IEEE Working Group Considers Kinder, Gentler DRM 236
slave5tom writes "An IEEE working group is trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Its scheme will allow unlimited copying of encrypted content, which will require a playkey to activate. Trying to add a cost by making the playkey 'rivalrous' (what you take I lose) and rescuing the big content players from the brink of oblivion does seem futile, but it is entertaining to watch them fight the inevitable."
Palyers? (Score:2)
Sounds kinda like a shit sandwich (Score:5, Funny)
Still not terribly appetizing.
Re:Sounds kinda like a shit sandwich (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
To access the content inside, however, you'll need the playkey, which is delivered to the buyer of a digital media file and lives within "tamper-protected circuit" inside some device (computer, cell phone, router) or online at a playkey bank account. Controlling the playkey means that you control the media, and you truly own it, since no part of the system needs to phone home, and it imposes no restrictions on copying (except for those that arise naturally from fear of loss).
"tamper-protected circuit": you may gain some "ownership" of some encrypted media files, but you have to give up ownership of your device.
You can just as easily label what they still control as the "content" and the encrypted files on your device as the "key". Interchanging those labels is just semantics, since you still need both parts to hear the music. The end result is that you gain no additional control over the content, and you have sacrificed control over the hardware.
No thanks.
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...give up ownership of your device.
Only if you give up ownership of the money I give you for use of your product. Or; in other words, not in this life.
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Sweazey argues that a truly non-rivalrous system makes commerce too difficult, even impossible, and that we need to create ways for the digital world to mirror the constraints of the physical one.
On a philosophical level, I am opposed to artificial scarcity for the sake of profiteering. It scares the hell out of me. However, playing devil's advocate for myself, it *could* work to allow sharing, resale, and the other benefits currently enjoyed by physical items.
However, as the parent poster rightfully states, the whole tamper-protected circuit notion is nice on paper but going to be impossible to implement while actually "giving" it to the same people who hold the data.
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Those little shiny discs are fine as a medium of exchange and proof of ownership.
The only real problem here is that the content industries are bound and determined to make those shiny discs less useful.
A shiny disc that I can freely copy is MORE VALUABLE to the end user.
They can go into a media center or onto a PMP. Right now if you want an iTunes style video experience you need to do a lot of your own legwork. Or you can just pirate stuff.
The Pirate Bay should not be the more attractive option in terms of
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Tamper protected might mean that it simply stops working if altered. That should be enough to keep 5 9s (99.9995) of the would be hackers at bay, and would probably be good enough.
If you buy something and it gets encoded to some key you own, you still want the ability to use that key on more than one device. (computer, smartphone, ereader, TV, etc), or authorize that media on every device you own.
That is where the problem comes in. Offering device flexibility without giving the game/ebook/song to every r
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Great. So the 6th 9 hacks it and posts a torrent. The cat is out of the bag.
Re:Sounds kinda like a shit sandwich (Score:5, Insightful)
1. I receive an encrypted copy of $BIG_MEDIA_PABLUM$. It requires the super secret playkey to decrypt. The super secret playkey is stored in an unbreakable TPM.
2. My software requests the playkey, uses it to decrypt $BIG_MEDIA_PABLUM$ and hands me a plaintext copy.
3. I have a plaintext copy. I no longer care a whit about the playkey. Even if the TPM is unbreakable, and the "rivalrous" revocation mechanism impossible to defeat, what does it matter? I have a plaintext copy.
As with any DRM system, this "kinder, gentler" system requires that all the software on a system be aligned against you(and, to keep it that way, typically involves hardware measures that make it hard or impossible to replace that software, even if you wish to opt out of the "ecosystem" entirely). Thus, no matter how "benevolent" the terms of the DRM are technologically capable of being such a system will necessarily be an enemy of software freedom(or even the potential possession of software freedom) and will, in practice, be as restrictive as desired by the company or consortium that exercises cryptographic control over "your" hardware in perpetuity.
Re:"Tamper-protected": The only real DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
The "tamper-protected circuit" is yet another attempt to bring about trusted computing [cam.ac.uk], the idea that while you physically own a computer, there are parts of it that if accessed in non-approved ways, stop working. It's the only real way to implement unbreakable DRM... or at least, it makes the target the hardware, which can be much more difficult to crack than a software implementation. Think encrypted RAM with the key stored in such a "tamper-protected" chip, gooped up with epoxy and a self-destruct mech
lame (Score:5, Insightful)
Turn to page 5...paragraph 4, sentence 3, word 4. Write it in the box. Insert dongle to continue. Serial numbers, online activation, warder, blah blah blah, and the list goes on.
Guys, no matter how you want to fuck with the technology, you can't erase one simple fact: At some point it needs to be viewed by a human, listened to by a human, interpreted... by a human. That means that at some point the data comes out analog, and can be scanned, manipulated, copied, and everything else.
DRM will always be an excercise in fail.
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Actually, it is more accurate to say at some point the game has to execute code locally on the user's computer. Where the user has full control of what runs and what doesn't run. Where the user can use a disassembler to reverse engineer the game and disable the DRM.
On a console it's harder because of the locked-down nature but the hardware running the code is owned by the user and they can get access to the system one way or another and decompile the code.
Re:lame (Score:5, Interesting)
Console?
No, think iPad. Do you think a disassembler or virtualisation software will be allowed to enter the App Store? Me neither.
We are already starting to lose the hardware battle to Apple. Apple owns the hardware, not you. RIAA and MPAA owns the content, not you. Then they can make deals without bothering with pesky details such as customers.
The biggest threat to information freedom today is Apple and the iOS.
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Only if your mind can only reach as far as the Apple delusion bubble goes.
Protip: There are a bazillion fuckin’ great media players out there. Half of them are better than any Apple product. And if you consider the price/performance ratio, most of them probably are better.
Tip: Buy one that is Rockbox-compatible and get tons of features and formats for free.
Yes but that doesn't matter (Score:2)
It's shiney shiney.
Re:lame (Score:4, Insightful)
You're still free to jailbreak your phone and the iPhone emulator in the iPhone SDK allows you to run any program you want AND decompile/debug it.
You're full of FUD and I suggest you get off the Internet. Now!
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The point is Apple actively tries to prevent that sort of freedom. They keep releasing firmware updates that block various jailbreak methods and won't just leave some simple method to accomplish that sort of thing.
Re:lame (Score:5, Insightful)
Not according to Apple, who consider it a DMCA violation. Never mind the retarded acceptance of fighting the manufacturer for control over your property.
Totally irrelevant, since you have to pay Apple $99 to load it on a non-Jailbroken device and not at all to others.
There is no FUD here. Apple is totally hostile in the mobile front and that's dangerous.
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Enter: Cloud computing.
Here's another consequence of moving the execution to the cloud ... you don't get local access by definition. Just wait until games execute on the server and stream the video of the action.
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User accounts that can only have 1 session logged in at once have worked very well.
People can still share the game, but they can't both play it at the same time. It's a good balance that lets people lend games if they want to, while still forcing most people to buy at least 1 copy.
However, this is only really effective for games that focus on a multiplayer element. Otherwise, one could share the login details and disconnect and both users could play the singleplayer aspect at the same time. Ubisoft tried ge
Why can't the IEEE understand this? (Score:3, Insightful)
I expect this kind of greed and stupidity from content makers, but the IEEE? Or are they accepting money to do something they know won't work?
PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:3, Insightful)
There are examples of successful DRM out there. The PS3 is probably the most biggest. The PS3 has been out a long time now and it's looking like the DRM isn't going to be cracked anytime soon. The machine is definitely in the second half of its life right now and the most high profile attack was geohot's ultimately useless hypervisor hack.
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...Sony thanks you...
These words should never be together in a sentence.
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...Sony thanks you...
These words should never be together in a sentence.
Sounds like the first half of a Soviet Russia joke, which given the wide scale piracy happening over there, doesn't seem too inaccurate.
Re:PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony's DRM has succeeded mightily in stopping me spending money on their products. The Sony amp and speakers I bought in the 80's look embarrassed at the way their maker has pissed its good name away.
Re:PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:4, Insightful)
And for every disgruntled consumer that won't buy their system because it carries DRM, would you care to take a guess at how many non-disgruntled consumers are pressed into playing by Sony's rules?
I don't know the number, but I'm willing to wager it's a lot higher than you'd like it to be.
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I don't know the number, but I'm willing to wager it's a lot higher than you'd like it to be.
Yea, the number is sitting at around 36 million at the moment. I'm sure execs over at Sony are losing sleep over the 8 guys on Slashdot who didn't buy one because of the DRM though.
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Meh, there is no accounting for human nature (see religion, sports, soap operas), there are likely 6 billion people eager to exchange their money (that Sony can do anything it wants with) for Sony DRM products ( with which they can only do what Sony wants ).
It is better to moan about DRM than to curse some candles in the dark. Or something.
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Absolutely. All you need for successful DRM is locked hardware. If personal computers are ever replaced by several additional lines of XBoxes, then DRM might start working as intended. Fortunately that cat is out of the bag...
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Actually what you need for successful DRM is any sufficiently strong/complex protection (it can be purely software too), combined with aligned incentives in all the needed parties and most crucially a content experience that isn't the same for everyone. One of the reasons that DRM fails again and again with things like movies and music is the analog hole. The reason it has worked very well on the PS3 (and to a lesser extent the xbox) is that there is no analogue hole. It's a digital copy or bust.
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However, that applies only to interactive content (games, software). Non-interactive content like music or movies can be pulled trough the analog hole and there is no way the manufacturer can both allow me to listen to the song I bought and prevent me from recording the song to a different device using a microphone (assuming it is somehow possible to prevent me from connecting the wires directly).
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Yes, and so we might start seeing more DRM in our lives, so it worth standardizing.
The conversation on /. is often driven by those who reject DRM, but what about those of us who would accept it if it were done right (like me)?
Just like for formats and containers, we need royalty free standards for DRM. If I buy DRM'ed content I want to be able to take it to any phone, iPod, TV, car, etc. that I own. I do not want to buy multiple copies and I certainly don't want to get locked into a single supplier.
Re:PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:5, Insightful)
The big content producers mostly want you to be able to do this as well. The big problem is that they want to be paid for it.
The formula is simple: if some action has value (like format shifting), they want to be paid.
This is why I think "DRM done right" is not possible. DRM *is* rights management. It's all about stopping you from freely using the content in arbitrary ways.
How would you define "done right"?
Re:PS3 hasn't been cracked yet (Score:5, Insightful)
"The conversation on /. is often driven by those who reject DRM, but what about those of us who would accept it if it were done right (like me)?"
Nothing personal, just an honest response:
/. consider people like that to be the sheep who are primarily responsible for many of the world's ills. You really should get this idea through your head: if DRM ever truly became successful, eventually you would be kissing your freedom and privacy goodbye. And I would hold it against the sheep who helped allow it to happen. I'll pass on all that, thanks very much.
Most people on
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DRM needs to be turned on its head. Every day, people give up all kinds of personal information. I would like that to be protected by DRM that I control.
So, for example, if I don't like Facebook's latest privacy policy I should be able to revoke their right to my data. If I get tired of the grocery store tracking my purchasing habits, I should be able to turn it off with a click. Want to change physicians or insurance companies? It should be simple to block your old doctor or insurance company and grant acc
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They have succeeded in making a very difficult to crack system or a system where the potential be
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you can play bootleg versions of PS3 games without paying for them. Which is basically what everyone I know who cracks their systems uses it for. Playing free games for that system on that system.
This. PS3 is cracked sufficiently to cover 99% of the reason people crack systems. So what if it isn't completely opened up? Its open enough to pirate with which is Sony main reason for trying to lock it down in the first place.
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Really, what is there to do on a cracked PS3 that can't be done on a 360 or Wii aside from things that use the Cell Processor which only really does obscure mathematical calculations very well.
Play copied PS3 games. I think from Sony's point of view they have more than made back their investment on DRM for the PS3.
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Except that I already own a PS3 and would have to spend ~$200 for a Wii or 360. Also, what effort is involved in turning the PS3 into a media server? All I had to do was install some software on my pc and tell it what I wanted shared. (PMS-linux on Ubuntu 10.04)
At least there being honest (Score:2)
Making digital goods act like physical objects might sound like a bizarre step backward. Didn't we gain quite a lot with the shift to digital, non-rivalrous items? We certainly did, but Sweazey argues that a truly non-rivalrous system makes commerce too difficult, even impossible, and that we need to create ways for the digital world to mirror the constraints of the physical one.
There argument is that its impossible to regulate the spread of there goods once they release a small quantity into public. They seem to of missed supply and demand.. if the supply is infinite, then no matter what scarcity is going to be low. With no scarcity, theres no real reason to pay.
Re:At least there being honest (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, with no scarcity there is no reason to pay for all the crap coming from hollywood with generic plots, sub-par acting, etc. but if you are truly good at what you do, you are almost always successful.
Just about every artist or product "killed" by piracy wasn't very good to begin with.
Re:At least there being honest (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets see here, Zombieland made $102,297,496 with a budget of $23.6 million (see http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=zombieland.htm [boxofficemojo.com]) . And that isn't even taking into consideration any sales from DVD sales. I'd say that is a lot of money made in profit. Note that they've made over 50 million dollars in -profit- not just sales but profit after they've paid everyone.
Can you show me a great movie/game/etc that really -has- been killed off by "piracy" and not just the fact that it didn't appeal to a wider audience or that the movie/game/etc was terrible?
Technology is coming along at such a fast pace that you don't need a studio to make a movie, you don't need theaters to make a profit. The internet is full of examples of this. In the '80s and earlier, yeah, you needed professional equipment, today? You can go out and buy a camcorder that will shoot HD video, a computer and programs that add in special effects, etc.
So go on, find an example of something "killed" by "piracy" that was truly killed by it.
Re:At least there being honest (Score:4, Insightful)
The vast majority of movies either lose money or break even, so the big studios subsidize them with the profits made by the big hits. Picking a single very successful movie and trying to make an argument about the entire industry then isn't going to work.
No obviously not, because something has to be made before it can be pirated, so piracy cannot "kill" a game or movie. It can significantly reduce the probability of a sequel, presumably, but as we're talking about probably and decisions made behind closed doors that's tough to prove.
What we do know is that from time to time a loose lipped game company executive mentions that they de-prioritize PC ports of games because of piracy. This usually leads to widespread condemnation from PC gamers of course so it's not surprising that mostly they prefer not to discuss it. But I frequently read on Slashdot that "PC gaming is dying" and it's being killed by consoles.
Business is not, entirely, about rational financial decisions. If a team of people work on a big, complex project for 3-4 years and when it launches, 90% of players are pirates, that takes a serious emotional toll as well as a financial one. The next project, whoever is in charge may well look at PC game development, the piracy rates, the extra server and support costs involved in supporting the pirates etc and say "fuck that".
What a load of crap. Film technology has been advancing rapidly for more than three decades, but I fail to see movies produced in peoples bedrooms taking over the cinemas. After all, isn't the most successful movie yet made also one of the most expensive?
Re:At least there being honest (Score:4, Insightful)
And there are also ads and the like to generate revenue. Look at Google, it had a profit of over $6 billion last year, and yet it in essence gives away its chief product(s)! I don't have to pay $30.00 for a license to use Google's search engine, the majority if not all of their downloadable programs are free, the majority of Android save for a couple of Google created programs are open source, etc.
Again, there are very, very few people/companies that have been "killed" through "piracy" and had a good program that appealed to people.
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Interesting that you should bring up Portal. The team for that in fact was quite small, (no more than 10 people involved, according to wikipedia) and made a very similar game before Portal on their own - with presumably very little funding. Apparently most of the time and money required in Portal compared to the previous game was to create it in the Half Life universe. And even then, going by the MSRP for the game, it's a pretty safe bet it was in fact fairly cheap to make.
As far as movies go, a lot of thin
Yawn. (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure I've seen this exact proposal before. Of course it won't work, because it assumes it is sufficient to protect the playkey. It isn't; you have to protect everything-- the encrypted content, the keys, and the output. It can be done, provided the device you're playing your content on is a sealed box and the content can't be read from the box by some sort of capture device. Problem is, those sealed boxes keep getting unsealed and the capture devices keep getting better.
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Of course it won't work, because it assumes it is sufficient to protect the playkey. It isn't[...]
Why not?
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Suppose I've got my magic tamperproof decryptor box which contains the playkey. I want to read my new copy of _1984_, so I use the tamperproof decryptor box to decrypt _1984_. Now I take the decrypted output and post it on the Internet. Oops. Not only does the playkey have to be protected, everything it decrypts has to be protected.
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Of course it won't work, because it assumes it is sufficient to protect the playkey. It isn't[...]
Why not?
At some point some unencrypted content is going to be flowing in some memory for some video codec to decode... thats when you snatch it, and put it on bittorrent....
The only way to fight that now is to track content with individual watermarks and get the lawyers after the guys who are copying.... its going to end up being cat and mouse game to defeat the watermarks, but it would be a lot more scary for the copiers... you never know if you might have left some fingerprints when copying...
Makes no sense (Score:2)
I can see no good coming out of this. The only "good" forms of DRM are similar to those in the Google Market on Android, it keeps track of payments so you can always retrieve back your programs.
EOL (Score:2, Informative)
So when the publisher is no longer interested in maintaining the DRM servers, I still lose my 'property'?
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Of course not. The 'property' you have paid for is the right to access the content. You won't be able to actually _access_ the content, but you will still have the _right_ to do so.
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Why can't we do the same with the money we give them?
They would have to right to getting our money but never be able to actually access the money.
Seem fair if you ask me.
This way I get my money back when they stop providing *the Right* to access the content.
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You mean like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management#Obsolescence [wikipedia.org]
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So when the publisher is no longer interested in maintaining the DRM servers, I still lose my 'property'?
This is why I prefer DRM for rental instead of ownership. Renting movies and music on-line is cool. It's cheap and there's instant gratification. Purchase of content that way... yick.
IEEE-USA also lobbies for software patents (Score:4, Informative)
DRM is DOA. The real "genie" has been out.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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"The original genie was let out with the LP vinyl album."
Actually it was long before that. The "original genie" was let out with the paper rolls that control player pianos. They could be copied with a paper punch and some glue.
We owe a lot of our modern copyright law (up until DMCA, that is) to the lawsuits that took place over the copying of those rolls. That is also when it was first determined that software -- even software that is made "real world" by causing a machine to do something -- is properly covered by copyright law, not patents.
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DRM is only implemented by Middlemen. Artists do not worry about encoding CD's, artists rarely make CD's. It is record labels (definition: middlemen) who worry about DRM. Some Independant artists make enough money doing live shows that they host their music for free.
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Very few Independant artists make enough money doing live shows that they host their music for free.
FTFY. And of those very few, the ones who are making a living that's equivalent to even a 1st year helpdesk employee usually had help from a label at one point or another.
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But I bet they enjoy making the music way more than that helpdesk employee.
There is no law (yet) that state any twit that can make music is entitled to be super rich. Middlemen even less so.
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The gulf between "average independent musician income" and "super rich musician" is astronomically huge.
If you want our culture to have a rich music component, full-time musicians need to make a decent middle-class living. Currently the number that can is vanishingly small.
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If you want our culture to have a rich music component, full-time musicians need to make a decent middle-class living. Currently the number that can is vanishingly small.
The number of people who have been able to make a living doing nothing but make music has always been vanishingly small. I'd wager the percentage of people able to pull that off today is significantly higher than it has ever been. The reasons that the number of profitable musicians are (and should be) relatively low are so numerous and obvious, I find it a bit dumbfounding why anyone would try to imply that we need more of them. In fact, we have so many "musicians" these days that I'm mostly surprised that
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Very Few musicians make as much money as what you would attribute to rockstars.
However, there are PLENTY of musicians who are not on the top 40 list who make more than a helpdesk employee based on their independant label.
At least, here in Canada there is.
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Its to stop thieving cunts helping themselevs to everyone elses work. get that into your fucking thick skull.
That's almost entirely what he's talking about. Reread his post Mr. Notthickskull.
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> DRM has nothing to do with middlemen. Its to stop thieving cunts helping themselevs to everyone elses work.
> get that into your fucking thick skull.
You're the one who's "thick".
DRM doesn't stop anything. All it does is inconvenience the PAYING CUSTOMER.
For any actual pirate, it isn't even ever noticed.
The DRM gets cracked long beforehand. It gets cracked because there's a planet full of hackers out there that like a challenge.
rivalrous? (Score:2)
Your definition of "rivalrous" sounds like the more commonly-used "zero-sum".
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Rivalrous is an economics term. Zero-sum is a game theory term. Different, but related fields of study may use different terms for similar concepts.
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binary semaphore
rights (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knows, it may yet work - if it manages all rights, not just the distributors rights. For example, I want my user rights to be just as important - if it fails, it has to fail "open". If the company goes out of business, I must still be able to use the stuff I paid for. Likewise, it must automatically unlock/decrypt the content when the copyright term is over and the stuff enters the public domain.
Treat my rights as a consumer as equally important as the rights of the distributor, and we can talk about DRM. It's probably still a stupid idea, but as long as the "R" in DRM is entirely one-sided, remind me why I should even consider it as an option?
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For example, I want my user rights to be just as important - if it fails, it has to fail "open". If the company goes out of business, I must still be able to use the stuff I paid for. Likewise, it must automatically unlock/decrypt the content when the copyright term is over and the stuff enters the public domain.
According to the TFA (the claim is, the standard isn't written), it does "fail open" since you have both the key and the media in question even before failure. That seem to be a key ingredient in the whole scheme -- that you need not be connected to any network to play it.
Controlling the playkey means that you control the media, and you truly own it, since no part of the system needs to phone home, and it imposes no restrictions on copying [the media, not the key -- which can only be "moved", not "copied"].
Now, this scheme relies on magic tamper-proof hardware and so the usual caveats about DRM apply as always -- if it is possible to read a key it is possible to copy it. That said, it does appear (on its face) to give the moderate consumer
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Public domain doesn't mean they aren't allowed to sell it
No, but it does mean I am allowed to copy it - so a "fair DRM" system has to let me, basically, disable itself.
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If the company goes out of business, I must still be able to use the stuff I paid for. Likewise, it must automatically unlock/decrypt the content when the copyright term is over and the stuff enters the public domain.
And how about you must be able to circumvent the DRM if you're using it in a "fair use" situation?
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Good point, yes. I didn't intend to list all rights, I was shooting for examples. Obviously, the list is a lot longer, with fair use and all.
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Who knows, it may yet work - if it manages all rights, not just the distributors rights.
Ugh. Imagine how much money they'll have to spend to develop and maintain that. As it is, these silly people have long-term support costs for every product they sell. Every time you ask for permission to play something, somebody they're paying (or a system they're paying to maintain) has to grant or deny it. This is not a problem DVDs, for example, have. Once it leaves their hands, that's it, they're done. This is why it's important for them to find out what the affect of piracy really is. They're go
different countries have different copyright laws (Score:2)
How exactly do you "automatically unlock the content when the copyright term is over" when different countries have different copyright laws?
If you go by the copyright laws of the country where it is published, they'll just flock to whatever countries have infinite copyright terms.
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AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA! -- (Big media meeting reading your comment)
BwuahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! -- (me after reading their latest whining about piracy while I look for stuff on torrentz.com)
It's a free market, right? Supply and demand, sales occur where the two meet. Only in the 101 primary school version is price the only factor.
Dear $CONSUMER (Score:5, Funny)
And now you know why researchers are trying to create an artificial one [newscientist.com]....
Hubris (Score:2)
To access the content inside, however, you'll need the playkey, which is delivered to the buyer of a digital media file and lives within "tamper-protected circuit" inside some device
A "tamper-protected circuit". Oh boy! When did we invent these??
You'd think the IEEE, of all groups, would know better than to suggest something that stupid.
It doesn't matter how clever you think you are - if you can build it, someone can unbuild it. It's really just that simple. How many times have we seen this befor
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in my version of The Dog and the Bone the dog sees the bone hit the water, observes the group velocity of the waves, estimates the depth of the bottom, and realizes he can retrieve the bone by waiting a few minutes for the tides to recede.
In the 'shadow and substance' version, the dog learns to swim, impresses a small pack of females on the shore, and shows them he has quite a bone after all.
In the Kalayamutthi Jataka the monkey does indeed lose most of his peas, but after eating the one he retrieved he get
The Intractable Problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure this has been articulated better by others but it's on my mind so here goes...
How do you get money from people who wouldn't spend it regardless of DRM. That's the core problem right?
Are these not the people that DRM schemes seek to deter? Are the people who buy things with restrictions feeling pressure to circumvent these countermeasures to fully enjoy the things they buy (LAN play with no internet type games, resale purchases, etc).
If this is so, then the only thing DRM has been successful at so far is creating an environment that encourages more non-customers.
Somethimes I think ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Zen (Score:2)
they really don't get it. (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to buy some 50 albums a year. I haven't done that in a number of years. And it is not because I am stealing the albums now. The new music sucks. There is nothing I want from them. At any price. I will admit to buying used albums, but that is for 'missing' items from my collection.
Re: (Score:2)
Now tell me... how exactly would this “stealing of music” work?
Explain to me, how you could take away the music from someone, so that he does not have it anymore?
Protip: Container = meatspace = physics of meatspace. != physics of bitspace = bitspace = music.
If you manage to steal (take it away, so that he doesn’t have it anymore) music from someone I’ll give you $200 in cash on the barrelhead!
(Remember that a brain is a lossy but valid storage container for music too!)
Re:they really don't get it. (Score:5, Funny)
Of course the new music sucks. New music has sucked ever since Oog's children figured out you could bang sticks together, not just rocks. And it sucked even more when Oog's children's children figured out you could bang the sticks on the rocks. It's just been all downhill ever since then.
Excuse me, I'll leave and let you get back to the maintenance of your lawn.
Damn! I can't copy an image/sound/video file... (Score:2)
...via the usual Mac OS commands, due to new and improved DRM?
SnapzPro and WireTap [ambrosiasw.com] to the rescue!
Again ? (Score:2)
The exact same scheme was introduced last year... It had some other fancy name I think... Looks like its going nowhere....
My solution (Score:2)
Digital REFUND Management. When my access to the content stops, their ability to use the money I paid for that access stops. Put whatever system you want into play, 'cuz if it breaks, I get my money back. Oh, my solution also allows me to determine what my money is spent on, and it defaults to preventing its expenditure on lawyers, lobbyists, hookers, drug dealers, and overly intrusive advertising campaigns.
Personally, I think it's fair. I might be a bit biased though.
Re: (Score:2)
oh it's all configurable by each individual customer, and can be changed at any time, for any reason. If you want to give the *AA permission to spend your money on hookers, that's up to you.
Focus on Convenience and Experiece (Score:2)
DRM will never work. If you play it once, you can record it, and then you can copy it.
I can't believe they're still focusing on it as opposed to recognizing this simple reality.
People will pay for convenience and experience.
I still have cable. I suppose everything I watch is 'online' somewhere. Yet I have cable because I just turn on the TV and it's all there, no downloading, no decisions...
I still order on Demand Movies because again... my time is worth $5.00 of not browsing torrents, dealing with crapp
Mafia version: (Score:2)
Eehh Tommy, you’re lucky! The Don considers a kinder, gentler ass-rape torture for ya! How about that? Aren’t ya happy now? *laughs*
Re: (Score:2)
Even funnier, I just got an email from IEEE today trying to get me to join for 1/2 price. I haven't been a member in about 10 years; I guess they're getting really desperate.
Re: (Score:2)
DRM is about screwing the consumer.
Your references to RMS don't alter this.