DRM From the Viewpoint of the Electronic Industry 374
mike449 writes "The cover story of the Oct.16 issue of EDN magazine is about the recent trends in DRM. It is not just a technical article. The author tries to convey what people who are supposed to design and implement access restriction measures think about their feasibility and associated economic, legal and moral issues. 'Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM'."
Just say no! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not even about copy protection. It's about keeping us on the "new format treadmill", and locking us in to specific playback hardware/software.
Don't be fooled. [riaa.org] Take a stand! [eff.org]
Re:Just say no! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just say no! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes downloadable music is good. Yes it can celebrate good rather than manufactured music. Yes, it levels the playing field. Yes, yes, yes, that's all true, we agree, great, fine, lovely. That's NOT THE POINT.
It's very simple. Digital Rights Mangling systems are bad. They are wrong. Any system that employs them is flawed and intrusive. Any system that employs it does not get my business or my money. End of story.
Re:Just say no! (Score:2)
Re:good?! (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, I do understand their complaint and somewhat sympathize. But it's hard to find much more sympathy when they are proclaiming this from multi-million dollar offices.
Re:good?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most music CDs do not have any sort of DRM. The recording industry has been selling perfect digital copies with no protection whatsoever (until recently, and still only in isolated cases) since 1982. In that time, and even in recent years, there have been lots and lots of platinum albums.
DVDs do have some copy-protection in the CSS encryption. But we all know how weak that is. Still DVDs sell like crazy.
Restrictive DRM only serves to remind the honest consumer that Industry does not trust them. The real "pirates" (Yarrr!) will find ways around DRM and sell illegal copies forever. Practically every DRM scheme released so far has been broken, some using high-tech devices like a Sharpie, or the Shift key.
If you were a media executive, would you waste money developing and marketing a DRM method that will most likely be quickly defeated?
Re:good?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Bull. They can not sell it and make ZERO dollars, or they can sell it and make money. If they want to close up shop and not make any money, fine, someone else will will jump in to make a buck selling a product. The RIAA can yell and screaming that the music industry will vanish all they like, that does not make it true. They made the exact same claims when radio appeared, they made the exact same claims about cassette tapes, and the MPAA made the exact same claims about VCR's. Just because they WANT DRM enforcement and they WANT congress to grant them expanded copyright powers and they WANT to eliminate fair use and they WANT congress to pass laws forcing consumer producted to be crippled does not mean they should get it.
They got congress to pass the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) in 1992 which forced all digital recording devices to be DRM crippled. This law exterminated all progress in these consumer products. It killed Digital Audio Tape, it killed MiniDiscs, and it killed others. No progress for a decade! They demanded this law to "fight piracy". The elimination of all new new media formats meant a drop in sales, they lost the market of people re-buying music they own on new formats. The irony is that they demanded the law to fight piracy, and when the law caused a drop in sales they blamed that drop on piracy.
All current pay services are suffering under FOUR SELF IMPOSED HANDICAPS. #1 They only offer crippled products. #2 They have not been offering their full catalog of music. #3 The prices are inflated - a download is undeniably a far cheaper product than pressing and distributing and retailing a physical product. #4 They are struggling to recover from a FIVE YEAR delayed entry into the download market. They should have started selling downloads as soon as Napster smacked them over the head with the fact that it was possible and that there was a demand for it. By refusing to sell downloads they left a vacuum in the online market. That vacuum was the main force driving the development and explosion of P2P.
Even suffering under those four self inposed handicaps these services are still drawing quite a few customers. They can't do squate about the five year late-start, but if they eliminate the other three handicaps they will attract a hell of alot more business. It is no coincidece that the most sucessfull pay service (iTunes) also hapens to be the one that is most nearly DRM-free.
The only effect of using DRM is to drive away customers. It certainly does nothing to prevent the songs from appearing on P2P.
Once someone buys something they have every right to make fair use of it. They have every right to preform a calculation on that file to play it backwards, they have every right to preform a calculation on that file to play it at double speed, they have every right to preform a calculation on that file to make it sound like random noise, and they have every right to preform the calculation on that file that happens to remove the DRM. The DMCA is just play stupid for trying to say it is a crime to do math. The DMCA is just play stupid for trying to say it is a crime to tell someone math function.
Any circumvention a computer can do can also be done purely mentally by thinking through the exact same steps the computer would do. You can violate the DMCA and commit circumvention crime by sitting motionless staring at a DRM'd E-book and mentally descrambling the data to read the text. You can break the law by sitting motionless and THINKING.
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I say it time and again... (Score:2)
sharingthegroove.com [sharingthegroove.com] and FurthurNET [furthurnet.com]
Re:I say it time and again... (Score:2, Interesting)
Therefore, saying 'the bands you should be for' is ridiculous.
Re:I say it time and again... (Score:2, Funny)
Are you a bot?
Re:I say it time and again... (Score:2)
Why, because there's something wrong with wanting to get paid for your life's work?
Itunes is a great example. (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, let's say Itunes is the best DRM crippled format there is. Can it do what normal recorded music can? The objections raised in the article strike at real problems facing any DRM that make the whole concept look like a looser. The inability of more than one person to share music collections in more than one place at a time blows it for most people. Answer these questions about Apple's nice DRM that are typical family issues:
What good is any music that I can't share with other members of my own family? If my wife can't listen to my music in her car, while I listen to our music at home or on my bike, the DRM sytem simply sucks. Sure, I can work around it with tapes and other stuff that will rocket me back to the 1980s. What good is that? I'm happier with my simple oggfiles that I can serve out as I please and put on as many computers as I want. When I bought the music, I had every intention of everyone in my house being able to enjoy it. Anything more complicated than that is simply not going to catch on.
Re:Just say no! (Score:2)
Whoops. Looks like we're all stuck in 2003 content-wise.
The alternative? Let the market force long and hard considerations on behalf of producers. Let Sony explain to my mom why her home movies don't play on her new VCR. Balance will be found, but it might be bloody for companies that make bad decisions.
Re:Just say no! (Score:2, Informative)
It can be a means to prevent sales of the software product that's allegedly supposed to be protected, in favour of protecting an artificially created monopoly market for hardware which the software producer has nothing to do with. Get on the "overpriced hardware treadmill" instead.
Witness what's being done to AmigaOS [8bit.co.uk].
If only Microsoft and the [RI|MP]AA could try to be that kind of mah-brain-huuuurts stupid!
Re:Just say no! (Score:2, Funny)
DRM is precisely as effective for anti-piracy as the Evil Bit is for security.
Wow, you're giving DRM a lot of credit here. It's too bad nobody implemented the Evil Bit so we could do real comparisons.
Interesting line ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder just how many people actually *do* a cost-benefit analysis these days, or is it just a 'tick-box' item ?
The world might be a better place, if people would actually *think* more, it's not hard... "Actions" => "consequences". "Actions" => "Consequences". Repeat as necessary...
Simon.
Re:Interesting line ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. Action: Millions of people rip songs from cds with no copy protection and share them on Napster.
Consequence:Recording industry decides DRM is necessary.
Re:Interesting line ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Action: RIAA overcharges for their product.
Consequence: Millions of people download songs shared on Napster for free.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Someone is going to have to make the compremises. The question now is: Will it be the RIAA? Or the millions of people who buy their products but are getting ticked off about getting gouged?
Re:Interesting line ... (Score:5, Insightful)
And where are the $10 CDs? Besides in the bargain bin, the last home of musicians so bad that even their mothers didn't buy a copy? $15-20 is more like the norm now.
Seriously, they are not overpriced! They are already cheap!
The cost of manufacture is in the neighborhood of $0.10 and the artists and composers get about $0.40 (some of which goes to pay back the record company loan which covered recording and production costs, which is why I'm not including those costs here). A couple bucks go to the retailer. So yes, they are overpriced, at least in terms of their real value.
I have an honest question for you, how much would you like CD's sold for, at what price would you buy them?
For me, about $5-10, depending on how good the music is. Luckily, the used market makes this possible. Unfortunately, there's no reasonable way to acquire a single song if you don't want an entire CD (singles are priced about $5 now I think, and there's no used market). I think this is the real reason piracy is so rampant, and why iTunes is so succesful. After all, $10 for a lossy, restricted album with no physical medium or artwork isn't a great deal, but $1 for a single beats anything available in the record store.
By the way, nice Slashdot name, it really shows me what kind of attitude you have in general, a piss poor one!
Strong words coming from Anonymous Coward. By the way, with the economy in its current state, you might not want to make comments like "get a REAL JOB", lest irony bite you in the ass.
Re:Interesting line ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Consequence ===> Users buy less content. RIAA whines that it's those darn pirates to blame, and not that they themselves are acting like spoiled 4-year-olds.
DRM - NOT - necessary. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why doesn't the recoding industry protect their interests the same way as the rest of us? Sue a few of the SOBs and the rest will get the message soon enough.
Oh, that would be "bad" marketing! Tough sh*&, that's the way a free and civilized world works. You have a right to redress in a court of law, not the formation of a police state.
Then the rest humans don't have to live in a world were "automated book burning" is the name of the game.
Recently there
Re:Apple != RIAA (Score:3, Informative)
The copy you burned still has DRM, and ripping it to a DRM-less format is against the law.
Huh??? I don't know what you're smoking, but once you burn it to CD, it's a real, honest-to-goodness, Red Book CD, that is exactly like any audio CD you bought before DRM was more than a mad gleam in the RIAA's eye. No DRM there.
Which works great as long as that's true, and you still have access to that machine. Of course, it really sucks when you have to somehow get your old 8088 on your fibre-optic network so
Re:Interesting line ... (Score:3, Interesting)
The right one would be:
Action: The RIAA members produce 20% less new releases than before
Consequence: The RIAA members sales figures are 20% less than before, but they blame pirate for less sales.
Not to mention that MPAA member DVD sales are up, gaming consoles and games sales are up. But consumer have roughly the same (or less because of the economic downturn) amount of money in their pocket so they spend less on music.
Don't forget the first part (Score:2, Informative)
The first sentence is quite telling as well. There will always be a small minority that refuse to pay for things, though most people are more than happy to shell out a few bucks for something useful.
I picked up Knights of the Old Republic the other day. It's a great game, but I found that the copy protection wouldn't let me play at first. It
Re:Interesting line ... (Score:2)
Re:Interesting line ... (Score:2)
They did:
Fortunately, the device industry's analysis looks like:
so there is a chance sanity may prevail.
DRM only hurts the Good Guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DRM only hurts the Good Guys. (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM is going to create the exact same market. Right now, anyone can pirate music/software pretty cheap (bandwidth being the big cost), if DRM continues to be pushed on everything, fewer and fewer average Joe's can circumvent it by themselves, and will start buying equipment and software to do it ([sarcasm] which will no doubt be provided at a reasonable charge from the black market [/sarcasm]). End result will be people paying an arm and a leg to get at DRM circumvention technology, in order to think they've made a deal by getting 'free' stuff (ala pirated software/music/movies...)
Now if I could somehow just wedge myself into that nice lucrative DRM circumvention technology provider/distributor position, I'd be rich!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DRM only hurts the Good Guys. (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks DRM for making my life so much better.
Re:DRM only hurts the Good Guys. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that those who are promoting DRM see the issue in black and white. They want the absolute strongest protection technology and the absolute harshest punishment for violators. There is no way to achieve absolute protection with current technology and continuing to push for it only makes consumers less like to adopt DRM products because of the significant hassle.
A more reasonable approach to DRM would be to aim for relatively strong protection but one that does not create a hassle for the consumer. It should also be bundle with a service that actually creates a benefit for using the DRM product. If the consumer gains by using the DRM product, they'll be inclined to use it. Admittedly there will still be those that will crack the DRM technology but that cannot be eliminated anyway. So why aim for 100% when 80% will lead to wider and faster adoption of the DRM technology?
Re:DRM only hurts the Good Guys. (Score:5, Informative)
Get it through your thick skulls! (Score:2, Interesting)
Which leaves lots of room for money making endeavors, as lots remains to be made. Of course, if you can't make, but only wish to "own", DRM is not going to change the fact that you are, ahem, fucked.
Re:Get it through your thick skulls! (Score:2)
Somebody better tell that to all those stores selling DVD's and CD's full of pre-existing content!
Re:Get it through your thick skulls! (Score:2)
Perhaps this is true in some strange theoretical sense (I doubt that), but it's certainly not true in reality. Virtually all content that is sold is that which has already been made. Your argument makes very little sense.
Re:Get it through your thick skulls! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Get it through your thick skulls! (Score:2)
how much did it just go for on eBay? FIFTY
when did it come out? 1994
Re:Get it through your thick skulls! (Score:2)
This isn't yet an absolute, we're still in the middle of the paradigm shift, but it's becoming more and more true every day.
Oh, and I no longer hold the rights to the content I've
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust hasn't been earned (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look at the network traffic of any university. Can you really blame electronics companies for not being trusting of their target market?
Re:Trust hasn't been earned (Score:2)
Re:Trust hasn't been earned (Score:2)
trust hasn't been given in the first place (Score:2, Interesting)
Who needs to earn trust again? (Score:2)
Re:Trust hasn't been earned (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, maybe college students with almost no disposable income shouldn't be a target market for $20 CDs, either.
Historically those markets listened to college radio and swapped vinyl. They certainly weren't spending $20 a pop on a CD from an international megastar with one good song on it.
Here's a concept -- charge different amounts for different product. I.e., Mogwai and Ted Leo CDs should be offered for $5 each. Let the teen masses and the adult contemporary listeners (with their disposable dollars) pay $20 for an album.
Variable pricing is slowly coming of age via direct downloads through non-traditional channels such as indie-label sites and the iTunes store. Fortunately this will ultimately kill off the RIAA's price-fixing tactics. But goddamn it's an ugly death.
Re:Trust hasn't been earned (Score:4, Insightful)
They are infringing on the copyrights of the content industry.
So, I see no reason why the hardware manufactures will think that their bottom lines will be affected. Quite the contrary, many hardware companies have profited from the widespread availability of content. Hence, Sony's schizophrenic reaction to all this. Their hardware unit profits and their content unit losses from piracy.
One thing the article points out is that the hardware manufactures are rushing to provide a technology that does not benefit them (i.e. profit). It only benefits the content industry. Users and hardware manufactures pay the cost of DRM. Government and users pay the cost of Draconian copyright laws.
So, even if you disregard the idea that people are basically honest, it does not make economic sense for the electronics industry (i.e. hardware manufactures) to essentially make a charitable contribution to the content industry.
Mixed companies like Sony have a rational for doing it, but they are still just shifting profit from one business unit to another.
Re:Trust hasn't been earned (Score:2)
And it's not about trusting ALL of the people buying the stuff, there will always be some piracy - it's just about the piracy/buying ratio getting better - so that the increased sales offset the lowered prices.
no locks (Score:5, Insightful)
thats what it all comes down to
Re:no locks (Score:2)
For example, look at The Club which is used to protect parked cars. Anyone can take a hacksaw and cut through the thing, but it's simply easier and less risky to look for a car that doesn't have it.
Sure there are always the experts that like the challenge of doing the impossible. Those are not the people DRM is designed for.
Re:no locks (Score:3)
1: Hey, I like Kraftwerk. I think I'll share this latest Kraftwerk CD on P2P.
2: Awww, shucks, it's copy protected. Oh well, I think I'll start liking Britney Spears instead, because those CDs aren't protected.
3: ???
4: Yeah, right.
Meanwhile, songs from both artists (well OK, the artists, and Britney Spears) end up on P2P because someone with a better-than-the-average-consumer clue WILL spend 2 min
Re:no locks (Score:3, Funny)
On the contrary, these are exactly the people DRM is designed for. DRM protection of content gives them the challenge of breaking the DRM. Who else benefits? Not the average consumer -- if the DRM is properly implemented, they won't notice a difference, and if it isn't, they will be inconvenienced. Pirates won't benefit -- there's always the analog hole. The companies won't
How will small content creators cope? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, a small time music producer or a small time comic book creator will have trouble in this environment, especially if they're just doing it because they love the art.
Re:How will small content creators cope? (Score:2)
weaken the individual and strengthen the big corperations further. its gradually happening, and will continue to. sure there'll always be some resistence, but the world has taught people to listen, to any old crap and its taught them not to think at all, and not to question.
This will lead somewhere nasty one day.
maybe im going too far, but ever played the game Deus Ex? quite a scary game if you ask me.
Re:How will small content creators cope? (Score:2)
Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Problem isnt DRM its copyrights (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't DRM, it's copyrights. DRM is just one of many tools to enforce it, where when used in a way to controll people it would, in a normal world, fall by the wayside like all those other "key" schemes that never worked out.
But when you assert that you have a right to restrict what other people copy, even when the cat's out of the bag, then it takes on a whole new meaning. Like the right to regulate hardware companies who don't participate. The right to monitor other peoples computers for the sake of "enforcement". And the right to pry into peoples private content.
Re:Problem isnt DRM its copyrights (Score:5, Insightful)
Today we use careful forensic techniques to examine content of centuries past. Centuries down the road, is the skill of cracking going to required in university to become an arheologist? Enormous amounts of content of modern culture could become completely lost. Films decay, even the BBC's big knowledge archive turned out to be almost unsalvagable only a couple decades after it was made, and they didn't even have to fight DRM.
DRM is fundamentally flawed, and serves only to interfere with the rights of those it is inflicted upon. It serves no purpose to anyone but a self serving company that may not even be around a few years from now. How many old games or software titles do you own in which the company is even still in existance. Guess what, once they go tit's up there is no incentive for them to help salvage DRM'd products.
Re:Problem isnt DRM its copyrights (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, I see no evidence that copyrights will expire in the future.
Sure, they were supposed to, but the powers-that-be are so far into the big copyright holder's pockets that copyrights get extended any time the copyright holder needs them to be extended.
Re:Problem isnt DRM its copyrights (Score:3, Insightful)
Some issues have flip flopped multiple times over the years, I see no reason why todays climate of corporate interests trumping citizen interest
Re:Problem isnt DRM its copyrights (Score:2, Insightful)
DRM Engineers... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, if their opinions are heard and understood, their job at designing and implementing DRM is gone. How many people would stand up for a cause that would put them out of work?
Re:DRM Engineers... (Score:2)
Duh! - Honesty and Trust! (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM should be thrown out - pirates will still find ways to crack/hack the system. It's just a vicious cycle - one that ultimately hurts the consumer.
Producers should instead look towards more effective means of an honest and easy system of distribution. This would generate much more revenue - and shut down the napster-like systems of today.
I know many people who are now avidly seeking the honest route through the $0.99 title online stores.
Yeah, sure (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah. This will be about as effective as standing my grandmother in front of the breaking dam.
I like the concept that they trust the consumer to be honest. How about instead we trust SOCIETY to evolve and simply let bygones be bygones? Sure, some industries don't want to die...why would they? But they're hindering our forward progress in their rediculous attempts to merely survive (read: senseless litigation) rather
Just don't buy it. (Score:2)
This is the wrong way to think. You shouldn't have any say in what people buy besides what you vote with your wallet. It is very democratic, you see?
If people generally don't care about DRM the sales of the crippled product will not be affected. If they do
Re:Just don't buy it. (Score:2)
If something has DRM that you find to be unacceptable just do not buy it. Of course the problem you will have with this is that others who do not care will continue to buy it, and losing you as a customer will probably not be the companies biggest concern.
This is the wrong way to think. You shouldn't have any say in what people buy besides what you vote with your wallet. It is very democratic, you see?
If people generally don't care about DRM the sales of the crippled product will not be affected. If the
Re:Just don't buy it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that the Six-Pack family doesn't even notice the war going on (for now), so can't take sides. And by the time they notice, the "wrong" side will have won.
How many people, if they understood the idea that their new media purchase could simply vanish at the whim of companies with less interest in them than Enron had in its employees' retirement funds, would still plop down the same (or more) money as for an unencumbered and semi-permanent product?
Not a whole lot, I'd wager. In my experience, people have NO clue about the implications (or even the presence) of DRM. Just last week, for example, I had to explain to a friend (and not even a tech-illiterate one at that) that all the music on his computer, ripped by him from his own CDs, would no longer work simply because he had used WMP to rip and encode them, and had never turned off WMP's "rights management". Granted, WMP lets you back up your keys for a planned migration, but major crashes rarely bother popping up a dialog warning "This installation of Windows has died, and five minutes from now, will never boot again. Please back up your music library at this time".
So yes, I believe "Joe Sixpack" should have less say in matters such as this, and should listen more to those of us who do understand that "enhanced" and "restricted" do not mean the same thing. But calling that a power-grab strikes me as a rather egregious twisting of the facts. For an analogy, do you believe that fire codes should result from the whims of the market, or from those who've spent thousands of hours studying how fire propagates through your house? Or do you just consider your greatly increased likelyhood of living through each night a power-grab by those in the know on that particular topic?
Obligatory Microsoft Bashing (Score:2)
From the article: However, Microsoft has made public that it intends to introduce changes that will make the operating system incompatible with chips that follow the current version of the TCP spec.
I guess Microsoft just can't resist embracing and extending things. I mean.. here, they're not even waiting for the spec to mature before they ruin it with their own implementation. Maybe Microsoft will be our greatest ally in the war on DRM... or not.
Vending Machines (Score:2)
>Just think of all the money you'll save not having to have a lock, a money changer,etc
Just leave a bucket I am sure everyone would be honest.'
Quis custodiet... (Score:5, Insightful)
What matters is who is holding the keys at the end of the day.
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad.
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Are you implying some sort of patriarchal gang bang thing going on with this "analog hole" stuff? Sexist pig. I'll bet you use ATA hard drives, too.
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Complete Article (Score:2, Redundant)
The War On Copying
The communications industry is ready for an infusion of data, such as digital video, to drive it to recovery, but music, video, and other digital-content owners continue to keep a tight rein on their growing mass of IP (intellectual property) while waiting for a secure DRM (digital-rights-management) scheme to materialize. The complexity of DRM, however, makes it a nontrivial addition to a system, especially a consumer device with
Re:Complete Article (Score:2)
This is really a very good article... (Score:4, Insightful)
Your mileage may vary, but I, for one, had never seen the observation that the chief function of DRM is to "protect the release window" (the short time when content is new and makes most of its money).
What I still don't get (Score:3, Funny)
Analog totally defeats the purpose/use of DRM.
Hardware DRM (Score:2, Insightful)
Call me paranoid - I enjoy it.
DVD recorders (Score:5, Insightful)
In an ideal world... (Score:3, Interesting)
yeah, there are some situations where this need not apply, but things like electronic voting and how i get to use my stuff under legal fair use doctrines should have auditable code.
Example: microsoft comes out with longhorn sometime around when i build my first Megaman unit in 200X. it has code that checks for unauthorized movies, in the form of digital signatures it downloaded as part of Windows DateRape (the new, forced windows update). some day you decide to watch episode 3 for the second time to laugh at how terrible it is.
the movie, since it was a divx rip of a dvd you own, has the same signature as a pirated copy floating around the internet. so of course, people still use kazaa in the future or something like it, and the people with movies on their disks that match the signatures have their dossiers sent in MS Word format (twice...maybe three times) to local law enforcement.
After local law enforcement is done scanning the files for macro viruses, they send out a squad, bust down your door and throw you in jail. Even though it was just a divx rip of a DVD you already own.
bad, bad, bad! people need to know if things like this exist, but can't because only Russia, Micronesia and Paraguay can see the code. don't get me started about republican-controlled buddy-buddy electronic voting.
WHY HASN'T THERE BEEN A CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATION INTO ELECTRONIC VOTING IMPROPRIETIES YET?
another topic for another thread, i suppose...
p.s. the signatures wouldn't be something complicated like MD5Sums (however easy that would make evasion), but filesize and a soundex title match. or something like that.
Finally... (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen.
Now all you have to do is let the rest of the non "techy" consumers know that and DRM will most likely fail.
Although a difficult task to successfully complete, just remember to remind them that DRM will make their life more complicated and computers will become even more confusing to the average person... but then again, the RIAA, MS, etc etc will gain an extra buck at a large cost to the consumers, so that's an upside... right?
DRM to prevent virus and worm attacks? (Score:4, Funny)
I would invision a scheme in which executables must be registered by the creator with a trustworthy third party in a non-anonymous fashion. Code that has not been registered in a publically traceable way would be denied access to system resources or run only within a tightly controlled sandbox. Once a piece of code has been validated, it would be locked in an execute-only state.
Given that most users are too willing to run any old app that comes over the internet, stronger controls on what can and cannot run may be warranted.
Re:DRM to prevent virus and worm attacks? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DRM to prevent virus and worm attacks? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gentoo users would love it. The machine could sign every binary generated by the build processes with the owner's private machine key. No binary without that signature would run. It d
DRM is 90% lie and 10% truth (Score:5, Insightful)
As a music publisher and promoter, I paid thousands of dollars in royalties to the licensing agencies however, not one artist or songwriter in 7+ years has ever received a solitary zinc penney. Never and none. All the money the RIAA is taking in with their extortion tactics stays within the RIAA and the corporations. Not one cent is being paid out to the artists. Never and none.
So DRM isn't about paying royalties to artists and it isn't about protecting them since they will receive very little, if any benefit from DRM.
Those selling the locks and the keys and those selling the media and the players are the only ones who will receive any financial benefit. So, why even have DRM?
Supreme Court (Score:2)
"Recently, the US Supreme Court ruled on DVD protection, stating that publishing trade secrets circumvents protection schemes as covered under the DMCA. "
I don't remember any such ruling. I remember a DMCA ruling from the 2nd Circuit, and a trade secret ruling from the California Supreme Court, but no US Supreme Court ruling at all. Anyone know if this is confusion on the part of the author, or if there really was such a ruling?
scary.. (Score:2, Interesting)
firstly tonight i read about Trusted Computing, and that Phoenix plan to put all sorts of weird and wonderful things into the BIOS (supposedly for our convienience and privacy, etc) Phoenix's BIOS Roadmap [deviceforge.com]
and then i read about this DRM crap. It all seems to be tied together quite nicely, and results in a general lack of rights, ease of use, and privacy for the end user.
they are literally stripping away our choice, with this stuff. subtly making it more convi
And of course (Score:2)
Anyone for moving to Nicuragua?
Punning with Acronyms (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft is moving even more slowly than I thought. Only a monopolist could sell an operating system in today's market without support for tcp.
(shakes head in disbelief)
Just released: Digital Plate Management (Score:5, Insightful)
Officials at one of America's largest "all you can eat" restaurants announced today a new method of cost-cutting.
Tuesday, November 25th
For immediate release
Raleigh, NC: Silver Bucket, a nation-wide franchise restaurant chain with over 200 all-you-can-eat restaurants, has just introduced a new technology called Digital Plate Management, or DPM for short. Company executives are said to be excited about this new technology as they expect it will end the ability for unscrupulous customers to share food with non-paying companions.
"We've always faced a certain 'undesirable' component to our clientele," says Bryan Dawkins, CEO of Silver Bucket. He adds, "You can tell who they are as soon as they arrive. They'll arrive in twos or threes
Dawkins adds, "They're lying, of course. We seldom see it happen as they've become such experts at this kind of blatant theft, but come on
The Digital Plate Management technology that is now being deployed at Silver Bucket restaurants will bring an end to all that. The system relies on a high-tech buffet plate that is designed to work only with the person who purchases the buffet menu option. "These plates are going to save our bacon," says Dawkins. "They are just the most fantastic devices we've ever seen." The plates, which cost the company a little over $1300 a piece, are encoded at the time the customer makes their purchase upon entry into the restaurant. From that point on, the plate is designed to maintain its rigidity only when held by the authorized patron. "If someone else picks them up, they go completely flaccid. The plates, that is," adds Dawkins. In other words, the plates will only be useful for the authorized customer.
Digital Plate Management is the results of years of research, combining stunning effort in both materials engineering and biometrics. The plates include integrated sensors that allow them to be encoded with biometric data when the customer is first handed the plate. The plate stores information about the registered user such as fingerprints, skin elasticity, and body temperature. If these values change beyond a certain range of acceptable values, the plate goes limp. That might seem like a problem for restaurant staff, but the plates have been designed to handle encoding for more than one person. "One of the incredible features of these plates is that they can be encoded to allow any of our restaurant employees to handle the plate without having the plate become flaccid," adds Dawkins. This means that, while customers cannot share their plates amongst themselves, restaurant staff will be free to handle the plates when clearing tables and during dish washing. "Oh certainly, in the restaurant business, you never want to annoy your staff with potential hurdles like that," states Dawkins. He continues, "Multiple user encoding was one of the first things they had to solve in the design of these plates."
"Silver Bucket is committed to providing a first class customer experience," explains Dawkins. "Digital Plate Management is an absolutely revolutionary method for maintaining the level of quality our customers expect. These plates will allow us to make sure that only those honest, paying customer will have access to our all-you-can-eat buffet. We will thus be able to ensure a high-quality menu for our guests, and improve the bottom line for our shareholders."
Customer reaction has been mixed. David
non-US? (Score:2)
I ca
This is rich... (Score:2)
While the author of this article has hit the nail right on the head here, somebody needs to hit these content produces up*SIDE* the head for thinking it will work.
It doesn't matter if it's illegal, pirates will still do it.
It doesn't matter how complicated it is, pirates will find a way.
It doesn't matte
Loaded words and phrases (Score:3, Funny)
WOW.
This article probably uses every single one of GNU's "Confusing or loaded words and phrases" [gnu.org]. Congratulations to the author for showing his utter lack of bias...
Very good points (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 80s with VCRs and tape recorders, people showed that they wanted time- and space-shifting fair use rights, and the law followed. Now the law is swinging back, as the DMCA can make those things technically illegal - consider that if the DMCA and the broadcast bit existed then, VCRs would be illegal now. But the content owners were unable to stop Xerox machines, VCRs, tape dubbers, digital audio extraction, CD-RWs, and portable MP3 players, because people really do want to "own" content.
When you make a sale, both sides get something they want. The RIAA wants money, theoretically so they can pay artists to make music. People want music. Specifically, they want to "own" music, as in, "to have the ability to play it, whenever, wherever." This is where the balance lies - if people could redistribute, artists wouldn't get paid, but if people couldn't "own" (in the sense of sovereignty, not copyright), they wouldn't buy it, and again, the artist starves. DRM tries to do just that - take away "ownership," in return for, nothing but inconvenience. I don't think this would happen in a competitive market. I can only hope it won't happen in the present market.
No DRM actually helped the electronic industry (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about broadband, CD/DVD-R/RW, large hard drives, solid-state digital music players, etc -- all cheap and ubitquitously avaiable today, due in large part to the demand caused by music swapping, and all having beneficial applications beyond copyright violations.
I think that had Napster, KaZaA, etc not been possible due to DRM, you would not have had this growth, and the state of the tech industry would have been not as well off because of it.
2035: a reflection (Score:5, Insightful)
I spent the last day trying to get my doctoral thesis back. So far, I think it's lost for good. I wrote it back in 2017, and the University copyrighted it. Last week, a fire at the University destroyed the key server; about 20,000 volumes were lost.
At first, it was thought that we could restore from tape, but the problem was that the law mandated encrypting all copyrighted works to prevent illegal distribution. Yes, we still have the backups, but they're encrypted; without the key server, useless. Some of my colleagues have wondered aloud about building a decryption utility, until the legal department reminded them that this would be illegal. Since all software is registered with a central repository by the compiler, it would be impossible to keep it a secret. And given that most decryption algorithms are patented, it would surely get tagged by the patent-crawlers.
Yeah, I remember a time before compulsory registration and mandatory networking. You could actually compile your own source code without having it registered with the copyright office. And even 20 years ago, there was no such thing as a patent-crawler; if you infringed on copyright or someone else's patent, they had to take you to court. With automatic enforcement now, it's impossible to copy someone else's bitstream. Even if you want to give it away, you still have to pay for a distribution license.
And the compulsory registration system has had its problems. The computer science department now has a waiver allowing them to run non-networked computers. With automatic copyright registration and enforcement, infringement alerts became increasingly frequent; it seems as if there's only so many correct ways to write "Hello World", or solve the fibonacci sequence. After a few years, the FBI simply ignored infringement alerts from the University, and soon after, we got the waiver.
But some of us are still writing code with a pen. I've seen illegal copies of D'Christy's prime-factoring algorithm passed around on notebook paper. You would never get away with computer file of it, though, because someone would eventually slip and use the disk on a publicly connected workstation.
Well, I think my thesis is lost. Even though I've got a key, I can't risk bringing it forward (last year, private ownership of encryption keys was made illegal). I didn't know I had it - I found it as I was rumaging through some disks, hoping for a legacy copy of my thesis.
A colleague of mine managed to get a copy of the backup on disk. While rumaging through my things, I found an old pre-registration laptop without a network interface. Tonight, we'll see if we can get our words back.
And some poor kid got busted yesterday. He bought some cheap flea-market hardware that had an old unlicensed compiler on it. He would have never gotten caught, either, had he the insight not to connect it to a network.
List of requirements to make DRM real (Score:3, Interesting)
The average consumer who purchases a DVD, CD, multimedia device, television, or computer system really has no "upfront" knowledge of why DRM is bad. Nor, do they particularly care. There will always be exceptions to the rule, however, the majority of consumers will not be able to tell (unless the package is marked) whether the brand new Sony DVD player they bought contains DRM capabilities. The criteria that the average consumer uses when making their product selection is not as "robust" as the tech savy or politically aware consumer would use. DRM acceptance by the general public really boils down to satisfying a few key requirements.
One, the hardware device which utilizes DRM should not cost anymore than the device which does not utilize DRM. Certainly, the addition of the DRM components will raise the price of the product. Therefore, it is necessary for the consumer to perceive a benefit which justifies the additional cost. This will require slick new features that are available only on the DRM enabled model and suitable advertising of the device. Thus neutralizing the issue of product price increase then becomes a marketing exercise.
DRM enabled equipment should be able to conduct the authentication/verification of the user and their content with NO user involvement. If the new DVD player becomes more difficult to use, people will not purchase the new DVD player. DRM hardware must become innocuous to the user and must be backward compatible with previous releases of content.
DRM enabled hardware will need to have a single industry standard that is used to encode and decode the content. There can be no competing standards such as DVD-R and DVD-RAM. The price of content that supports decryption on all DRM standards would be quite a bit higher than a non-DRM enabled content. There would also be considerable difficulty in creating content to meet all standards. There is also no guarantee that competing standards would work interchangeably.
DRM enabled hardware must be presented as a positive component by such consumer product publications as popular as Consumer Reports. If DRM is rated as being considerably more costly and painful to operate, the hardware will not be bought.
Finally, the "cut-over" for releasing only DRM enabled content, must be worked out. A large enough majority of the consumer population must posess a DRM enabled hardware device so that the DRM enabled content can be consumed. It wouldn't do for all of the LOTR III DVDs, to use as an example, be released as DRM enabled. There wouldn't be enough people with the correct hardware who would purchase the new LOTR III DVD. The content providers must work with the harware vendors and create a plan to "roll-out" content that by design will only be consumable on DRM enabled hardware.
In conclusion the DRM enabled hardware/media must be competetive in price with the non-DRM enabled hardware/media. The DRM enabled hardware must be as easy-to-use, if not easier, than current hardware. There must be a single industry standard on DRM implementation that allows for backward compatibility. The popular media outlets that consumers consult to build their "criteria of product selection" must present DRM in a "positive" light in order to build public support and neutralize any "negative press" in regards to the DRM product. Finally, the content providers will need to work closely with the hardware vendors to determine how best to implement DRM "roll-out" to the consumers.
Re:Cost (Score:2)
Methinks you might have forgotten about things like licensing costs. I can assure you EMI would likely be paying a non-insignificant license fee to whomever developed the DRM method they choose to implement; said fee may be imposed per title, per time unit (week/month/annum), or per individual unit (CD) produced.
This is exactly right (Score:2)
Its perfectly legitimate to put on any kind of weird protection scheme they want. It should be just as valid for me to get around those schemes, as long as the end result is, or could be legal.
To use the example in the article, if I want to copy a DVD to my laptop to save battery life, then that should be legitimate.
What I truly object to
Re:DRM is fine...get it right (Score:2)
So don't play the "technically, DRM is fine" card. While it very well may be fine, the statement is misrepresentative of the real problem and abstracts awa