4C May Back Down On Hard-Disk Copy Protection

ArghBlarg writes: "As reported on the Mercury News' siliconvalley.com website, the 4C group, consisting of IBM, Intel, Matsushita and Toshiba, responsible for the dreaded CPRM rights-management standard for PC storage media, may be backing down on mandatory implementation of the standard in PC hard disks. A Linux consultant by the name of Andre Hedrick, who sits on the T.13 protocol committee, apparently confronted them during a recent meeting and got them to consider making an 'opt-out' mechanism if the standard is ever implemented in hard disks. However, the EFF says that's not good enough, and says that CPRM should never besmirch a PC hard disk's firmware, in any form. The 4C group has been eerily silent about the issue, according to the article, so this isn't over yet. (According to the Mercury article, the 4C entity promised to release a formal statement here about the 'opt-out' possibility, but no new releases were up at the time of writing.)"

Comments

The Register has the best coverage of CPRM

[gkanai]

Forget the Merc and CNet, the Register in the UK has had the best coverage of this CPRM mess.

Everything you ever wanted to know about CPRM, but ZDNet wouldn't tell you...
CNet suckered by CPRM spin
Linux lead slams 'pay per read' disk drive plan
Stealth plan puts copy protection into every hard drive
4C retreats in Copy Protection storm
EFF's Gilmore calls for CPRM hardware boycott

How will media conglomerates report this?

[astrashe]

This is a huge issue, and we need to take it seriously. I would go so far as to say it's a "do or die" issue, perhaps more important than cryptography. We need to draw a line in the sand.

When drive manufacturers build hard disks, who are they working for? The owners of intellectual property, or us, the people who buy them? It seems to me that they're working for us. Why don't they act like it? What's going on here?

I don't want to encourage strident or peurile pseudo-political action. And I'm not sure what to do about it. But this just can't be allowed to go through. This is the sort of thing that ought to make us all consider writing checks to the EFF, at the very least.

All of the conventional wisdom about concentrating press power into a few hands, as has been the trend lately, suggests that this story won't get much play. The same dynamic exists in the debate over the giveaway of new HDTV frequencies to the broadcasters. You don't hear much about that, because the people getting the giveaway are the ones who are supposed to be protecting us from such scams.

The bad news is that all of the people who are suppsoed to be protecting us from scams like this current one are also the same people who own all of the intellectual property. Will Time/Warner allow its journalists to talk about this issue?

We have to stay focused on this. We have to tell people we know about it. We have to make noise. And we have to make sure that our lobbyists are well funded.

This is simply totally and utterly unacceptable.

Re:No way

[_ganja_]

"There's no way that HD copy protection will survive, AFAIK. Once you sell the user the hardware, you can basically kiss it goodbye."

From what I've read, its not that simple and if Alan Cox is worried about it, it will not be easy to defeat. This ain't no MP3 watermarking scheme.

The fact that this has gotten this far pisses me off a great deal, if I buy a HD I should be able to do as I please with it. Its bad enough with DeCSS bullshit, if this gets anywhere near HDs we'll have the same battle: "Sorry Linux, you don't have a licence to read the new HDs and even if a benevolent stranger were to donate a license, you can not write drivers and open the source".

What's that you say? It's only for selective content such as films and music, for now maybe but once the spread of the technology is wide enough, who knows? This is fat cat corporate heaven.

We are no longer living in interesting times but very worrying times. George Orwell seems to have only missed the date by 20 years, maybe he misjudged human nature and thought we would rollover quicker but regardless if "inititives" like this HD shit get implimented I'd say we're half way on our backs already.

EFF is right, not good enough

[mikethegeek]

While it's nice that the outrage among us techies bout CPRM has apparently been noticed, making it "optional" is not accaptable.

It does not need to be in there at all. If it is, even if "optional" that will still give the MPAA/RIAA and unscrupulous software vendors the ability to REQUIRE you have it or enable it for their software/media, that you BOUGHT to work.

I really believe the way to beat CPRM to death is to drive home the point that it breaks the ability to use imaging programs like Ghost. How many enterprises right now are using Ghost to maintain and deploy PC's? Tons. Breaking it with CPRM hard drives will cost firms tons and tons of money spent in needless manual setup/maitenance on individual PC's.

Here's what I submitted as feedback on IBM website

[Dym_]

A couple of weeks ago, I went to http://www.storage.ibm.com/feedback/feedback.htm and submitted the following:

Hello,

I am writing to you as an owner of several IBM disk drives and as an IBM investor.

I've been following recent media reports about CPRM with alarm. The proposed standard for control over information would present problems for many applications (such as free software, which I use almost exclusively) while having dubious benefits.

Please consider retracting support for CPRM. If IBM continues to support it, I'll likely boycott IBM products -- and I don't want to do that (my Deskstars and Ultrastars are working great). Also I'll divest my IBM stock.

IBM made great contributions to open source community recently, and I'd hate to see that relationship affected by the policy of the storage division.

I wonder if more feedback like this will influence their actions...