IDs For MO Drives To Counter Copyright Violations

CaptMondo writes: "It seems like HD manufacturers may be feeling the heat about MP3s and MPEGs. Fujitsu has just put out a press release about putting what they are calling 'Media ID' for their hard drives, which will identify each individual hard drive. Applications utilizing this feature can 'prevent reading of copied information.' Ugh!" From the description that link offers, it sounds like media, drives and applications would have to cooperate for this to work as intended, and that it only applies to 3.5" MO storage. Can you say technological tangle? It sure sounds like a good way to sell media though ... hmmm.

Comments

How does this thing work?

[Starselbrg]

I'm surprised no one has asked this yet: How does this thing work? The press release held no valueable information, of course. It just kept saying "this will protect you copyrighted content on the Internet" over and over in different words.

Is it supposed to prevent you from copying information to it? Because that would make one darn useful removable drive, not being able to write to it. How would a program using the Media ID tell if what it's writing is "copyrighted material"?

Is it supposed to prevent you from copying information from it? Because that would make one darn useful removable drive, not being able to read from it. How would a program using Media ID tell if what's being read from the disk is "copyrighted material"?

I can imagine a scheme where a "specially certified application" could write data to the disk with information about how many times the data had been read, but that really doesn't have anything to do with an ID. How the heck does the ID help?

The only answer that I can think of is that all this ID and Copyright Protection BS is going to get in the way, and nothing else. And you know what? It will kill the format. These things will never become popular if people have to jump through hoops to use them.

Besides, how many Evil Pirates do you know swapping Copyrighted Material on Big Floppies? Give me a break. CD-Rs and the Internet, that's the tools of their trade.

the fabled CD-WOM.

[Wakko Warner]

"prevents reading of copied information"...

sounds like the CD-WOM drive I saw once. It was two pieces of wood with no real physical connection to a computer. You placed the CD-WOM media between the two pieces of wood, waited as long as you wanted (or as briefly -- the transfer rate was astounding) and lifted the top board. There was no disputing the data had been written to the disk. Of course, being CD-WOM, there was no way to prove it had been written. But there was no need to. Looks like Hitachi has just updated the mechanical side of things.

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Forged disks

[Veteran]

One thing this would normally do is spring up a market for disks without serial numbers - made by a manufacturer outside of the consortium. Market forces would cause these disks to sell more, since they would be more versatile and less expensive to manufacture.

In the past there would have been no way to keep a manufacturer from making such disks. HOWEVER: The copy protection part of the DMCA does make it possible to stop the manufacturing of such disks.

All anyone has to do is come up with some sort of utterly lame copy protection scheme involving the serial number on the disk and the DMCA springs into effect with its draconian penalties against a non serial number manufacturer - since they would be circumventing a digital protection means.

This means that one manufacturer of any type of digital media who puts a serial number on their media could force EVERYONE to put serial numbers on their media of the same type. This includes floppies - and it would be a felony to erase a floppy serial number!

Isn't the DMCA just swell?

Re:Forged disks

[Veteran]

Let us see if Hanlon's Razor is applicable to the DMCA. For those who don't know, Hanlon's razor is : "Never ascribe to malice that which may be adequately explained by stupidity."

To see if the DMCA is simply an act of stupidity we need to think about the people who created the DMCA in the first place. If these are generally stupid people we are safe in assuming that the act was the result of stupidity and we may safely discount it as not being malicious. If however, the people who created the act are not generally stupid we need to show how otherwise intelligent people were confused into creating something out of momentary stupidity in orger to judge the DMCA as non malicious.

By far the majority of people in the House of Representatives and the Senate in the US are lawyers. The vast majority of lawyers follow the conventional path of graduating from college with superior scholastic records, then going into a post graduate law program which awards them with a 'Doctor of Laws' (Juris Doctor) degree; which is the equivalent of a Ph.D. in a technical subject. After obtaining this degree the average lawmaker then passed a difficult bar exam to become an attorney. After successfully becoming a lawyer these people engaged in significant networking to build up their political prospects.

Most people who enter the political profession emerge as significantly wealthier when they leave the profession than when they enter into it.

The argument that the DMCA was created by people who are generally stupid appears to lack plausibility. Now let us examine the idea that the act was created by normally intelligent people who were acting in an aberrant stupid fashion.

Reading the DMCA fails to give evidence of misspelling, poor grammatical structure, ill thought out sentence constructs, or other evidence of stupidity which might be brought on by the heavy use of intoxicating drugs or spirits or wide spread occurrences of stroke or other neurological damage. When tested against the standards of writing in other laws passed by these same legislators there does not appear to be any obvious fall off in the quality of expression in the DMCA.

In short, the evidence that the DMCA is the result of temporary stupidity on the part of otherwise intelligent people is very poor. Perhaps the claim could be made that the authors of the DMCA did not understand the consequences of their actions in writing this law and were thus being stupid. However, that argument fails upon further thought. The consequences of the DMCA appear to be carefully designed - the law appears to accomplish exactly what the authors meant it to achieve.

Here is an example of a stupidly constructed law for comparison. "Anyone who picks his nose in public shall be guilty of an offense. Persons who violate this law will be punished by being forced to have sex with an attractive person of the offenders' choosing."

The conclusion is that the DMCA is not the result of stupidity, and that Hanlon's razor is not applicable to it. We therefore MAY conclude that the DMCA is the result of malice; it is deliberate, it is intentional, and it is no accident that it is written the way that it is.

A defense of

[Mathonwy]

Maybe it's because I'm an old guy, but why are slashdotters so obsessed about their "right" to be able to steal copyrighted content?

I think you are missing the point that most people are upset about. The issue here isn't that it would prevent you from doing illegal/immoral things. The troubling fact is that someone else, some faceless, nameless division of some company somewhere is the one who would get to decide for YOU what would be moral usages of their device. And that kind of large corperation hasn't been especially renouned recenetly for acting in the best interest of the consumer. (or anyone else but themselves, really...) So you can see how it would make people edgy letting such an organization dictate what is ethical.

The other issue is that this is yet one more step in a fairly disturbing trend that has been going on recently in corperate thinking. As you has doubtlessly often heard quoted in DMCA discussions, originally when you bought a product, it was yours, you could do whatever you wanted to it, since as soon as you purchased it, it was entirely your proprety. However, corperations seem to want to change that, and retain quite a bit more control over their products, even after purchase, and dictate what you can and cannot do with them. For example region codes on DVDs. Region codes allow companies to make arbitrary decisions about what you can do with DVDs you legally purchased, and enforce them. (For example, you can't play them in a country different from the one you bought it in. There is no law to this effect, but Sony effectivly enforces one anyway with their region coding. And there is no apeal to this kind of law.

And lets not forget the ever popular problem of pattern matching errors. Such as the problems that have plagued nearly all "net nanny" software packages since the dawn of time. (or at least "net nannies") While deciding what is "moral and legal use" of a product is ticklish enough, programming the product to recognize the difference and act on this information is even trickier. And judging from the actions of Hasbro & Co, most companies don't seem to even care much if they make mistakes that inconvienence users, as long as they keep the majority of people happy and/or oblivious to the problem. (*cough*hasbro*cough*)

This is what makes people edgy about this kind of thing: This product would give someone else (who's trustworthyness is questionable) the ability to create "laws" governing the useage of their product, with no real apeal. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but that's a little more trust than I'm willing to give them. And judging from the general tone of most of the responses to this artical, I think I'm not the only one.

Sorry if I'm ranting, it's been a weird week.

In Japan, the Media is the Market

[Speare]

In Japan, we've heard it said here before, the media is the prime mover in the market. If you buy a music CD, some clerks ask, "Would you like a Sony MiniDisc or two with that?"

And there comes special drivers...

[jmv]

...and there goes the ID. The CPU ID had a chance to work, since it was unsing an actual instruction, bypassing the OS (well, I think, don't flame me). However, this hard drive ID has no chance of success. It will need to ask the OS about the ID of the drive. There's nothing that prevents the OS of always answering the same ID for everybody... and there goes the system. Under Linux, it's quite easy to bybass... you just don't implement the system. Under windows... I'm pretty sure some people will come up with modified disk drivers..

I think this move is more meant to look like they're doing something to prevent copyright violations. And if the MPAA believed there CSS was secure, they'll probably believe the hard disk ID will be too!

Hard Drive "tatoos"

[The Breeze]

This sounds similar to the practice that HP & some otehr vendors have been following for years, and which is now REQUIRED by Microsoft if you're one of the top ten or so OEM's.
An HP Pavilion HDD has a "tatoo" in a section of the hard drive that can only be reached by debug scripts and the like. FDISK can't touch it. "Recovery" disks look for the HDD tatoo & and the BIOS tatoo and if they don't find it, they will not install. This means if you have one of these types of systems, you need to take your system to an OEM-approved "service center" and they will run the script to make your new hard drive able to function with the recovery disk should you buy a new hard drive.
Some OEM's (notably HP) used to foist this travesty on consumers in return for cheaper licensing for their protection payments to Microsoft for Windows. Now, this is REQUIRED by M$ on all new system.
The solution, of course, is refusing to by OEM systems that have "recovery disks". Use Linux, BSD, ANYTHING, or if you MUST use Windows, by from a smaller OEM which will still give you a genuine Windows OEM CD - the big boys are now PROHIBITED by M$ from distributing Windows CD's, they can only distribute "image" CD's.
I'm sure there's disgruntled techs out there somewhere who have the debug routines to duplicate the tatoos, or a good assembly language hacker can do it. Of course, who wants all the crap the major OEM's load up anyways?

The "Disappearing Information Paradox"

[Some Id10t]

sigh Once again we have someone trying to capitolize on what I call the disappearing information paradox.

You can't give someone access to information without giving her the ability to manipulate that information in some way. (Aside from terminating the recepient, which would definitely affect your customer loyalty factor, not to mention squelching any repeat business.)

DVDs failed at this with CSS
Sony failed at this with the Minidisk "Do not copy" bit.
DIVX... well, 'nough said.
VHS Macrovision

The list goes on and on, from movies and music, to email and "read once and destroy" messages. If you present information to someone, they can recreate it. Period. Preventing that is not within the realm of current technology, no matter what type of encryption/timestamping/client-side security you put on it. It will be reverse engineered and automated within hours.

As we say in the south- "You can't un-ring a bell!"

News Release!

[friartux]

[Merrimack, New Hampshire] 14 Sept 2000 -- Linux user friartux, never impressed by Fujitsu storage products, has announced a personal resolution to avoid buying any Fujitsu media.

"This shouldn't be difficult," he said. "Compared to Maxtor and IBM hard drives, in my opinion, Fujitsu sucks anyway. Their capacities are low, and their buffers small in comparison. And who uses MO drives these days, anyway?"

Backup media such as CD-R have become more popular than MO in recent times, and DVD-style storage promises more than either.

Friartux looks forward to the first DVD-writable solution certified compatible with Linux -- without any corrupt tracking schemes, and with large buffers and good speeds.

Re:Won't work always

[bgalehouse]

When did you last try to copy a commercial program from one system to another? Quite a few really require re-installing the software.

Now, if they required online registration as part of install (before activation) and if this linked your CD-key to your hard drive identifier... then we'd be in buissiness.

Actually though, the hard drive is a pretty lousy place for this. Would be comparativly easy to patch the OS to change it (see the standard work-around for software region checking of DVDs).

CPU would be harder to patch universally.

Fortunatly though, Intel got burnt trying to add unique chip ids for privacy reasons. No software vendor will require ID'd processors untill they are ubiquitious (can't risk loosing market share). No hardware vendor wants the privacy loss uproar.

Be interesting to see how long this 'hard drive id' idea lasts.

Reminds me of something I saw years ago.

[shippo]

Some time ago I deal with very specialised hardware, long since out of production. Semi-PC compatable, but for some strange reason it required all SCSI hard-drives to be supplied from the manufacturer.

The drives were normal full-height SCSI drives, but had some form of 'signature' written somewhere. Using normal drives of the same model just wouldn't work, as filesystems could not be made on the partitions. Of course the charge for these drives was around 3 times the normal cost.

I eventually discovered how to sign any drive, using the in-built diagnostics program and an undocumented password. I never had the chance to dump the contents of the disk via dd to determine what the signature was, or where it was written.