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More On Hard Drive Copy Protection
rabtech writes: "I contacted one of the head guys working on the ATA specs [Kent Pryor of Quantum] about the 'copy protection' thing, and what that may mean for the hard drive industry. He responded, and I've posted his letter on our front page. I did point out the issue between copy protection and copyright protection: 'Yours may be the only one actually giving a rational reason for opposition.... I will pay special attention to the difference between copyright protection and copy protection. Thank you for pointing out that legal distinction. In general, we support copyright protection. The amount of copy protection that would be allowed under this proposal would not be determined by the standard, but by the software that controls the licensed devices.'" It sounds like a royal mess to actually implement hard-drive copy controls, since they require so many groups to cooperate, but the seed has been planted.
Will our boycott really matter?
We're boycotting Winmodems, remember.
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What exactly is to stop me from revving up my debugger and NOPing out the handshaking code in both the downloader and the player? At which point it'll look just like a normal data transfer when saved.
That's why I mentioned the part about some of the functionality being server side. The stream would come to the downloader encrypted. The downloader becomes a middle man itself, and doesn't have the opportunity to dictate the final key (or lack thereof). Anything the downloader can do, the server can do with the downloader as an intermediary.
It can still be hacked, but somebody has to grab a copy of the server to even begin analysis. (or, you're back to cracking a tamper proof chip).
As someone else pointed out above, the last easy hack is the stream going to the soundcard. It's only a matter of time before that gets closed up.
Of course, there is the problem (for RIAA, not for me) That most people will find a recording made by sending the output of the sound card (or USB speaker amp) directly into another soundcard and re-digitizing to be of acceptable quality. You would have to cut into the USB speaker and intercept the signal between amp and speaker since there's ALREADY been talk of encryption the stream over the USB.
Keep in mind that having done that, you are STILL guilty of a felony in the U.S. unless/until the DMCA is overturned.
Ultimately, the best answer is to kill all of this by educating the masses that this is just another DivX and their $1000 music collection could disappear overnight if the operators of the 'service' fold up like DivX did.
What are the things that have prompted you to expand your hard drive? For me, it was the following in succession:
- Collecting GIFs and JPGs (back in the BBS days)
- Collecting pirated games
- Collecting tons of MP3's
- Collecting movies
I'd bet that most large home hard drives are filled with similar things. The conclusion? Piracy is good for the hard drive industry.Heck... P2P is good for the hard drive industry. Instead of having the songs stored on a few central servers, you have them stored in many locations, and the cost is spread out over lots of people.
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USB has something that's purely layered. I've not looked at it: Content Security (scroll down a bit), by folk from Intel, Microsoft, and Philips; dated summer Y2K.
That's not "part of USB" but I sure hope we don't start to see it show up in products. Like USB disk drives or MP3 players, for starters.
I have serious reservations about such attempts to remove the discretionary/social control aspects from copy control policies. This whole gig about criminalizing behaviors that have traditionally been civil issues or non-issues just sends shivers down my spine.
Remember: When government gets smaller, that means the abuses are only going to be committed by even less accountable organizations.
Until a way to destroy the watermark is found, that is.
The same may be said for copy prevention.
The computers in the US have already reached the point of market saturation anyway. The rest of the US has said that a computer is not in their life style. Now who are you going to sell the
new crippled HD's to? It is just like VC players no body wants them, even tho most people dont do much recording anywhy, Why ? because people dont see the value. Their friends come over and tell them how stupid they were for buying a crippled VCR. Consumers have to feel that they got a good deal, and they do not make the same mistake twice. On WWW time Information moves too fast to sucker the public, you tell anyone that these HD's are a crippled POS they wont touch em, and they will tell their friends just to show how smart they are. Its not like the supply of REAL HD's will just go away. No this is the analog World losing control over the digital World and not taking it too well. IBM should be reminded of MCA and PS2.
On the real front......
This pirate crap is just book cookin anyway, most of the people would not have/use the games or programs if they had to pay for it all. Now if a person is really into a product and sees an added value in really buying it they will. Pirate use of software is better marketing then any thing else in the industry. Do you really think that we
would be here right now if every software package was purchased outright. Hell NO! How are we going to learn and get trained if we are not students fork out mega bucks for the top end apps? I cant afford to do that and not all of the things I would like to learn about are at work or ever will be.
Music and Video might be another issue but I still think that bands should make money on proformance not album sales. Movies, well most of em suck anyway, and if they are good people will go and see them in theaters even if they can get an regionless DVD. If people are not going to the theaters, that is a social change not because of priate DVD's. That is what this is all about, a social change, with growing pains. Trends come and go and maybe some of the "establishment" will go too, might not be a bad thing really.
Out
Plaintiffs are everybody with such a hd, purchasers of content with such protection, maybe more. Local governments and school boards buy a lot of that sort of thing. I think they would jump at a chance to rake in punitive judgments of some deep pocketed defendants.
Spreading the suits over many jurisdictions simultaneously would spread the defendants leather-winged legions pretty thin. Each would need to spend tens of millions a day just to have legal ears in all those courtrooms.
Any lawyer could come up with dozens of complaints starting fom denial of fair use, damages to unrelated data by failure of backup utilities, digital wiretapping (digital sounds more sinister to joe public), quartering of their agents, the list goes on. They don't need to be that sound, legally, there just needs to be lots of them -- enough that each suit is a little different from the others.
Fight politics and greed with greed, sympathetic juries, politics, and votes. The public won't be jawboned into protecting its rights, but it will jump right in if there's money to be had.
Maybe this is a general method for knocking the zaibatsu out of their roost.
--Zax
-- We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms.
Have a look at what those industry morons are up to:
The proposal to enhance the ATA-spec with copy protection extensions is an enhancement of CPRM.
CPRM itself is just one of several technologies which are part of the so-called "Content Protection System Architecture" (CPSA).
[http://www.4centity.com/4centity/data/tech/cpsa /c psa081.pdf]
Enter CPSA, servants, attendants.
CPSA is an attempt to define a technological framework in order to fulfill the entertainment industry's (RIAA, MPAA etc.) demand for complete control of distribution and copies of audio/video content. The idea is to create a secure end-to-end chain from cable-station/satellite-receiver/settopbox/DVD etc. to the enduser's speaker/digital-display etc.
CPSA is supposed to include the following content protection technologies among others:
Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM)
- protected exchange of audio/video on DVD, FlashMedia, (ATA-hdds planned)
- encrypted storage of content
- protected storage of content management information (CMI)
- system renewability
- methods to prevent playback of bit-by-bit copies
developed by: 4C (IBM, Intel, Matsushita (MEI), Toshiba) http://www.4centity.com
Content Protection for Pre-recorded Media (CPPM)
- robust protection of DVD-Audio content on DVD-ROM media
- encrypted storage of content
- protected storage of content management information (CMI)
- system renewability
- methods to prevent playback of bit-by-bit copies
developed by: 4C (IBM, Intel, Matsushita (MEI), Toshiba) http://www.4centity.com
Content Scrambling System (CSS)
- protecting DVD-Video cotent via authentication and content scrambling
developed by: DVD Copy Control Association (CCA) http://www.dvdcca.org
Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP)
- robust encryption of content passing between digital devices in the home e.g. IEEE 1394, USB
- copy control information
- authentication and key exchange
- digital encryption [sic!]
- system renewability
developed by: 5C (Hitachi, Intel, Matsuhita (MEI), Sony, Toshiba) http://www.dtcp.com
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP)
- encryption on high-bandwith interfaces to digital displays e.g. DVI
developed by: Intel http://www.digital-CP.com
4C/Verance Watermark
- technology for creating/reading watermarks (Content Management Information - CMI) in audio content
developed by: Verance Corporation http://www.4centity.com
Finally, a video watermarking scheme (to be selected by the DVD CCA)
All information above taken from:http://www.4centity.com/4centity/data/tech/cpsa/c
(Dated February 17th, 2000; revision 0.81) Absolutely recommended reading!!!
So much for the overall framework.
Some interesting details on the technologies described above:
Content Management Information (CMI)
- additional information added to the content in order to establish rules and conditions restricting its usage
Copy Control Information (CCI - a subset of CMI)
- copy restrictions through data flags: copy free, copy once, copy nomore, copy never
There is an enlightening presentation on DTCP (warning: horrible layout):
http://www.dtcp.com/data/dtcp_tut.pdf
A preliminary version of the DTCP specification (v1.1) can be found here:
http://www.dtcp.com/data/DTCP_spec11_informationa
A few buzzwords to wet your appetite:
- content encryption, supported ciphers: M6, Blowfish (modified), DES
- authentication: Diffie-Hellman key exchange, PKI
- cryptographic functions: SHA-1, random number generator
[cf. Chapter 4.4 Cryptographic Functions]
The next document makes for another interesting read:
http://www.dvdcca.org/4centity/data/licensing/ado
let's have a look at some excerpts:
Exhibit B-1 CPPM COMPLIANCE RULES FOR DVD-AUDIO (p.35ff):
Section 3. Encoding Rules for individual parameters of prerecorded DVD-Audio disc
- specifications for control of copy permission (3.2)
- specifications for control of copy numbers (3.3.1)
- specifications for audio-quality control of copies (3.3.2):
The Audio Quality Parameter (Q) consists of 2 bits and defines the number of channels (ch), sampling frequency (fs), and quantization bit level (Qb) of permitted copies.
another example:
section 4. Playback and output control rules for participating player devices
- playback control by audio watermark: unencrypted content with CCI bit of Audio Watermark set to any other state than "copy freely" will not be played (4.1.1)
- player devices built after Dezember 31, 2000 have to respond to the Verance/4C Audio Watermark (4.1.2)
- as soon as a method is determined players shall, through media type detection, prevent playback of recordable media with CPPM protected content(4.1.3)
An interesting tidbit on HDCP can be found in an article at maximumpc.com:
http://www.maximumpc.com/reprint/intel_revamps/
a quote from that article:
(...) Intel has proposed the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection encryption spec. Using hardware on both the videocard and the monitor, HDCP will encrypt data on the PC before sending it to the display device, where it will be decrypted. The rub is that only new DVI-equipment will have the feature, which creates a slight risk of obsolescence for those who invest in DVI early on.
Intel officials have downplayed that issue. They claim that any DVI monitor will be able to display protected content, because the HDCP-equipped DVI card will simply sense that an older DVI monitor lacks HDCP features and will lower the image quality to keep the content protected. Of course, no one has accounted for consumer acceptance. Will people embrace a standard that reduces image quality on their older equipment? Intel officials say the loss won't be enough to irk people.
how about this one:8
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20000218S000
"HDCP uses a 56-bit key, with individual keys distributed to the various vendors. A violated key could be tracked down and revoked over a satellite broadcast network, for example."
Apart from the documents obtained from the specification websites referenced above a search on the manufacturer's websites (Panasonic, Sony, etc.) for keywords like DTCP, CPRM etc. yields further information such as press-releases and other documents.
A couple of devices that already make use of these technologies have already been announced and/or gone into production such as:
Matsushita (Panasonic) DVD-RAM recorder DMR-E10
Panasonic D-VHS VCR PV-HD1000
Silicon Image SiI 168 PanelLink transmitter chip for DVI hardware
Silicon Image SiI 861 PanelLink controller chip for DVI hardware chip
And you guys thought CSS was the only thing to be worried about.
---Police Line - Do Not Cross !---
Will our boycott really matter?
/. do get these things at work. Why do you think they get these things at work? Purchasing power. They know that you probably have the influence of perhaps several hundred thousand or maybe even millions of dollars of purchasing power over the next few years. In other words, there are some people on slashdot whose spend on disks (RAID arrays, etc.) are going to be equivalent to 100s of ordinary home users. I'm likely to spend to have influence over around $1 million worth of RAID arrays and disks over the next few years on my own... and that's just me...
Yes, although it probably won't change much. It will however make them think, and here is why.
Do you ever get those free industry papers and magazines sent to you? In the UK there are ones like Computer Weekly and "Computing" (imaginative titles, eh?) and I get one from the US called "tele.com"... I suspect most people who read
Let's suppose that IBM introduce this system for their drives. We all decide to boycott IBM and buy Matrox instead. We end up with crappier drives, but we feel good inside. IBM may possibly turn around and say "Hey, where did that $20 million worth of RAID business go?" and we can all turn around and wave at them saying "Over here! We're with the nice boys from Matrox who haven't put copyright-protect on..." and IBM may just possibly re-consider.
I agree with another poster that in a day and age when you can't make a disk read-only in hardware that manufacturers should be considering protecting the "copyright" as laid down by an institution that exists in another country to my own (I live in the UK), and telling me what I can and can't have on my disks.
There is also the whole can of worms about how this is actually going to work, and as to whether it could all get a bit Big Brother down in the firmware...
In other words, there are some people on slashdot whose spend on disks (RAID arrays, etc.) are going to be equivalent to 100s of ordinary home users. I'm likely to spend to have influence over around $1 million worth of RAID arrays and disks over the next few years on my own... and that's just me...
I could toss similar numbers around too, but the fact is that I don't get to tell Sun, EMC, or Hitachi what brand of disks I want in those servers and arrays. I just tell 'em how big.
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Copy protection hard drive plan nixes free software - RMS By: Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Posted: 23/12/2000 at 01:07 GMT
Richard Stallman says that plans to put content control into industry standard hardware pose a threat to the adoption of free software.
... tries to disguise obstructionism and rampant power as an attempt to keep a program or book or song safe from harm. It is a propaganda word."
Proposals have been made to add CPRM (Content Protection for Removable Media) into the ATA hard disk specification, we reported on Wednesday. CPRM originates from the the 4C Entity and licensing is administered by License Management International, LLC, which also administers the CSS license.
"This resembles CSS and e-Books: it is another plan to impose additional power over people who use published information, on behalf of those who hope to control the power," he writes in emails to The Register.
"This plan seems to pose a threat to free operating systems. We will surely not be authorized in the US to implement free software to access any of the centrally-controlled data. So a free GNU/Linux system won't be able to do it."
"If users accept the domination of centrally-controlled data, free software faces two dangers, each worse than the other: that users will reject GNU/Linux because it doesn't support the central control over access to these data, or that they will reject free versions of GNU/Linux for versions "enhanced" with proprietary software that support it. Either outcome will be a grave loss for our freedom."
"We must hope that some countries refuse to pass laws to prohibit free software such as DeCSS, so that some part of the world can publish the software that will keep freedom alive, underground, in the rest of the world."
Stallman also highlights the term "copy protection". "The word 'protection'
Indeed: it's a euphemism as incongruous as down-sizing or friendly fire. As an alternative, we quite like "copy control". But if you have snappier suggestions, we'd like to hear them.
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
That's just one more challenge for the crackers.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Individual boycotts are unlikely to have a discernible effect --- there just aren't enough disk buyers around who are aware of this issue.
However, there is an easy way of amplifying our insights and making the companies take note: use the extremely active investors' networks, and offer the view that investing in hard drive manufacturers is inadvisable given that their sales will be taking a huge downturn owing to the incorporation of copy protection on drives. Names names if you can: we know that Quantum supports the scheme, and at least 3 of the 4C companies make drives --- IBM, Matsushita and Toshiba.
In the UK, investors' information exchange sites like this one seem to have dozens of thousands of very active customers (we see their mailing lists spew out an incredible torrent of investors' comments every day). Advice offered here is likely to have a significant effect on share prices far beyond the number of people providing the advice, at least in the UK.
Does anyone have a list of equivalent sites in the US and the rest of Europe?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Chris, I don't think that we can really just ignore the traditional channels and support the independent artists like yourself exclusively.
:-)
The migration of established musicians away from the studios (for which we had hoped) just doesn't seem to be happening, and music consumers aren't willing to abandon their favourite bands. Unfortunately, this means that some sort of accommodation will have to be reached with the studios eventually, because their demise and hence the release of artists from their contracts seems most unlikely to occur. Ditto the abandoning of copyrights on countless thousands of works gathered over decades and treated as financial assets --- it just won't happen, yet people will still be wanting access to this material over the new medium.
I guess it's still a possibility that the traditional music industry will continue its present extreme myopia and in due course all CDs will be available unofficially over the net and the RIAA member institutions will die, but I doubt it. Their shareholders would force a re-org as soon as there is any real downturn in profits, should it ever happen --- but there's no sign of it happening yet of course, quite the opposite, so it seems that the "piracy-as-advertising" brigade is right.
In any event, MP3s aren't going away as they're now part of the music culture and also widely supported by hardware player manufacturers, so initially begrudging acceptance and then finally real exploitation of online distribution by the current detractors is bound to happen eventually, in my view. The result may not be a flat-rate scheme, but something new will arise!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If so, you are consenting to being taxed on independent work, the money of which goes directly to my worst competitors. It effectively negates my attempts to undercut the majors via mp3, if you decide to pay this flat tax like you propose.
It's kind of like 'music CDRs': as an indy guy I would kind of like to see people outright boycott that stuff: all it's doing is adding X amount of surcharge, which goes straight to the RIAA as if it were some government authority, which then turns about and uses that money to try and shut me down or impose taxes any way they can. Please don't give them _more_ ideas :P :)
Is a one-page, easy to understand flyer that explains to Joe User why this is BAD for HIM RIGHT NOW. Not why future historians will be pissed, not why his rights are being trampled on, and not why it means Linux has problems. It needs to explain clearly and concisely (don't tell him it has 8 different crypto keys and is hard to break -- he doesn't care) why it will prevent him from doing what he does already every day, or why it prevents hime from doing things he knows he should be able to do but probably doesn't (backups). Then, we all need to whenever we're in Best Buy or whatever and see someone looking at hard disks, hand them a copy, and answer any questions. That will do more than any amount of griping on slashdot or in newspapers ever can. So, is there such a flier that can be printed off, and if not, and you're interested in helping, send me an email. If there's support, I'll help.
Phase 1 - Design standard that makes installed software impossible to copy on other machines.
Phase 2 - For each software you release, separately bundle two "editions". One only works on copy-protection-enabled machines, and costs half as much as the other. Meanwhile, pressure HD companies to make copy-protection-enabled drives. Tell people how easy it is to upgrade to the new standard.. And how much money it'll save them.
Phase 3 - Stop making software that works on normal HDs.
Phase 4 - Implement new functionality in the copy-protection standard which disallows installation of unapproved software. Such as non-microsoft OSes..
Anyway, The Register (the site that also broke the story) has posted a very good FAQ on the subject:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/15718.html
(for the goat sex paranoid)
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It is obvious that this won't work without cooperation between the HD, controller, and r/w software, presumably including the OS if this is to prevent simple copying.
How this would bind you is, content would be released in a form which could only be read by a fully compliant system. It would not matter just what your key is, but you would have to have one in order to install what you had legitimately purchased. (Obviously, there ain't squat they can do about media formats that don't support their scheme, except make them illegal. News at 10.)
I see the hack for this as being a software hook to intercept the commands which retrieve the key block. Hey, I'll have a key, it will just consist of a megabyte of zeroes. At worst, such a hack might have to be a hardware dongle on the IDE cable. People will do this if they feel it will benefit them. Just look at the flap over DVD encryption, or even the third-grade half-assed XOR scheme used by Digital:Convergence.
The bait for getting you into this new straitjacket will be some new improved quality (doubtful in music, but what got DVD's off the ground for video), improved content (DVD's again), or simple failure to release content in uncontrolled format (software industry). I sincerely doubt that this scheme would prevent you from backing up or making n copies of uncontrolled content of your own origin, including .mp3's and legacy content released outside of the standard. It would only be this controlled content, which you voluntarily bought (right?), which could not be copied from one drive to another and expected to work. Unless, of course, you arranged through a hack for the new drive to have the same ID as the old one.
Of course it's fine to voluntarily boycott such controlled content, but what do you do when it's the only content available? I've been told repeatedly that VHS is on its way out in favor of DVD, and there does seem to be a gradual trend in this direction at the local Blockbuster. (After all, excepting the copy protection scam^H^H^H^Hscheme, DVD's are clearly superior to analog videotape.) So as soon as you want to use anything at all that relies on this dubious technology you will fold up, buy the software and the compliant hardware and grumble while it does its thing. And you will lose that content when you buy a new PC or hard drive -- unless you get the hack for it.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
...because all "copyright protection" mechanisms give the distributor full control over everything recorded -- what is a kind of "copy protection" that is infinitely higher than anything allowed to him by copyright laws. It's a way to strip users from any rights, protected as fair use, and put content distributor in charge of policing itself.
No possible technical "copyright protection" measure can't be reduced to limiting what distributor can do, therefore all of them -- claiming to be "copy protection", "copyright protection" or anything else, should be fought against.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
[Case in point: I'm currently helping a company install various Linux servers in their NT network, the decision for which was significantly helped along by the threatening letter they received from Microsoft about reporting their current licensing status. Way to go Microsoft, threaten legitimate customers who've just begun to have a viable alternative to your monopoly...]
Added to this is the fact that the unauthorized users of your software don't all represent paying customers. Many of them either can't afford the product, don't really need it, or don't think it's worth the price, and if forced to pay would rather just stop using it. The numbers that software industry groups report as being "lost to piracy" are overinflated by orders of magnitude, in the sense that while copying may nominally add up to those kind of figures, under no conceivable market or legal conditions would that money actually ever be collectible.
Finally, yes, copying is a marketing tool, and one which companies don't have to spend any time, money or other resources on. Since companies can't easily control copying of their products, it makes sense to allow it to occur and judiciously play the heavy every now and then - especially indirectly, through an industry organization - to make sure that potential customers remember that they're supposed to be paying for this stuff.
from what I saw the site was more of a "we like the Mac, but hate apple" type thing. All their articles were about either cool Mac stuff, or screw ups by Apple (as a company, not so much related to the quality of the actual machine). This is somewhat understandable attitude. As an outsider looking in, it has always seemed to me that Apple delights in tormenting it's loyal users, who keep coming back because they like the product.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
No copy protection scheme prevents commercial pirates from turning out identical copies of the 'copy protected' material.
All 'copy protection' schemes are about preventing people who have legally purchased material from using their material in ways which the law has always allowed.
Copy protection is about allowing current industry companies to maintain control of artists and other people who create copyrighted material.
'Copy protection' is about the current industry companies attempts to continue to be dominant in the recording and publishing fields.
Current companies are terrified of the Internet because the Internet allows artists and writers to publish their works without going through a publishing company .
'Copyright protection' is the responsibility of government to protect material which is copyrighted from theft or other illegal use.
'Copy protection' is a scheme by companies in the recording and publishing industries to control how legitimate purchasers of copyrighted material use that material . 'Copy protection' is an attempt by the recording and publishing industries to eliminate 'fair use' of copyrighted material such as LIBRARIES .
The only encouraging thing about the copy protected disk situation is that it is the first time that I have been able to get across to non technical people why the DMCA affects them . That is a very good thing - we need to let the non technical people understand why these things are so important to all of us.
Nice idea, but I think you'll find there aren't enough people who think like you do, to make a difference. You might succeed in creating a bit more awareness, but most people will remain disinterested until the issue bites them in their own ass.
Watermarking is a MUCH WORSE thing than CPRM. Watermarks are audible. Thus the music is degraded. The only good thing about watermarks is that they can be removed--that's what the SDMI hacking challenge was all about!
It would take a long time to track down songs that have your "watermark" on napster, because you need a large enough chunk of the data to get it to work reliably.
It would take a while. That's why they would need to prioritize and just go for nabbing a percentage of offenders. It wouldn't take all that many to have a decent chilling effect. Of course, if it were really about the piracy, they would mostly focus on the mass duplication schemes which dump many thousands of bootleg copies on the market. Instead, even before Napster, they have been focusing on individuals giving a few copies (often of dubious quality) away. I don't deny that they have the right to do that, but logic, their claims, and reality put together reveal a hidden agenda. We may know the shape of that agenda by the way the other pieces fit together around it.
Either the stuff will refuse to install on your disk in the first place (e.g. "This content is optimized for CPRM drives, please upgrade.") or your driver will have to implement a MITM attack.
It all really just depends on how popular it gets. If it doesn't take off, then people who write stuff that depends on CPRM will have little market for their products. And if it does take off, then everyone's drivers will just fake it, so there won't be any copy protection anyway.
If you own stock in any of the companies who are developing this stuff, you might want to ask the management why they are flushing your money down the drain...
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think the DMCA can be worked around in this case. The only thing that made DeCSS illegal is that no copyright owner of a CSS-protected DVD has (so far) ever granted authorization for the system to be bypassed. The reason for this is that (so far) every CSS-protected DVD has been owned by MPAA members and published with a license from DVD CCA. Why there hasn't been an exception yet, I'm not sure. Probably something to do with the expense of producing DVDs and movies.
But DVDs are still a lot less common than hard disks, and the number of people who write and distribute software that runs on hard disks, is immense. All it takes is for one programmer to write a program that uses this form of copy protection, and then explicity grant authorization to everyone to bypass the copy protection.
That's one of the weak points in DMCA: it doesn't really outlaw bypassing copy protection. It just outlaws bypassing copy protection without the authority of the copyright owner. If the copyright owner grants that authority, then technically by DMCA's definition of "circumvent", circumvention has not occurred.
If software that uses this copy protection scheme (but grants users authorization to bypass it) were to become widespread, then it would become necessary for drivers to bypass CPRM, and yet no one would be able to credibly say that the purpose of the driver is to bypass CPRM without authorization, since it would be easy to demonstrate that the driver is, more often than not, used with authorization.
Any copy protection scheme can have its DMCA protection removed, not by hackers cracking it, but by hackers adopting it.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You have to make sure that the OEMs and the "mom 'n pop" chop shops in Taiwan get the message that you don't want to buy these drives.
The MnP chop shops are so used regulation they won't even see it as rolling you over in pig manure. And if they don't see the point, (like it costing them more,) YOU are so screwed.
You may all be buying Apples to run OS X to hang onto your rights or using aging, fragile and perishable drives. If you think Jobs is going for this, you're nuts.
Oh and I hate Mac haters. To the people stupid enough to name their site that way, I can only say: LUST AFTER MY UNENCUMBERED MACHINE. I'll be able to back it up.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I could toss similar numbers around too, but the fact is that I don't get to tell Sun, EMC, or Hitachi what brand of disks I want in those servers and arrays. I just tell 'em how big.
Sure you do! Explain to them that the copy prevention mechanism is considered a DEFECT and that if they can't promise defect free HDs, you'll have to go with an Alpha. NOBODY produces a platform with unique capabilities these days.
What it really comes down to is the issue of solidarity. If one tech at a company refuses to touch such a drive, he (or she) is fired. If NO tech period is willing to touch them, the drives go away. Sadly, it will probably take an actual wide scale abuse from an entrenched system to make enough techs realise what they should have done when they still could.
Note that economics could work in our favor. Drives that provide little or no support for copy prevention will intrinsically cost less to make. If capitolism is still somewhat functional after the under the table dealings, those drives will cost less.
Here at iHateApple.com
we use WindowsNT machines
to host our website. That
is why is was so easy for
this site to get hacked. We
are currently still hacked
and chances are, won't figure
it out. Why you ask? Because
we are lame and tried fucking
with the platform that Bill
Gates stole. Any way, you will
be redirected to www.apple.com
shortly. Learn from us, don't
host your website on a Windows
machine. It's not smart.
r00ted by -> NewWave
(poster's note: I hope they didn't destroy the data, I kind of wanted to read the response to his letter!)
It seems rather shortsighted for the hard drive manufacturers to be trying to help put in place copyright protections, because, and let's be frank here, 'illegal' media has fueled their industry for years.
If people didn't have gigs of mp3s, pr0n, and pirated software, the market for huge hard drives would be much, much smaller. (Yes, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for needing a 80G drive, but 9 out of 10 people walking out of Best Buy with a 80G hard drive are going to use it for mp3s.)
Fortunately, I still believe that most corporations value $$ over everything else, and it will eventually dawn on them that even attempting such protections is against their bottom line.
As many others have said, unrestricted copying is a huge boon to the HD world. Now they wanna stop that and cut a thick portion out of their revenue??? This new method requires tons of 'compatible' components and is very difficult to implement in a new setting, let alone an enstablished one.
I think the HD manufactuers got pressured into doing SOMETHING by the big record/movie people, they came up with this idea. They'll trot it around release a few HDs with it, let it fail, then go back to the record/movie people saying "We tried and it didn't work, sorry"
For this to work you need compatible HDs, Motherboards(controllers), and software. People wont want to use the software. The controllers/motherboards come from asia manufactuers (we've all heard about piracy in asia) that have a lot to lose by implementing this protection. And there will be suppliers of HDs without this 'feature.' THis is gonna flop like DIVX and I think the HD guys know it.
FunOne
FunOne
I've long heard that there are some applications vendors who surrepitiously participate in the piracy market.
The idea is that the user base for your application is broader than the paying market can ever be, but the paying market is as swayed by the ubiquity of a product as it is a software application's price or features. You may have a better application, but if "everyone" is using your competitor's product the paying customers may choose it to guarantee better collaboration or portability for their documents.
By flooding the non-paying market with copies of your application you help insure that you have this kind of influence.
I think this is a believable idea, especially in the freelance market where there's a lack of centralization in terms of the workforce but the exchange of electronic files is pervasive and made much simpler by a common document format. Think of designers and Photoshop* -- ad firms use freelance talent all the time and even lame apps keep getting used because they're ubiquitous.
Of course I have no evidence that applications developers actually participate in this or how they would participate, but to some degree its a compelling idea.
* Disclaimer: I'm not accusing Adobe, Photoshop users or anyone else of participating in the illegal duplication of software. Photoshop was used stritcly to illustrate a particular example of market standardization.
I can't figure out why the hard drive manufacturers are giving this scheme the time of day. If it works, it will dramatically reduce the amount of copying being done (perhaps 95% of all non-corporate copying I'd guess), and so it's absolutely inevitable that the number of drives bought will plummet. This is not to the advantage of disk manufacturers at all.
Given the profit motive, the drive manufacturing sector of the free market should be dismissing/ignoring these proposals altogether. What's happening here, what's pushing them to support it? They're definitely not addressing their customer requirements.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I don't see any. The only way to effect copyright protection you need to have copy protection, right?
Nope! Copyright protection can be effected by watermarking the content. Then, if you see your copyrighted material on Napster (for example), you track it down to the person who is offering it for download. You can get some idea of how many people downloaded it based on having the same watermarks. Now, you tell them to pay up or prosecute. You don't have to catch them all, or even most. Just a few examples will do.
None of that would have any impact on me making a copy for use in the car or for backup, or even making a copy for a friend (small change!), but it would prevent mass abuse.
They DO have a watermarking scheme.
I was aware of the watermark. I should have been more clear by saying rather than just using much simpler watermarking.
From the e-mail:
but by the software that controls the licensed devices
SO what does this mean? AT what level would that be implemented?
BIOS; HD Controller; OS?
I actually think you would have to have a carefully crafted cooperation between the HDD, the Disc Controller na dfinally the OS. So does that mean that once on of those links doesn't work the whole CP Scheme will not work? I still don't quite get it how this stuff could work, even with appliances like tivo.
However it's scary seeing you rights fading out more and more each day.
"Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx
That's a pretty good description of how it'll work...
I wonder though where they're going to get an embedded CPU capable of doing realtime decryption of data at a speed anywhere near what the hard-drive can read at. If they can't, and this is a moving target, they're going to end up with a crippled product where protected media is read at a crawl, imagine trying to seek in a large movie this way... Ugh.
And this protection assumes that someone isn't going to crack it once and distribute the resulting unprotected media. Especially because 'cracking' in this sense means using something akin to 'Play to Disk' in your MP3 player, or recording the data it sends to the audio out disk.
This just prevents basic copying, but as soon as one of the readers gets compromised and distributed, anyone will be able to make unemcumbered copies with ease.
It'll be just like now, except that people like me (bored sysadmins with an OC3 available) will have a personal grievance with the media companies.
Once again, the stupid media companies are the weakest link in their own chain. They'll never get anything right and they'll piss everyone off trying.
Good work.
Now, we need to make it very clear to the CEO's of every disk manufacturer that we can reach, that we will boycott any copy-protected drive.
They can't even be bothered to make drives with a real hardware write-protect anymore, so the security of MY data is apparently unimportant. I'll be DAMNED if I'll buy a disk that secures the MPAA's data, but can't be configured as read/only so I can keep the script kiddies from messing with it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How will they manage to prevent a single raid-array disc to be copied ? /dev/hdxx (or sdxx) volume is not rot13-uuencoded / rot13/uudecoded on the fly ?
How will they ensure the raw
And btw, doing this will have an ethic impact : what about fellows who want to backup their ext2fs or reiserfs volumes ?
Does this mean we will have to pay for specific backup software with NSA backdoors (who said "MS" ?) ?
I believe there's something rotten...
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Copyright protection can be effected by watermarking the content
... climb out and hang ...
Until a way to destroy the watermark is found, that is.
---
Put your feet out and stop
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
This whole copy protection scheme (as all others are) is pointless. You can make downloaded songs triple-encoded with different 4096-bit keys, require a hardware dongle that has to be kept locked in a safe that is welded to the computer, and this still isnt going to stop people from swapping pure good ol' american FREE MP3S!!. When I say free, I mean free of copy protection and other impurities. Not free of cost.
You can secure the secure stuff all you want and unless you can find a way to un-invent MP3, you're right back where you were.
If they want to stop 'piracy' (By this I mean people gaining posession of a song without paying) they should SELL MP3s. And I mean all of them. Every song by every artist. Available for download in MP3 for $10/month. I would get that in an instant. That $10/mo would get you a guranteed good rip with a good download speed would be worth it.
People dont use Napster because they dont want to pay any money. They use Napster because they dont want to have to go to a store, pay 100x what the CD is worth, and then find out they dont like it. If I could pay $10/mo for unlimited downloads IN UNSECURED MP3 FORMAT I would never use Napster/openNap/PowerNap/etc again.
--IronHelix
Copyright laws aren't mutating into anything -- there was no changes in copyright laws except some ridiculous extension of the duration of protection. DMCA is a kind of legal garbage that has nothing to do with "copyright laws" -- it's an exception from general laws made for particular kind of distributors, legalizing practices that amount to extortion and illegal terms of contract.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Probably because the SCSI change came before the DMCA, and folk hadn't been alerted. This is just a guess, but it seems reasonable.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Any unauthorized access to the media is illegal. It doesn't matter if it takes place through deliberate action or inaction.
We are not at that point yet. However this is certainly the direction we are going odds on the next WIPO treaty will be an attempt to get the whole world to use US style "copyright" (i.e. holder of original copyright also holds copyright of any "derived works") as well as to broaden the definition of "copy" far beyond it's original meaning.
what is a kind of "copy protection" that is infinitely higher than anything allowed to him by copyright laws.
It certainly isn't "infinitly higher" also copyright laws are at present mutating into "useright".
Nor do any of these things actually stop "piracy" in the first place.
If/when this gets implemented how long do you think it will take for some bright lad to circumvent it.
Could be short, or it could take a LOOONNGGG time, depending on the quality of the implementation.
The big deal is that under the DCMA, whoever does the cracking, and distribution of the crack is going to get thier pants sued off.
While not a scientific study of reliability, there was an interesting article (The Art of Massive Storage: A Web Image Archive, IEEE Computer magazine, 2000-11) that found big differences between the reliability of IDE and SCSI drives. Over an 18 month period, 6 of 24 IDE disks failed (25%), 7 of 368 SCSI disks failed (1.9%).
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
this letter feels more like a public relations than anything worth while. first it spends no time talking about black and white quantum policy - whenever he talks of policy he uses terms like "will pay special attention to" and "In general, we support." can you get anymore wishywashy. Then he dedicates almost a third of the letter to complimenting to complimenting Russ and how Russ the "only one actually giving a rational reason." the author may be saying that you're so smart but he's thinking how your so gullible. anyone who goes through the trouble of writing this letter without actually saying anything solid has something to hide. I'm not saying blackball quantum because of this letter but please don't praise them either.
Is this whole CPRM effected by the filesystem (fat,e2fs,etc) or OS used to store the data?
What if I use an encrypted filesystem?
How might this work with non-ms software?
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Can't any copy-protection mechanism be defeated by using an encrypted filesystem? Or am I missing something here? An encrypted filesystem would slow down disk access, because encryption and decryption consume CPU cycles, but CPU is cheap.
The proposed standard will not prevent organised copyright theft, or even a knowledgeable hacker; user-friendly software for installing an encrypted filesystem will quickly become available, so that even ordinary users will be able to copy whatever they want, just like they can now.
Market forces could clearly win out here
... correct my Economics101, but wouldnt the RIAA/MPAA clearly demostrate a oligopoly - and collusive behaviour? WTF is wrong with this picture - I thought we had all agreed we tolerate capatalism because it breads innovation through competition... every time I pick up a browser or a paper I read about another industry setting restrictive standards/license terms/leases etc etc because there is virtually no competition in 99% of the modern marketplace (this would exclude ordinary chattle (dishes, plastic knick-knack-garbage, furniture))
I wholy agreed - except this bit.
You assume there is competition - there is none, therefore the 'market' you look to correct this problem dosnt exist. Americans need much stronger monopoly laws - especially the ones regarding COLLUSION
Of course it's fine to voluntarily boycott such controlled content, but what do you do when it's the only content available? I've been told repeatedly that VHS is on its way out in favor of DVD, and there does seem to be a gradual trend in this direction at the local Blockbuster. (After all, excepting the copy protection scam^H^H^H^Hscheme, DVD's are clearly superior to analog videotape.) So as soon as you want to use anything at all that relies on this dubious technology you will fold up, buy the software and the compliant hardware and grumble while it does its thing. And you will lose that content when you buy a new PC or hard drive -- unless you get the hack for it.
We are all sheep. We all know that slashdotters and the like have effectively no voice in the world-- that we are either portrayed as whiny losers who whine to each other on Slashdot (there's a whole lot of truth to this) or renegade hackers who have nothing but damage to others' rights on their agenda (there's very little truth in this). But with DVD's we aren't even using what little voice we have. Indeed, the technophilic nature of the sort of people that are drawn to slashdot probably means that a higher percentage of them than the common public have DVD players.
What we *should* be doing is boycotting the DVD standard, and loudly. Some of the few respected speakers among the techno-nerd crowd from which slashdot draws its audience should be echoing these boycotts. The message should be, we're not interested in a format that has a central patented control (i.e. DVDCCA) on the very format. We will boycott it until manufacturers and content providers come up with another format not so encumbered-- and buy *that*. Market forces could clearly win out here, but all of us techno-geeks are too drooling in awe of the capabilities of DVDs that we've just jumped lemming-like over the cliff rather than have the willpower to take whatever insigificant steps we could to harenss those market forces.
Market forces killed DIVX. The manufacturers are getting more canny, though. With DVIX, it was obvious to every consumer that they were getting a bum deal. Now, the manufacturers are getting better at slipping things in, things that only techno-geeks notice, which they can then use to provide DVIX-like controls on the hardware and software that everybody already has bought. There will not be market forces against it until the computer illiterate notice what they're losing, and by then it may well be too late.
(What's happening is that the massive entities who control distribution in the analog world are trying to enact legislation and such that will allow them to continue the same sorts of controls on the digital world. In the analog world, they were a little more natural. Joe Average making a copy of content would degrade it in quality; only the big entites had the resources necessary to really provide quality content. In the digital world, this is not true; anybody can make full quality copies. What should really happen is that as the digital world takes over, there should be a paradigm shift, and whole new models of distribution should come in. (Much as the very presence of recording technologies introduced new paradigms.) However, the people who have all the power in the analog world don't want it. But it really is unnatural, and eventually something that really uses digital technology to its full effect will take over and send the analog power brokers the way of the dinosauar. It will happen. Unfortunately, I fear it may take 50 or 100 years (pessimistically speaking), and those of us who live in the interem will have to suffer for it. Especially since those few who understand the issues don't do anything about it, but either just whine to each other (as I am doing now) or give up and buy tainted technology (as all of you have done with your DVDs).)
-Rob
Anyone have details about this?
Just my two cents.
--- I'm not a real anonymous coward, I just play one on TV.
Sounds like you're advocating something illegal under the DMCA, namely circumventing copy protection used to protect a copyrighted work.
It's decss all over again. They encrypt software, music, you name it onto a CD, DVD, Installer disk, whatever. You can't get it off there because that's a DMCA violation. Then they make a Windows-based installer to transfer it securely to the Hard Drive. You can't get it off the HD either-- it's another DMCA violation.
Boom. There goes your right to use any of that content in Linux, unless they feel like giving you a Linux installer.
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
here will be understood now. From the letter;
An optional set of ATA commands has been proposed by IBM that could support the CPRM method from the 4C entity or other methods. After implementing these commands, a hard disk (HDD) supplier wishing to install CPRM keying information and support that particular key management method would need a license from 4C entity
This observant post at open law might give you a better idea of who 4C entity is.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"