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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.'"
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
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.
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?
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
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"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...
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*
burris
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
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").
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.
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.
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