Slashdot Mirror
Companies Abandon The Sinking Ship That Is SDMI
wiggles writes: "Cryptome is mirroring a federally filed notice which discloses that a small number of companies (9) have joined the SDMI, and a large number of companies (27) 'have been dropped from the [SDMI] venture' i.e. either kicked out, or jumped ship. I put my money on the second possibility. The list of companies 'that have been dropped' is staggering in scope. Some of the more notable names include Encoding.com/Loudeye Technologies (famous infrastructure provider for streaming music), Guillemot (French maker of kickass graphic cards), I2GO.COM (American maker of high-capacity solid state mp3 players), LG Electronics (Korean makers of all kinds of consumer electronics), among others. One wonders how many more defections will follow, as the SDMI group continues to try (and fail) to achieve the impossible. As Bruce Schneier says 'Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.'"
If I were you, I'd think long and hard (insofar as it would be possible for me to do so) before calling anyone else dumb.
That's the burst speed your thinking of. The sustained data rate on an IDE drive is much lower than that. When you have to seek to 8 different spots on the disk constantly during your writes it will be even slower than that.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
They make one ofthe best/cheapest digital recording cards out there. For about $300 (US), you can get a card that supports 8 inputs at up to 48 KHz sampling, plus 4 out puts, S/PDIF I/O, and two MIDI interfaces! It comes with a special edition of Cool Edit, but is supported Cubase and all the other biggies. You need a fast HD, though, no IDE if you want to do all 8 imputs at the same time!
And it is a well done card...I can turn up the volume on my studio monitors, and I still hear no noise...very nice!
ttyl
Farrell J. McGovern
Amature Recording Engineer
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Theoretically yes, practically no.
If they controlled 100% of the hardware, it would be impossible (and that's assuming they did it perfectly), it might well be uncrackable.
But in the real world, the cat is out of the bag, systems they do not control exist, and there will be a way to crack everything.
Is it really not possible to make things uncopyable?
Well, if it can be read, it can be copied. It's that simple. Copying is just reading something and writing what you've read elsewhere (i.e., what the Unix 'cp' command does). That's where SDMI is going to lose - they're trying to make reading and copying out to be separate operations, but one is just an extension of the other.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
effectively forced the manufacturers of DAT recorders to incorporate SCMS, thus killing DAT as a consumer format.
:/
And MiniDisc is in basically the same boat, if I'm not too much mistaken. Ah, all the potentially excellent technology we've missed out on because of stupid legislation.
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
if you stop paying for the product most people will stop supplying (I am talking about original designers)
What this means is that something is scarce in the equasion. That would be the capacity of people to compose music good enough that many others want to hear it.
So, what the market seeks is a way to pay for that and distribute it in the most efficient way possable. A middleman who keeps >90% of the wholesale price and prevents a method of distribution that costs next to nothing is not efficient.
As a consumer, wouldn't you be willing to pay $1.50 - $1.80 to your favorite artist to produce the next CD (as high quality mp3's)?
If you were a musician, would you write and produce music for ~$1,000,000 a year? ($1 each for a single platinum album)
In other words, if the market was working here, we'd be paying for the scarce thing (composition and production) not the unlimited thing (reproduction of the work). Likely, many would pay a small amount to get that in a convieniant form (a CD) as well, but not $15 - $18.
Sure he might find out after. But is he really likey to take it back to the store now? Probably not. He'll just live with it.
Or have the kid next door 'flush the filmware or whatever he said' and remove the 'feature'.
man I hope so :) If Leonardo DeCaprio is jumping off you know this is true... Lucky bastard. :)
--
LG is much bigger than you realize (unless you realized that it was a 100k person, $100 billion chaebol (a Korean conglomerate))
Perhaps if they said "Lucky Goldstar" the name might start ringing some bells. Or just "Goldstar". Or maybe "Zenith".
Yes, that's right, it's one of everyone's favorite makers of relatively cheap, relatively well-made (ahem) electronic equipment. Which has the advantage of being based in a country with somewhat lax enforcement of IP laws.
So LG is a big loss to SDMI - but otherwise, you're right on with your assessment of the other loser & no-name companies bailing out.
Accurate, but you forgot the logical conclusion, which is the real reason that any sort of copy protection scheme is doomed:
Once anyone breaks the copy protection on a digital work, they can make the unprotected version of that work available to the world at large, for effectively zero cost and at almost zero risk. This is the real reason any sort of digital copy protection scheme is doomed; not because it's technically or politically difficult to implement, but because if it fails even once, it's effectively useless.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
The truth is there never is a victory in such a battle, just a reprieve. Just because some people have realised copy protection doesn't make sense, doesn't mean that you won't have someone else come along to try to prove the contrary. As an example, how many times have you tried telling your parents something was possible, when they had long ago learned from experience that it wasn't.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Don't talk about your rights as a consumer! Consumers are pieces of market share to be exploited. You have rights as a citizen.
Since the uncrippled player gets sued out of existence, there will be no choice. Just wait a year or two and Hilary Rosen's "if we don't approve it, it won't happen" will be the law.
Don't compare it with Divx, compare it with DVD. We've already lost that battle, but does anyone care?
Friends, let us gloat. Briefly, to be sure, but let's gloat nonetheless. We said it couldn't be done. We *showed* them it couldn't be done. Did they listen? Nay! Their foolish efforts to stop the free-flow of bits through weak-ass crypto hacks not only had the Good Guys(TM) alternately furious and aloof, but I'm sure there were information theorists who were just passively humored. "They wanna do what? Morons! The 'enemy' has physical access to the ciphertext!"
So a big ol' raspberry to all the suits over at the RIAA, MPAA, etc. Fuck y'all! You are going to have to change your business model, bribe politicians into starting a War on Copyright a la the notorious War on Drugs, or just start offing people a la the Church of Scientology. But any way you go against it the genie is out of the bottle and ya can't stop it.
Or maybe I've just drank too much Jolt. I actually found some today. RaH!
- Rev.In that IBM is joining the venture, while 27 others are leaving.
How does this affect their "most-favored-big-company" status here on Slashdot?
Yeah, that part sucks. Sure, 27 winky companies are gone, but IBM is worth 100 of 'em.
And too bad IBM is a big drive manufacturer too... as mass storage is the core of tomorrow's consumer electronics. Geez, this is BAD news.
It only takes a few large and powerful players, along with some crazy legislation to make something like SDMI a potent industry standard.
Sure, I agree: you'll be able to break any copy protections. But the industry can make it ugly and painful to do so. Just wait for a couple generations of consumer-level home electronics, and we'll find more and more protections baked into the hardware.
Yep, the consumer will pay for all this in real dollars and in their personal freedoms. All in the name of protecting the industry's profits and obsolete business models.
I smell another Divx (the Circuit City DVD thing) happening. Of course, one can never underestimate the power of evil marketing executives. Average Consumer: "It's Sony; it must be good!"
In that IBM is joining the venture, while 27 others are leaving.
How does this affect their "most-favored-big-company" status here on Slashdot?
I think that most of the confusion in this thread is arising from the fact that "code" has several applicable meanings, and so does "crack".
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention
Bruce Schneier
Music, videos, books on the Internet! Freely available to anyone without paying! The entertainment industry sees services like Napster as the death of its business, and it's using every technical and legal means possible to prevail against them. They want to implement widespread copy prevention of digital files, so that people can view or listen to content on their computer but can't copy or distribute it.
Abstractly, it is an impossible task. All entertainment media on the Internet (like everything else on the Internet) is just bits: ones and zeros. Bits are inherently copyable, easily and repeatedly. If you have a digital file -- text, music, video, or whatever -- you can make as many copies of that file as you want, do whatever you want with the copies. This is a natural law of the digital world, and makes copying on the Internet different from copying Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton luggage.
What the entertainment industry is trying to do is to use technology to contradict that natural law. They want a practical way to make copying hard enough to save their existing business. But they are doomed to fail.
Complete Article
Want Root?
"As Bruce Schneier says 'Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.'" "
I think that pretty much beats out any comment a slashdotter will ever come up with. Bruce is the man...
like a millionaire that has no money
like a rainy day that is not wet
like a gamblin fiend that does not bet
like dracula with out his fangs
like the boogie to the boogie without the boogie bang
like collard greens that dont taste good
like a tree that's not made out of wood
like goin up and not comin down
is just like the beat without the sound no sound
to the beat beat, ya do the freak
everybody just rock and dance to the beat
(copyright: the authors of the lyric in my URL
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
for a start, every anti-copy mechanism ever invented has been beaten because people will accept poor quality copies. Next, there's no point using encryption because the signal has to be decrypted by the player so it can be seen/heard (which makes CSS such a joke.) and people just make analog copies. As we are mostly talking about a digital signal anyway, the professional pirates just duplicate bit images and don't have any problems at all :-)
Call it "just desserts".
One Can Never Own Enough Musical Instruments...
With IBM on board, the announcement seems like an overall win for the consortium. But even without them, the changes are insignificant.
:-)
The companies that left are rather trivial players. That's kind of backed up by the fact that you have to explain who they are. Two dot coms whose web sites seem to be down at the moment, a graphics card company I've never heard of, and a consumer electronics company I've never heard of? (LG's probably bigger than I realize, but they don't ring a bell the way Sony, Matushita/Panasonic, Fuji, or Philips do.)
On the other hand, they've gained IBM. You don't need to explain who they are.
Now consider a few of the companies that did stay in the consortium: Aiwa, AT&T, BMG Entertainment, Casio, Compaq, Dolby Labs, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Iomega, JVC, Kenwood, Lucent, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Napster, Nokia, Philips Electronics, Pioneer, Real Networks, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Siemens, Toshiba, and Yamaha.
I'd guess they make about 95% of audio equipment sold worldwide.
I'm not arguing that SDMI is making a good, nice, or viable standard. But if you're trying to make it sound like they're in trouble simply because the quantity of companies dropped is greater than the quantity of companies added, I think you've neglected to consider the significance of those companies.
WinBond chips do the dinky stuff that anyone could do, heck even Cyrix could make chips that do it. It's just hardware temperature monitoring and timing stuff, things that can easily be done by any other semiconductor company. They also make other chips, but the odds are that a Winbond chip on your motherboard is just there doing low-leval hardware monitoring for the BIOS etc. If Winbond chips were to have anything objectionable to the average consumer built in, then VIA, nVidia, or anyone else could quite easily make an alternative. Just recall the disaster that was the P!!! serial number--
Intel: "Look! It's good for e-commerce!"
Consumers: "Fuck you, we don't want serial numbers on our hardware that can get read by our software and sent to other people."
Intel: "We're making a utility available to turn it off and it won't be a 'feature' of the next chip revision. Sorry."
When push comes to shove, some other company will provide hard drives, chipsets, etc., with no copy protection restrictions, and some enterprising hackers will provide software to emulate the protection measures so that SDMI or other "protected" bits and bytes will work on any system.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
You _can_ make water not wet. Just freeze it! I mean - look at the snow in Antartica. Is it running around like a liquid? It's so cold, you'd be a fool to touch it with your bare hands, ...
Remember, IT IS MY PATENT. RIAA - you can't touch this. Nyah nyah!
No. It is demostration of how impressive unwet water is.
is not dry humor apt?
burris
If they do that, there will be a demand for non-SDMI hardware, but no supply. Anyone that would enter that market would make a killing selling at high prices due to the law of supply and demand, until the supply reached a resonable level - at which time the market would find a balance between low prices for the buyers and decent profits for the producers.
They'll also pay off the governments not only to make this monopoly legal, but to enforce compliance with it (SDMI says "DMCA is just the beginning").
Yes, a law mandating SDMI could happen and would be very bad. The AHRA mandated SCMS and the DMCA mandated the standard Macrovision and Colorstripe copy restriction technologies. It is illegal to sell VCRs that do not get hosed by Macrovision, even if the fact they are immune isn't engineered in on purpose to allow recording in spite of the restriction technologies. Example: A VCR company could have been making VCRs without AGC circuits. They would be immune to Macrovision. Under the DMCA, the manufacturer would have to deliberately engineer a bug into the product - make it so Macrovision just hoses it (e.g. add an AGC circuit) or detect it and block the copy.
If I made VCRs, I'd obey the law, but instead of recording gibberish I would put - "Copying prevented due to copy restriction measures. It is illegal for us to allow you to record under Federal law 17 USC 1201(k).". Let the citizens (not mere "consumers") know WHY their rights are being restricted.
I don't know if CD drives could be made to read the "copy protected" CDs. Since the "protected" CDs just have hosed metadata, and nothing is encrypted, and they break the standard, it might not be illegal under the DMCA. Unless Kaplan is presiding, it which case not only would it be illegal, but I'd likely be a criminal for even mentioning the "details" of "protected" CDs.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Why didn't DAT kick out analog tape from its market? All the non-SCMS disadvantages of DAT you mentioned apply to analog tape. And analog tapes are STILL mentioned in those ads for music albums on TV.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The RIAA, being it's usual bastardus sell has sued launch.com. A site that that uses some fancy algorithms to play what it thinks you'll want to hear. The RIAA thinks it's to customizable.
What's funny? the fact that Launch.com is owned by some pretty big RIAA members.
fuck, for some reason I sound like a press release or something today.)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Hey, if you're going to talk like that at least have the decency to mention Fatboy Slim instead of Britney :-)
But this is true -- I've never really understood how SDMI could be made a selling point...
(At some random convention. Prospective Shopper is looking at MP3 players and approaches Hardware Company Suit.)
PS: So explain this SDMI thing to me you're pushing.
HCS: Well, this is a great feature! It allows you to be sure your music is secure!
PS: What do you mean? Like someone sticking a virus in an MP3 file?
HCS: No, that can't happen.
PS: So why exactly am I concerned about it being secure?
HCS: Well, you wouldn't want to be getting software from some source that might have attached a virus to it, right?
PS: Uh, no...
HCS: Well, SDMI just makes sure that the music you play on one of our systems comes from a source you can trust.
PS: Wait, I don't get it. It's just music...
HCS: All I'm saying is that you don't want to get your music from a source you can't trust...
PS: I'm sorry, I just don't see the point...
And the conversation goes on in this vein, the Hardware Company Suit beating around the bush in hopes of snowjobbing the Prospective Shopper. The sad part is that there might actually be someone who falls for this line, but I think the SDMI folks are realizing there aren't enough.
/Brian
Making bits uncopyable is a much harder problem.
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
They did freak out. You just weren't old enough to notice. They used to make DJ's talk over the beginning and end of songs to prevent people from taping them off-air -- despite the fact that it has been ruled legal.
Actually, I heard that the RIAA lawyers finally snapped, and started suing their own members for copying their copy protection scheme...
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
I look forward to the days when audio devices have no audio output for 'protection'.
Customer: "I'd like to return this walkman"
Salesperson: "Is it broken?"
Customer: "well, theres nowhere to plug the headphones in"
Salesperson: "oh.. They just clip on the back, like this"
Customer: "yeah.. I tried that, but I couldn't hear anything.. Isn't there supposed to be a headphone jack or something?"
Salesperson: "Oh, No sir.. Pirates use headphone jacks to steal the audio signal.. This walkman is secured against intellectual property theft.."
Oh well, until then there's always FM radio
air and light and time and space
"Again"? When did music companies stop making money?
And, I wouldn't underestimate the power of laws, and the power of mainstream media demonizing large parts of the population (resulting in witchhunts).
Therefore, techonlogies that are designed to undermine free expression must be fought before they go mainstream.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
All your ciphertext are belong to... yadda yadda you know the drill.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Subscribers who pay a monthly fee will be able to load any other digital audio files -- like the music of independent labels, their own recordings or other material -- onto their computers and share it with other Napster users. The fidelity will be just below the sound quality of compact discs and users who obtain files over Napster will be precluded from loading them onto their own discs or sending them outside its network.
So their participation in SDMI makes some sense - until you try to use the service of course. Oh well, I added them to my FC list months ago.
sulli
RTFJ.
In order to gain consumer acceptance, the industry will have to offer something BETTER or CHEAPER.
If together the SDMI Stasi form a monopoly of electronic devices and produced music, then better doesn't matter -- you'll take what they give if you want anything.
Cheaper they can take care of by taking a loss and pricing SDMI hardware far below what anyone outside the monopoly can sell non-SDMI hardware at. Then they'll jack the prices back up way high once non-SDMI producers go out of business.
They'll also pay off the governments not only to make this monopoly legal, but to enforce compliance with it (SDMI says "DMCA is just the beginning").
Is this just a cheap ploy to get Kate Winslet to pose topless for them?
-
The customer has never been right. If the customer was always right, then I, as a customer, could walk into any store in the world, demand free goods, and use "The customer is always right!" as my justification for walking out without paying for anything I wanted to take with me.
Now, I am not necessarily taking their side, but look at it this way. If I buy a car, it's not like I have the equipment to pirate the design specs of the car and start producing my own cars. If I buy an oak desk, likewise, I am not likely to have a shop set up to crank out duplicate desks. However, with computer software, cassette tapes, CDs, video tapes, etc. it is so much easier (and relatively cheaper) to make bootlegs after buying one legal copy. Heck, in some cases, they don't even need a legal copy.... I am reminded of the time I saw tapes of "The Matrix" for sale at a local flea market the day after the movie came out in theaters.
They are not taking away your freedom by trying to protect their interests. They are trying to stop software/music/movie/whatever piracy from happening. In the long run, such piracy raises the prices they we have to pay.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Let's get back to "better or cheaper". "Better" is going to be tough because it means expensive hardware upgrades -- replacing your stereo with some kind of 16-channel amplifier and speakers. A tough sell when you consider that we all have only 2 ears, and they are not upgradable.
"Cheaper" is not likely either. The industry could use existing P2P technology to roll out a "cheaper" pay-per-song model, but they chose not to. To these folks, "cheaper" means less profit in the short term.
Even if they could solve the technical problem, the unsold hardware and media would end up at the landfill, right next to the DIVX players and discs.
Crazy laws won't work. P2P networks (with or without Napster) are growing faster than anyone can legislate. Legal tactics work only against centrally controlled networks. Any law that cannot achive voluntary compliance from the majority of citizens is doomed. We simply don't have enough lawyers and courts to prosecute the number of would-be criminals. Remember the national 55 MPH speed limit? Prohibition?
Are they really going to attack P2P networks (legally or otherwise)? Consider the scum-sucking spammers. They're like cockroaches. In theory, killing them is easy. LART one and it's dead. The problem is you can't kill them fast enough to control their growth. There are alot more P2P users than spammers -- both are here to stay.
Which is why this might be a blessing. IBM has an intrest in people clogging their hard drives with large and available media. And IBM is huge. It has customers that border on fans. That + Money = Clout. Maybe IBM can change the evil empire. There are millions of reasons for them to try. Besides, "the more the RIAA tightens [their grip], the more mp3 will fall through [their] fingers." -- Carrie Fisher
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
LG does not market much under its own brand. The only place where I know of that happening is the UK where the Dixons/Currys chain replaced their in house 'Matsui' label with an exclusive distribution deal with LG. They did a similar deal with Samsung many years ago when nobody in Europe knew who they were.
I'd guess they make about 95% of audio equipment sold worldwide. :-)
I doubt if those companies make more than 30% combined. They market upwards of 80% - China and India ae huge markets with significant local players.
SDMI is in trouble for reasons that were obvious two years ago when I went to their meetings, the only way SDMI can succeed is if every country in the world passes a law making non-SDMI players illegal. The hardware manufacturers have very little incentive to actually implement SDMI, they have a marginal interest in pretending they might.
I suspect that the list of companies leaving is simply the list of compaines whose subscriptions were not renewed. I can't see anyone going out of their way to declare in public the private contempt they express for SDMI.
In 1999 the group was running arround like headless chickens declaring that they had to solve the problem by Christmas or it was all over.
One of the most ridiculous features of SDMI is that it prohibits absolutely any form of microphone built into the package. So it will be illegal to have a portable dictation machine that also plays SDMI MP3s.
My strong belief is that there will be convergence between video cameras and MP3 players, just as there is already convergence between digital cameras and MP3. The idea of prohibiting a line in or mic in jack to such devices is pure fantasy.
What I want is a device about the size of a cigarete packet that has a CPU, battery and compact flash II socket. It would record 20 mnutes of video onto an IBM (or other manufacturer) minidrive. There would be sockets for headphones, line-out, camera, microphone and line-in, plus USB of course. The base unit would strap to the waist belt with only lightweight peripherals to plug into it - just like modern cell phones.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Ha ha. No.
SDMI, CSS and their daddy, the DMCA, are aimed squarely at stopping me and thee from doing any fair use activities. Why? Because commercial duplication is already illegal, and because if you make it hard for amatuers to crack protection, then only professionals will crack it. It's that simple. If they were targetting professional pirates, they'd crank up the penalties for commercial piracy. They aren't, and they didn't. DMCA, CSS and SDMI are aimed at you and they're aimed at me.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
While I broadly agree with you, I have to pick up on a few points:
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
That is when the DVD 'copy protection' kicks in. That's why we need deCSS -- to get around the CSS encryption so we can play the damn things, not to copy the disk. Anybody can copy a DVD, encryption and all, and you'll need deCSS to play the copy just like you need it to play the original. That's what the RIAA just does not get: stopping deCSS does not stop people from pirating DVDs, it just stops people like me from buying them legally because I can't play them. Oh, yes, it also stops me from buying pirated DVDs, because I can't play them either, so I suppose at that level the RIAA is right (as they shoot of their own nose to spite their face).
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Considering the size of LG (it's one of the largest companies in the world), I'd say that is a big loss. And considering how controversial SDMI is, if even a single electronics giant stands outside, they've lost, because the remaining one(s) will surely exploit their status for what it's worth to take market share by appealing to consumer rights.
> Is it really not possible to make things uncopyable?
No, it's not possible, if you can read it, then you can copy it.
The interesting thing happen when you want to *use* those bits.
That is when the copy protection should kick in.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?