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In pharma, you generally get 5 years of sales under patent.

In electronics/tech, you generally get 5-10 years before the tech is "stale." Unless you're like Intel or IBM or some other big company that can get their patent into the "root" of a tech standard and force everyone else to pay for the use of your patent. This is why Sony put DVD drives in the PS2 and Blu-Ray in the PS3, and spent tons of money pushing Blu-Ray on everyone: if they can get their stuff to be "the standard", then they stand to make a mint. They've also managed this with certain other technology (Beta, for instance, survived quite well in the TV production industry where quality mattered more than relative price).

In manufacturing/tech, you can sometimes have the full run of your patent to make money, either by being the "exclusive" provider or (again) by getting people to license it.

What's absurd isn't those limits, but the oddly strange "copyright" limits. If copyright terms were the same as the current patent terms, you'd see a lot less DRM and other foolish bullshit-crap being forced on consumers, because the primary reason for a lot of DRM (think, for example, printer cartridges) is to try to "copyright" what should, at best, be covered under a patent.

To date, I've only found the opposite:

http://www.drmwatch.com/standards/

Day by day it seems that slashdot crowd is just a bunch of bigots. Anything Microsoft does is bad. Anything Google/Linux foundation does is good. Even Apple is cool. DRM is bad and hence SafeNet is bad as well. Getting back to the original story, it is interesting to see the referenced article in the poster. How about this article here http://www.drmwatch.com/drmtech/article.php/3763781 I guess this gives you some insight as which division of SafeNet is working on what. Further, SafeNet does own MediaSentry. But there is more to SafeNet than just MediaSentry. In other news this might be interesting as well. http://www.safenet-inc.com/mykotronx/ . Oops shudder Oh Boy I know I am going to be flamed for this.
PS. Now that I have tried to swim against the tide, the bloody "preview" button says "You failed to confirm you are a human. Please start from the beginning and try again. If you are a human, we apologize for the inconvenience."

GPLed opensource product that institute DRM. It went something like a ssha encryption of the binary content and the provider generated an encrypted key based on your key which was based on your account information(from the provider). Then whatever player you were using needed a plugin that used another program to decrypt the media and stream it into the player.

Just to follow on your example, in such a system, the plugin would probably have to be a closed-source binary blob, or else you could just modify it to intercept and spit out the decryption key as it was being received from the provider. (I'm not trying to personally attack you -- what you created there was as good a DRM system as most of the real ones on the market, but it's running into the fundamental limitation of DRM.) It's all smoke and mirrors.

Anyway, after doing a little Googling, I think the "open source DRM" thing a while back was related to someone on the Gstreamer project discussing adding support for DRMed formats -- but it's still not clear how they'd accomplish that. Some people have pointed towards Sun's drm-opera project as one possible avenue, but AFAIK that's nothing but vaporware, and it too was widely criticized as being impossible when Jonathan Schwartz announced it. According to this article there have been two past attempts to create "open source DRM": one was OpenIPMP in 2002, another was Media-S, more recently.

OpenIPMP has a SourceForge project page, although the latest update was a year ago. Apparently there's some code that can be downloaded, but aside from that they are cagey on how it works, and heavy on buzzwords. Nothing about it makes me suspect that they have really discovered anything huge (and a DRM system that didn't rely on obscurity would be pretty huge). If anyone is familiar with the project and wants to comment, I'm genuinely curious.

Media-S apparently evolved out of an effort to make a "Secure OGG" format. They at least have an FAQ. Basically, they're going for the straightforward 'binary blob' route:

If Media-S is open source, how can the encryption be secure?

If a company wishes to use Media-S to protect their content, SideSpace Solutions highly recommends purchasing a binary distribution license. Under this license, any modifications to Media-S (such as a change of encryption engine or pri

Myspace licensed Gracenote's acoustic fingerprinting technology last year. http://www.drmwatch.com/ocr/article.php/3641591

Gracenote's failure and inability to deliver on promised recognition rates and performance is directly related to Myspace's failure to deploy a comprehensive system by year's end.

I am astonished that Slashdot has not picked up on the fact that Gracenote uses community submissions via its user-submited database (CDDB and MusicID) to turnaround and police the community. Everytime you enter music metadata to Gracenote's database, it could be used against you in a court of law.

No, Sun's DReaM project.

Forgot to mention that sweden also passed a bill that makes a 24 cent tax on each blank cd. Here in USA I can find blank cds 100 for $5 or $10. And blank DVDR at $20 for 100. Now you swedes have to pass more than DVDR prices for cds lol. "for example, the levy on a recordable CD will be SEK 1.75 or US $0.24, thereby almost doubling its typical price. This is even higher than in Canada, a hotbed of blank media levies, where the uplift is CAD 0.21 (US $0.16), which is more like a 50% surcharge." http://www.drmwatch.com/legal/article.php/3508086

Apparently, not all uses of p2p technology are illegal after all...someone send Senator Hatch a note on this, will ya?

Funny thing is that in Europe we are heading to opposite direction in some cases.

Like in france, the court ruled that dvd drm is illegal. And I think that this ruling is based not only to frances laws but to EU laws and will effect to other countries also.

Autoplay sues Microsoft, regarding a patent on automatically executing installation programs on CD-ROMs and other devices.

Timeline Inc. successfully sues Microsoft over breach of licence for three patents concerning SQL Server. Timeline actually threatened to sue third party developers and customers using Microsoft's product. Fortunately, they never followed through on those threats.

Microsoft settles with Intertrust, after losing a preliminary ruling to Intertrust. The lawsuit was based on Intertrust's DRM patent portfolio.

Feel free to go google DMCA abuse. There's about 100,000 hits, and you might find one or two in there that might lead you to understand WHY it's reasonable to think that a corporation might go after this, using the DMCA as a weapon, because they've done it before.

The FatWallet one is particularly educational. I invite you to go read it. It's even less applicable to the DMCA than card-stripe reading, and it happened anyway.

Attempts to foment copy protection schemes for audio CDs were mostly laughable. Schemes that patently (pun intended) did not work, such as SunnComm's for BMG Music, were fobbed off on the public in an apparent attempt either to placate record company executives eager to "just do something," place audio CDs under the protectionist shield of DMCA 1201, or both.

For more serious applications I doubt that you want to send your confidential data for computation on some random stranger's computer, given the amount of viruses, trojans etc. that are in circulation today and how "good" ordinary users are at keeping their systems secure. Encryption won't help as long as the computer is under full control of the user. Something like DRM could probably solve that problem however.

The thinking goes as follows:

"The Copyright Board found that nothing in the process of downloading files from P2P networks implies that the source material is necessarily copyrighted, and by implication, that end users should not be responsible for knowing which files they download are copyrighted and which are not. Those who upload files, however, are still liable under Canadian law. "

from here.

It's not a "downloading" case, it's an "uploading" (distribution) case. Downloading is legal in Canada.

If Apple really wants to boost AAC, it would allow other device and software makers to license Apple's own FairPlay digital-rights-management (DRM) system ... While Apple's competitors have embraced WMA, they hardly relish the thought of their business becoming heavily dependent on another standard that Redmond controls.

OMA 2.0 is already being added to MP3, but I think adding it to AAC would be a much better idea. If I have to deal with DRM to purchase music downloads, I'd much rather buy open standard AAC's that use an open DRM standard that is also being used on my cell phone and PDA.

Pot says to Kettle: You're Black.

Not at all. Kazaa is accusing the RIAA of commiting copyright infringment. Something that Kazaa has not done (to my knowledge).

In the 80's the MPAA briefly had VCR's pretty much outlawed by accusing them (and their manufacturers) of violating copyright law. They actualy won in state court. I think pretty much everyone here would say it's absurd to call VCRs illegal and VCR manufacturers criminal. I think we pretty much all agree the Supreme Court was right to overturn that dumb ruling and declare that VCRs are legal and the VCR manufacturers are not violating the law.

Well now it's P2P software in the place of VCRs. The courts have already ruled that P2P are NOT violating copyright law at all (Grokster and Morpheus specificly, but presumably Kazaa as well). I seem to recall one Judge actually calling P2P the new VCRs...

[Googling..... found it....]

file-sharing networks as -- to use Judge Wilson's analogy -- the VCRs of the 21st century

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Yeah, their "Negative Developments" section heading was pretty funny. You have to realize that the drmwatch.com is very pro-DRM.

In this story they cover a consumer rights group filing a suit about CD's that violate functionality expectations. That is an interesting term for what *I* would call *crippled* CD's. They conclude with the dire warning that "If this lawsuit succeeds... could.. throwing the entire DVD industry in those countries into turmoil". Note that it would only be those implicitly stupid countries causing turmoil within themselves.

Court cases we would hail as victories for our rights they refer to as "suffered losses". The use of "suffered" is clearly implying that the rulings were harmful. They refer to these three cases as coming together in a "perfect storm" - calling it a massive disaster and destructive. In the Norwegian DeCSS case they say he surely would have been guilty in the US or other EU countries - I think they imply he slipped free ("attempt to lasso a bowl of ectoplasm") because a of a problem with Norwegian law. The last few paragraphs includes advice that "DRM industry should hope that the ISPs lose" and accuses ISP's of nefarious motives.

And just to eliminate and doubt on their position on DRM:
We believe that ultimately [the Canadian system] are unfair solutions that are blunt instruments compared to the potential of DRM-related technologies

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Yeah, their "Negative Developments" section heading was pretty funny. You have to realize that the drmwatch.com is very pro-DRM.

In this story they cover a consumer rights group filing a suit about CD's that violate functionality expectations. That is an interesting term for what *I* would call *crippled* CD's. They conclude with the dire warning that "If this lawsuit succeeds... could.. throwing the entire DVD industry in those countries into turmoil". Note that it would only be those implicitly stupid countries causing turmoil within themselves.

Court cases we would hail as victories for our rights they refer to as "suffered losses". The use of "suffered" is clearly implying that the rulings were harmful. They refer to these three cases as coming together in a "perfect storm" - calling it a massive disaster and destructive. In the Norwegian DeCSS case they say he surely would have been guilty in the US or other EU countries - I think they imply he slipped free ("attempt to lasso a bowl of ectoplasm") because a of a problem with Norwegian law. The last few paragraphs includes advice that "DRM industry should hope that the ISPs lose" and accuses ISP's of nefarious motives.

And just to eliminate and doubt on their position on DRM:
We believe that ultimately [the Canadian system] are unfair solutions that are blunt instruments compared to the potential of DRM-related technologies

-

Yeah, their "Negative Developments" section heading was pretty funny. You have to realize that the drmwatch.com is very pro-DRM.

In this story they cover a consumer rights group filing a suit about CD's that violate functionality expectations. That is an interesting term for what *I* would call *crippled* CD's. They conclude with the dire warning that "If this lawsuit succeeds... could.. throwing the entire DVD industry in those countries into turmoil". Note that it would only be those implicitly stupid countries causing turmoil within themselves.

Court cases we would hail as victories for our rights they refer to as "suffered losses". The use of "suffered" is clearly implying that the rulings were harmful. They refer to these three cases as coming together in a "perfect storm" - calling it a massive disaster and destructive. In the Norwegian DeCSS case they say he surely would have been guilty in the US or other EU countries - I think they imply he slipped free ("attempt to lasso a bowl of ectoplasm") because a of a problem with Norwegian law. The last few paragraphs includes advice that "DRM industry should hope that the ISPs lose" and accuses ISP's of nefarious motives.

And just to eliminate and doubt on their position on DRM:
We believe that ultimately [the Canadian system] are unfair solutions that are blunt instruments compared to the potential of DRM-related technologies

-