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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.
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.
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?