under the sun. Hmm which one do you pick?

    I smell another Divx (the Circuit City DVD thing) happening. Of course, one can never underestimate the power of evil marketing executives. Average Consumer: "It's Sony; it must be good!"

  • Actually Guillemont is the parent company name for a few companies. Their flagship products are; Thrustmaster (controllers), Hercules (graphics), and Guillemont (Hardware [sound products included])

  • Ironic (Score:5)

    by Microlith ( 54737 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @07:03PM (#176760)
    In that IBM is joining the venture, while 27 others are leaving.

    How does this affect their "most-favored-big-company" status here on Slashdot?

  • Re:Ironic (Score:5)

    by Microlith ( 54737 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @07:05PM (#176761)
    As I look over the list, an even more damning name comes up.

    Winbond, makers of chips that appear in just about EVERY PC system on the planet have joined.

    Go through your machine, whether self-built or bought. You will likely find a Winbond chip in there.

    That worries me a bit...
  • I think that most of the confusion in this thread is arising from the fact that "code" has several applicable meanings, and so does "crack".
    --

  • Bruce Schneier's take on this (Score:3)

    by joq ( 63625 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @08:09PM (#176763) Homepage Journal
    The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention
    Bruce Schneier

    Music, videos, books on the Internet! Freely available to anyone without paying! The entertainment industry sees services like Napster as the death of its business, and it's using every technical and legal means possible to prevail against them. They want to implement widespread copy prevention of digital files, so that people can view or listen to content on their computer but can't copy or distribute it.

    Abstractly, it is an impossible task. All entertainment media on the Internet (like everything else on the Internet) is just bits: ones and zeros. Bits are inherently copyable, easily and repeatedly. If you have a digital file -- text, music, video, or whatever -- you can make as many copies of that file as you want, do whatever you want with the copies. This is a natural law of the digital world, and makes copying on the Internet different from copying Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton luggage.

    What the entertainment industry is trying to do is to use technology to contradict that natural law. They want a practical way to make copying hard enough to save their existing business. But they are doomed to fail.

    Complete Article [cryptome.org]
  • Bummer. I have their eGo mp3 player and was anxiously awaiting a needed ROM upgrade...
    Dammit.

    where's EmbedMan when you need him?
  • Musicmaker.com is a failed company that dropped out. I am sure many of the other 27 a losers too.

    I'm saying SDMI is good or bad but don't read too much into 27 out of business companies not be part of SDMI.

  • Why comment (Score:3)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @07:14PM (#176766)
    "As Bruce Schneier says 'Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.'" "

    I think that pretty much beats out any comment a slashdotter will ever come up with. Bruce is the man...
  • like a can of beer that's sweeter than honey
    like a millionaire that has no money
    like a rainy day that is not wet
    like a gamblin fiend that does not bet
    like dracula with out his fangs
    like the boogie to the boogie without the boogie bang
    like collard greens that dont taste good
    like a tree that's not made out of wood
    like goin up and not comin down
    is just like the beat without the sound no sound
    to the beat beat, ya do the freak
    everybody just rock and dance to the beat

    (copyright: the authors of the lyric in my URL /\)

    --

  • As long as they make it possible to run a decoder under Windows, it will be possible to do something like VMware or other hardware simulators and single-step it and rip the secrets out.

    It would require a platform that is impossible to simulate in order to secure the bits. The closest thing we have to that is the sort of smart card technology employed by DirecTV. They stay up late devising new ways to make sure that the code in the smart card isn't running in a simulator or in a trojaned card or what not. Just surf the net looking for "3 muskateer" cards (for sale in Canada, of course, where I hear it's not really a crime to decrypt US satellite TV. IANABarrister, of course) to get an idea how successful they are.
  • Sorry, but I have to ask. What is so obsolete in trying to sell products in exchange for money?

    Because I can go and copy those products an infinite number of times with virtually no cost to myself or others - certainly less cost than it is to buy it from the companies. Of course, I'm not buying the product - the product is the phyiscal CD, the packaging, etc. I'm buying the music. I can get the music without the "product", and without paying money for it.

    It's just like software - the rules of economics just don't apply. There is (or at least can be) an infinite, unlimited supply. Simple economics (IANAE) says that from an unlimited supply, the price should probably be pretty low. But it's not, unless you consider $15 a CD a low price.

    Not only that, but unlike software companies, they music industry can't/won't even offer services, extras, etc. At least _some_ software companies are trying to do it smart. The MPAA is just blindly pushing ahead trying to do anything it can to preserve this fundamentally broken model, regardless of who it hurts.
  • Rules of economics apply here as well, simply because if you stop paying for the product most people will stop supplying (I am talking about original designers) and move to another markets.

    Oh really? Perhaps you've heard of this "open source" or "free software" phenomenon, where people write code, and for the most part are not paid a penny for it. There's actually a fair number of them. Perhaps you should go inform them that they are breaking the laws of economics.
  • I _will_ pay for products, _if_ I'm not feeling cheated by the seller.
    What is the current price for a music CD in the US ? I'll tell you what we (Europe; Netherlands) have to pay: Hfl. 44 which translates to, uhm, 20 Euro. I'm not too sure what the Dollar does nowadays in respect to the Euro, but they're not too far apart. If that isn't bad enough, lookup the price of a blank CD and do the math.

    This industry has, for the past 15 years, charged us way too much money for their products. Classical albums, which are royalty-free, are even more expensive than "normal" albums, etc., etc. Doesn't that make you think something is up...?
    They get NO sympathy from me, for all I care they can all go bankrupt in the next five years, I'm totally fed up with this.

  • for a start, every anti-copy mechanism ever invented has been beaten because people will accept poor quality copies. Next, there's no point using encryption because the signal has to be decrypted by the player so it can be seen/heard (which makes CSS such a joke.) and people just make analog copies. As we are mostly talking about a digital signal anyway, the professional pirates just duplicate bit images and don't have any problems at all :-)
  • that way it can suck more money out of companies that are dumb enough to think it'll ever work.

    Call it "just desserts".

  • $9 at godaddy, only need to register for one year, all online updating. Can't comment on their service, but the price is right.
  • Ooooo...if you read my post you'd see I didn't endorse godaddy in any way...I just said it was cheap.

  • Hooray (Score:1)

    by ahde ( 95143 )
    Next time I am in France or Korea I might get some decent digital equipment. If it isn't confiscated at customs.

    Didn't loudeye go bankrupt?

  • Bruce would have ate his words thirty years ago when someone said you couldn't make a code that was uncrackable. And he probably would have said it too.
  • but he's wrong now
  • why do you need to make a plaintext analog? (make == distribute)

    Yes, if you want to use conventional equipement, you do, but SDMI isn't about that. Media and hardware makers haven't even tried to protect data yet. CSS was a joke, no more serious than a briefcase lock. Without even thinking, they could take something like DVD region codes and make a checksum that compares to the data. But that would be computation heavy--

    Hey, you could just encrypt a key sufficiently large enough to make a brute force analysis of the whole data too computationally intensive to be inconvenient

    Is this the difference between a code and a cipher to you:

    Code: Substitute A for B Cipher: Substitute (C+D)^E'%H for (F+G)^E''%H

  • Lost 27 nobodies, gained 8 nobodies and 1 megacorp (Score:5)

    by Argy ( 95352 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @08:15PM (#176780)
    With IBM on board, the announcement seems like an overall win for the consortium. But even without them, the changes are insignificant.

    The companies that left are rather trivial players. That's kind of backed up by the fact that you have to explain who they are. Two dot coms whose web sites seem to be down at the moment, a graphics card company I've never heard of, and a consumer electronics company I've never heard of? (LG's probably bigger than I realize, but they don't ring a bell the way Sony, Matushita/Panasonic, Fuji, or Philips do.)

    On the other hand, they've gained IBM. You don't need to explain who they are.

    Now consider a few of the companies that did stay in the consortium: Aiwa, AT&T, BMG Entertainment, Casio, Compaq, Dolby Labs, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Iomega, JVC, Kenwood, Lucent, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Napster, Nokia, Philips Electronics, Pioneer, Real Networks, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Siemens, Toshiba, and Yamaha.

    I'd guess they make about 95% of audio equipment sold worldwide. :-)

    I'm not arguing that SDMI is making a good, nice, or viable standard. But if you're trying to make it sound like they're in trouble simply because the quantity of companies dropped is greater than the quantity of companies added, I think you've neglected to consider the significance of those companies.
  • Lets not forget that even they way they want it, bits are copied about like no tomorrow.

    From the media through all sorts of interfaces, to RAM, through CPUs, into the DAC, out the speakers, resonating all convenient surfaces, rippling across synapses.

    Obviously some people will never be happy until they root reality.org. :-)


  • 20 years from now we'll probably talk about that bloody "War on Warez".

    - Steeltoe

  • Don't worry too much (Score:3)

    by Sir_Winston ( 107378 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2001 @01:13AM (#176786)
    WinBond chips do the dinky stuff that anyone could do, heck even Cyrix could make chips that do it. It's just hardware temperature monitoring and timing stuff, things that can easily be done by any other semiconductor company. They also make other chips, but the odds are that a Winbond chip on your motherboard is just there doing low-leval hardware monitoring for the BIOS etc. If Winbond chips were to have anything objectionable to the average consumer built in, then VIA, nVidia, or anyone else could quite easily make an alternative. Just recall the disaster that was the P!!! serial number--

    Intel: "Look! It's good for e-commerce!"
    Consumers: "Fuck you, we don't want serial numbers on our hardware that can get read by our software and sent to other people."
    Intel: "We're making a utility available to turn it off and it won't be a 'feature' of the next chip revision. Sorry."

    When push comes to shove, some other company will provide hard drives, chipsets, etc., with no copy protection restrictions, and some enterprising hackers will provide software to emulate the protection measures so that SDMI or other "protected" bits and bytes will work on any system.

  • And cassette tapes still have an RIAA tax on them to cover the industry's "costs" incurred by copying off the radio. *sigh*


    --Fesh

  • You _can_ make water not wet. Just freeze it! I mean - look at the snow in Antartica. Is it running around like a liquid? It's so cold, you'd be a fool to touch it with your bare hands, ...
  • Sorry, but I am patenting your idea. The bionic resonator. The resonating membranes are implanted in your ear at birth, and the pickup receiver decodes the digital broadcast into frequencies athat are picked up by the resonator, when it is placed near your ears.

    Remember, IT IS MY PATENT. RIAA - you can't touch this. Nyah nyah!

  • and it is melting ICE, not water.

    :-)

  • No. It is demostration of how impressive unwet water is.
  • is not dry humor apt?

  • Re:Might as well (Score:3)

    by burris ( 122191 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @11:22PM (#176793)
    Whatever. DAT didn't die because of the copy protection. MiniDisc has the same copy protection and is even worse for piracy than DAT (due to serial compression lossage) yet it sells like gangbusters by comparison. No, DAT died because it was an inconvenient tape based format. Consumers want random track access. Consumers hate rewinding tapes. Only pros and live concert tapers needed digital recording badly enough to suffer through digital tape.

    burris

  • Then they'll jack the prices back up way high once non-SDMI producers go out of business.

    If they do that, there will be a demand for non-SDMI hardware, but no supply. Anyone that would enter that market would make a killing selling at high prices due to the law of supply and demand, until the supply reached a resonable level - at which time the market would find a balance between low prices for the buyers and decent profits for the producers.

    They'll also pay off the governments not only to make this monopoly legal, but to enforce compliance with it (SDMI says "DMCA is just the beginning").

    Yes, a law mandating SDMI could happen and would be very bad. The AHRA mandated SCMS and the DMCA [cornell.edu] mandated the standard Macrovision and Colorstripe copy restriction technologies. It is illegal to sell VCRs that do not get hosed by Macrovision, even if the fact they are immune isn't engineered in on purpose to allow recording in spite of the restriction technologies. Example: A VCR company could have been making VCRs without AGC circuits. They would be immune to Macrovision. Under the DMCA, the manufacturer would have to deliberately engineer a bug into the product - make it so Macrovision just hoses it (e.g. add an AGC circuit) or detect it and block the copy.

    If I made VCRs, I'd obey the law, but instead of recording gibberish I would put - "Copying prevented due to copy restriction measures. It is illegal for us to allow you to record under Federal law 17 USC 1201(k).". Let the citizens (not mere "consumers") know WHY their rights are being restricted.

    I don't know if CD drives could be made to read the "copy protected" CDs. Since the "protected" CDs just have hosed metadata, and nothing is encrypted, and they break the standard, it might not be illegal under the DMCA. Unless Kaplan is presiding, it which case not only would it be illegal, but I'd likely be a criminal for even mentioning the "details" of "protected" CDs.

  • Why didn't DAT kick out analog tape from its market? All the non-SCMS disadvantages of DAT you mentioned apply to analog tape. And analog tapes are STILL mentioned in those ads for music albums on TV.
  • The RIAA, being it's usual bastardus sell has sued launch.com. A site that that uses some fancy algorithms to play what it thinks you'll want to hear. The RIAA thinks it's to customizable.

    What's funny? the fact that Launch.com is owned by some pretty big RIAA members.

    fuck, for some reason I sound like a press release or something today.)
  • It's called a one-time pad, folks. And I won't get into details here.

    /Brian
  • Hey, if you're going to talk like that at least have the decency to mention Fatboy Slim instead of Britney :-)

    But this is true -- I've never really understood how SDMI could be made a selling point...

    (At some random convention. Prospective Shopper is looking at MP3 players and approaches Hardware Company Suit.)

    PS: So explain this SDMI thing to me you're pushing.

    HCS: Well, this is a great feature! It allows you to be sure your music is secure!

    PS: What do you mean? Like someone sticking a virus in an MP3 file?

    HCS: No, that can't happen.

    PS: So why exactly am I concerned about it being secure?

    HCS: Well, you wouldn't want to be getting software from some source that might have attached a virus to it, right?

    PS: Uh, no...

    HCS: Well, SDMI just makes sure that the music you play on one of our systems comes from a source you can trust.

    PS: Wait, I don't get it. It's just music...

    HCS: All I'm saying is that you don't want to get your music from a source you can't trust...

    PS: I'm sorry, I just don't see the point...

    And the conversation goes on in this vein, the Hardware Company Suit beating around the bush in hopes of snowjobbing the Prospective Shopper. The sad part is that there might actually be someone who falls for this line, but I think the SDMI folks are realizing there aren't enough.

    /Brian
  • Making water not wet is easy... just freeze it. Or boil it.

    Making bits uncopyable is a much harder problem.

    Cryptnotic

  • They did freak out. You just weren't old enough to notice. They used to make DJ's talk over the beginning and end of songs to prevent people from taping them off-air -- despite the fact that it has been ruled legal.

  • Out of control... (Score:5)

    by ErikTheRed ( 162431 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @07:04PM (#176810) Homepage
    Actually, I heard that the RIAA lawyers finally snapped, and started suing their own members for copying their copy protection scheme...

  • Copy Protection. (Score:5)

    by PopeAlien ( 164869 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @07:15PM (#176811) Homepage Journal
    I look forward to the days when audio devices have no audio output for 'protection'.

    Customer: "I'd like to return this walkman"
    Salesperson: "Is it broken?"
    Customer: "well, theres nowhere to plug the headphones in"
    Salesperson: "oh.. They just clip on the back, like this"
    Customer: "yeah.. I tried that, but I couldn't hear anything.. Isn't there supposed to be a headphone jack or something?"
    Salesperson: "Oh, No sir.. Pirates use headphone jacks to steal the audio signal.. This walkman is secured against intellectual property theft.."

     Oh well, until then there's always FM radio [popealien.com]

  • "Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again."

    "Again"? When did music companies stop making money?

  • I hope you are right, but I wouldn't bet on it. Most consumers are far from sufficiently educated to know when they are screwed (M$ is an example).

    And, I wouldn't underestimate the power of laws, and the power of mainstream media demonizing large parts of the population (resulting in witchhunts).

    Therefore, techonlogies that are designed to undermine free expression must be fought before they go mainstream.

  • All your ciphertext are belong to... yadda yadda you know the drill.
  • Today's NY Times has a bit about pay Napster, [nytimes.com] which (of course) will use copy protection and therefore be useless. (Also in the Industry Standard. [yahoo.com] From the article:

    Subscribers who pay a monthly fee will be able to load any other digital audio files -- like the music of independent labels, their own recordings or other material -- onto their computers and share it with other Napster users. The fidelity will be just below the sound quality of compact discs and users who obtain files over Napster will be precluded from loading them onto their own discs or sending them outside its network.

    So their participation in SDMI makes some sense - until you try to use the service of course. Oh well, I added them to my FC list [fuckedcompany.com] months ago.

  • Monopoly (Score:3)

    by Quila ( 201335 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2001 @02:55AM (#176822)

    In order to gain consumer acceptance, the industry will have to offer something BETTER or CHEAPER.

    If together the SDMI Stasi form a monopoly of electronic devices and produced music, then better doesn't matter -- you'll take what they give if you want anything.

    Cheaper they can take care of by taking a loss and pricing SDMI hardware far below what anyone outside the monopoly can sell non-SDMI hardware at. Then they'll jack the prices back up way high once non-SDMI producers go out of business.

    They'll also pay off the governments not only to make this monopoly legal, but to enforce compliance with it (SDMI says "DMCA is just the beginning").

  • Is this just a cheap ploy to get Kate Winslet to pose topless for them?

    -
  • And speaking of FM radio...

    When I was a kid, my folks bought me a cassette boom box. I would listen for HOURS to the radio every day recording songs that I liked. I had boxes of tapes, all neatly labeled and catalogged. I pretty much had any decent song that was getting played on FM radio and I knew where I could find it.

    Sound anything like the .mp3 craze today? Sounds just like it to me. New technology, same concept. So why didn't the RIAA freak out back in the early 80's when every kid on the planet was running around recording songs off of FM radio?

    I was in my early teens. I didn't have any money to buy albums or cassettes. I think the RIAA was a bit less paranoid back then. And because they didn't try to stifle my music listening, I have since turned into quite a music BUYER. Music is an important part of my life, and I buy lots of CDs (mp3 sounds like crap, as did cassette). If I'd had to jump through hoops to record those songs back then, who knows how I would have ended up. Chances are I would have ended up with a bitter taste in my mouth toward the music industry and would not have given them anywhere NEAR the money I have over the years.

    -S
  • The customer has never been right. If the customer was always right, then I, as a customer, could walk into any store in the world, demand free goods, and use "The customer is always right!" as my justification for walking out without paying for anything I wanted to take with me.

    Now, I am not necessarily taking their side, but look at it this way. If I buy a car, it's not like I have the equipment to pirate the design specs of the car and start producing my own cars. If I buy an oak desk, likewise, I am not likely to have a shop set up to crank out duplicate desks. However, with computer software, cassette tapes, CDs, video tapes, etc. it is so much easier (and relatively cheaper) to make bootlegs after buying one legal copy. Heck, in some cases, they don't even need a legal copy.... I am reminded of the time I saw tapes of "The Matrix" for sale at a local flea market the day after the movie came out in theaters.

    They are not taking away your freedom by trying to protect their interests. They are trying to stop software/music/movie/whatever piracy from happening. In the long run, such piracy raises the prices they we have to pay.

    Kierthos

  • Not absolutely impossible, but close (Score:3)

    by dcavanaugh ( 248349 ) on Monday June 04, 2001 @08:47PM (#176834) Homepage
    In order to gain consumer acceptance, the industry will have to offer something BETTER or CHEAPER. Until that happens, we all keep our protection-free CD and MP3 players, and we buy only music that is compatible with them. The industry will continue to sell unencrypted CDs because the customers don't have the hardware to play anything else.

    Let's get back to "better or cheaper". "Better" is going to be tough because it means expensive hardware upgrades -- replacing your stereo with some kind of 16-channel amplifier and speakers. A tough sell when you consider that we all have only 2 ears, and they are not upgradable.

    "Cheaper" is not likely either. The industry could use existing P2P technology to roll out a "cheaper" pay-per-song model, but they chose not to. To these folks, "cheaper" means less profit in the short term.

    Even if they could solve the technical problem, the unsold hardware and media would end up at the landfill, right next to the DIVX players and discs.

    Crazy laws won't work. P2P networks (with or without Napster) are growing faster than anyone can legislate. Legal tactics work only against centrally controlled networks. Any law that cannot achive voluntary compliance from the majority of citizens is doomed. We simply don't have enough lawyers and courts to prosecute the number of would-be criminals. Remember the national 55 MPH speed limit? Prohibition?

    Are they really going to attack P2P networks (legally or otherwise)? Consider the scum-sucking spammers. They're like cockroaches. In theory, killing them is easy. LART one and it's dead. The problem is you can't kill them fast enough to control their growth. There are alot more P2P users than spammers -- both are here to stay.

  • The Register [theregister.co.uk] have a good story [theregister.co.uk] on this, tracking down the firms that have joined and spotting the common link between them. Hint: IBM were already a member; the enw joiner is IBM Microelectronics, ie., chip fabbers...
    --
    "I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
  • Exactly my point - vinyl was phased out because it suited the interests of the record and music publishing industries (and the distributors, hifi manufacturers etc etc.) For the first time, the ability to make our own pristine (well, OK, slightly lossy) digital copies raises the spectre, for the industry, of a market that might *not have to buy five copies of Dark Side of the Moon over a lifetime to make up for copies lost, stolen, destroyed or damaged. Course you wouldn't expect that to go down well with an industry where the vast majority of the grotesque profits they make come from back catalogue - bought for a pittance from young struggling artists, then just happen to sell for thirty years non-stop.

    I used to work at a music publisher. Take my word for it - the execs (and A&R people) at those places are pure evil. And that's not a word I like to use.
    --
    "I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"

  • Re:Not absolutely impossible, but close (Score:3)

    by imipak ( 254310 ) on Tuesday June 05, 2001 @06:17AM (#176837) Journal

    > the industry will have to offer something
    >BETTER or CHEAPER. Until that happens, we all
    >keep our protection-free CD and MP3 players,
    >and we buy only music that is compatible with
    >them. The industry will continue to sell
    >unencrypted CDs because the customers don't
    >have the hardware to play anything else.

    Some of us remember the way that vinyl records were ruthlessly swept out of shops; this happened *ahead* of consumer acceptance of CDs. I certainly remember when it started getting harder and harder to find decent vinyl copies of stuff I wanted, and this was the major factor in me reluctantly moving to CD. Remember there was a >70% price hike at the same time, supposedly to because th ultra-clean lasts-forever sound quality of CD was worth more to the consumer than crackly old records...

    Yes, I know, I could still get hold of fancy Technics 1200 DJ turntables if I really *want* to play my old records... can't afford that three hundred quid at present, though.

    Personally I'm just waiting for the point when I can afford to digitise my 400-ish CDs, store backups and the original masters off-site and just use a RAID equipped fileserver to pipe music around my house... I can dream, goddammit!
    --
    "I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"

  • Ahh. But IBM actually does try to listen to their customers now. The last thing they would want to do is give people a reason to not buy their sweet hard drive. When you've got pixie dust [ibm.com] the last thing you want to do give people is reason to think there is no NeverPayForMusicLand. The last thing anyone would want is to fork over some cash for a little bit of magic powder only get bent over by Captain Hook, VP End User Affairs for the RIAA.

    Which is why this might be a blessing. IBM has an intrest in people clogging their hard drives with large and available media. And IBM is huge. It has customers that border on fans. That + Money = Clout. Maybe IBM can change the evil empire. There are millions of reasons for them to try. Besides, "the more the RIAA tightens [their grip], the more mp3 will fall through [their] fingers." -- Carrie Fisher

  • LG is a bigger player than Sony. They are the largest actual manufacturer of electronic goods. Sony, Matushita, etc do less actual manufacture these days and outsource the work to companies like LG.

    LG does not market much under its own brand. The only place where I know of that happening is the UK where the Dixons/Currys chain replaced their in house 'Matsui' label with an exclusive distribution deal with LG. They did a similar deal with Samsung many years ago when nobody in Europe knew who they were.

    I'd guess they make about 95% of audio equipment sold worldwide. :-)

    I doubt if those companies make more than 30% combined. They market upwards of 80% - China and India ae huge markets with significant local players.

    SDMI is in trouble for reasons that were obvious two years ago when I went to their meetings, the only way SDMI can succeed is if every country in the world passes a law making non-SDMI players illegal. The hardware manufacturers have very little incentive to actually implement SDMI, they have a marginal interest in pretending they might.

    I suspect that the list of companies leaving is simply the list of compaines whose subscriptions were not renewed. I can't see anyone going out of their way to declare in public the private contempt they express for SDMI.

    In 1999 the group was running arround like headless chickens declaring that they had to solve the problem by Christmas or it was all over.

    One of the most ridiculous features of SDMI is that it prohibits absolutely any form of microphone built into the package. So it will be illegal to have a portable dictation machine that also plays SDMI MP3s.

    My strong belief is that there will be convergence between video cameras and MP3 players, just as there is already convergence between digital cameras and MP3. The idea of prohibiting a line in or mic in jack to such devices is pure fantasy.

    What I want is a device about the size of a cigarete packet that has a CPU, battery and compact flash II socket. It would record 20 mnutes of video onto an IBM (or other manufacturer) minidrive. There would be sockets for headphones, line-out, camera, microphone and line-in, plus USB of course. The base unit would strap to the waist belt with only lightweight peripherals to plug into it - just like modern cell phones.

  • IBM has been working on Digital Rights Management/Protection software for quite some time. I have no idea why they're joining SDMI at this late stage in the game...
    • IBM has been working on Digital Rights Management/Protection software for quite some time. I have no idea why they're joining SDMI at this late stage in the game

    To kick them while they're down? All they need to do is to keep SDMI tied up in wrangling and FUD until their own standard becomes de facto. Works for M$.

    • They are not taking away your freedom by trying to protect their interests. They are trying to stop software/music/movie/whatever piracy

    Ha ha. No.

    SDMI, CSS and their daddy, the DMCA, are aimed squarely at stopping me and thee from doing any fair use activities. Why? Because commercial duplication is already illegal, and because if you make it hard for amatuers to crack protection, then only professionals will crack it. It's that simple. If they were targetting professional pirates, they'd crank up the penalties for commercial piracy. They aren't, and they didn't. DMCA, CSS and SDMI are aimed at you and they're aimed at me.

    • Non-legitimate response to a problem with a business model: Buy laws and create technologies that attempt to prevent the exercise of the legally granted rights of American citizens

    While I broadly agree with you, I have to pick up on a few points:

    • Rights aren't granted, they're asserted.
    • It's a wider issue than just the USA. The USA rattled its mighty sabre, and Norway wiggled its bitch ass and kicked down Jon Johansens [slashdot.org] door, remember?
    • Business is entitled to create anti-copying technology. It's the laws that protect that (lame) technology that are the issue. Passing a law that says that because a technology can be used illegally, the technology should be illegal, in all forms, and even discussing it or telling people where to get it should be illegal, that's the problem. CSS and SDMI are fine, it's DMCA that's the long term nightmare.
  • The interesting thing happen when you want to *use* those bits. That is when the copy protection should kick in.

    That is when the DVD 'copy protection' kicks in. That's why we need deCSS -- to get around the CSS encryption so we can play the damn things, not to copy the disk. Anybody can copy a DVD, encryption and all, and you'll need deCSS to play the copy just like you need it to play the original. That's what the RIAA just does not get: stopping deCSS does not stop people from pirating DVDs, it just stops people like me from buying them legally because I can't play them. Oh, yes, it also stops me from buying pirated DVDs, because I can't play them either, so I suppose at that level the RIAA is right (as they shoot of their own nose to spite their face).

  • Considering the size of LG (it's one of the largest companies in the world), I'd say that is a big loss. And considering how controversial SDMI is, if even a single electronics giant stands outside, they've lost, because the remaining one(s) will surely exploit their status for what it's worth to take market share by appealing to consumer rights.
  • > Is it really not possible to make things uncopyable?

    No, it's not possible, if you can read it, then you can copy it.

    The interesting thing happen when you want to *use* those bits.
    That is when the copy protection should kick in.
  • Well, I'm pretty sure that people can come up with an encryption scheme which even the NSA would be unable to crack.

    The important part is not to make cracking the encryption impossible, the important part is to make cracking the encryption cracking *long*.

    Give the NSA computers enough to calculate that they would take longer than it's appropriate to crack it.

    (It doesn't help you when you pick up enemy communication in mid-battle if it takes a year to break it.)

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