IETF on DRM, Internet Faxing

Rich Salz writes: "The Internet Research Task Force, a sister of the IETF, has a research group on Internet digital rights management. Ebooks, secure content, no-fair-use (sic), etc. According to a presentation at the last IETF, one of the group's work items is to influence other IETF activities to support/architect DRM. IDRM membership is open to anyone, presumably including nay-sayers." Meanwhile, the IETF has put on hold its work toward an internet fax standard, as Adobe and Xerox squabble over a file format.

Comments

Re:real digital rights management

[e_lehman]

Yes, so you get two copies of the book. You diff them. You find several differences. Now what are you going to do? Suppose you resolve them randomly. When you see "grey" and "gray", you just pick one version at random. That should do the trick, right???

Not so, young grasshoppah!

Suppose that I, the Evil Publisher, encode 1000 random bits into each book using things like "gray/grey" or comma/no-comma. Your two copies will actually AGREE on about 500 bits, so you won't even know they're there. Now I compare the books I've sold against the pirate copy. Almost all books with agree with the pirate copy on about 500 bits +/- a few standard deviations. But TWO will agree on around 750 bits-- namely, the two you merged. With 99.9999% confidence (or around there), I now know the identity of both you AND your buddy who also purchased the second book. That should be enough for a search warrant!

(Of course, you might be more clever. But then so might the Evil Publisher. Not clear who would win, but without knowing his strategy and with years of prison time on the line, would you actually play the game?)

Re:TIFF is already standard, who needs color?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever seen a 'plain' color PS file? Some of them are HUGE.

Computer generated PS files can be the most hideously inefficient program creators of all time. But they work.

Re:The IETF needs a Patent IP policy for standards

[blueHal]

There should be a standard mechanism implemented for management and status handling of Intelectual property which becomes part of IETS standards (protocols, file formats, etc) such that there is never a question as to the availability for use of a standard.

What a great idea! Good thing there are such mechanisms.
See rfc2026: (The IESG is the Internet Engineering Steering Group, the folks who approve standards.)

10.3.2. Standards Track Documents

(A) Where any patents, patent applications, or other proprietary
rights are known, or claimed, with respect to any specification on
the standards track, and brought to the attention of the IESG, the
IESG shall not advance the specification without including in the
document a note indicating the existence of such rights, or
claimed rights.

The rest of the RFC is a worthwhile description of IETF policy, but, I believe, is being revised.

Re:Won't work

[sulli]

Interesting analysis, but as you note it depends on the publisher being able to track each individual copy sold. In addition to being highly impractical until we have universal 802.11 at all beaches in the world, the privacy impact is severe and negative. So I still doubt very much that this scheme (scam) will be effective, even if it is briefly protected by a patently unconstitutional law.

Re:real digital rights management

[mvdwege]

Or you simply run a spellchecker on the text. All copies have the same spelling, problem solved.

.....Wait a second! Now I know why CmdrTaco's spelling is so bad! It's a copy protection mechanism!

Mart

Waiting for Adobe and Xerox?

[RedOregon]

What the hey... maybe I'm ignernt or something, but what's the deal with waiting for two companies to quit squabbling? Why not define the standard and let _them_ conform to the standards, instead of conforming the standards to _them_??

Re:Waiting for Adobe and Xerox?

[monkeydo]

Yes, you are ignorant. If you had read the article you would know that the IETF cannot proceed without the permission of Adobe and Xerox because the new standard relies on IP from the two companies.

Re:Waiting for Adobe and Xerox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Before i start: i agree with everything you said, and what i do below is nothing more than clarifying my original point.

The HTML/4.0 spec turned out fine. It was implemented poorly and largely ignored

Umm. My exact point is that HTML 4.0 did not turn out fine, and was in fact a failure, becuase the implementations either ignored the standard or implemented it incorrectly. (I for one would say that "it was implemented poorly and largely ignored" is the exact opposite of "it turned out fine".)

as far as the rest of what you said: you are correct. microsoft and netscape are wholly at fault here, not the w3c, and there was no way to get them to listen to reason because interopability was, as you say, not in their best interests.

However, i would say that if there seems to be a way to make your implementors NOT be complete pricks, you should go that way. The w3c could have realized they were just working with children with poor social skills, and tried to do more to either bully ns/ms into playing nice or badmouth ns/ms to the media for ruining the standardisation process. Even that wouldn't have worked, though, you're right.

i was trying to put forward html 4 as NOT an example of an standard in which the process of putting the standard together was mismanaged (it was a rather nice standard, i thought) but an example of a GOOD standard wholly wholly made useless by implementors who couldn't work out their respective differences. My point being, without implementors, your standard is useless, and sometimes it is more important for the standards body to act as a playground moderator (and make the kids play nicely) than it is to act as, umm, a standards body.

Yeh, it was an unclear example. I apologize :)

I AM SUPER UGLY ULTRAMAN!!

Re:Waiting for Adobe and Xerox?

[Anonymous Coward]

The HTML/4.0 spec turned out fine. It was implemented poorly and largely ignored because the largest user agent vendors (in spite of posturing to the contrary) really don't want authors creating standard-conforming documents that can be rendered equally well by competing user agents. No process could have created a spec that would have been adopted whole-heartedly.

Re:Waiting for Adobe and Xerox?

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be easily argued that out of everyone in the entire world, the persons most qualified to design an internet faxing standard work for Adobe and Xerox. It is likely that if you will let the standard take place with the full input and approval of Adobe and Xerox, it will be of much higher quality than if you just put something together and declare it standard.

The standard simply cannot go very far without Adobe and Xerox anyway-- whether it's "defined" or not, the standard becomes standard when there are apps for it, and adobe and xerox are the ones who would make those apps happen. In this case, it makes the most sense to just give them a bit.

Or, alternately, you could just define a standard without making sure the people who would be implementing it are absolutely satisfied with the quality of and committed to using that standard. I mean, that's the kind of decisive action that gave us, say, HTML 4.0. And just look how well that turned out.

Never mind the squabbling. let's pretend it's "debate".

Re:Waiting for Adobe and Xerox?

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

So are you. If you had read the post you would know that the poster suggested a new standard, not "a standard that relies on IP from two companies" :

Why not define the standard and let _them_ conform to the standards

Re:hmm

[Midnight Thunder]

The question is what makes a fax more legally reliable than an e-mail. Maybe its simply because it is harder, for the sender, to falsify the originating phone number?

Their charter contains the problem

[Mactire_Dearg]

From their charter: 'IDRM is concerned with legal and social issues only to the extent that they affect or constrain DRM technology.'

I think thats more than half the problem. They arent asking IF something should be done, only how to do it. If someone comes up with a way to track every word I read in an ebook and then delete it so I cant re-read it what are the bets these guys would support it rather than 'constrain' the technology?

Maybe we should form the Internet Social Issues Team (IS IT) to address the things the corporations dont want to be bothered with.

Re:digital rights management and tech arms race

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

It's not a tech arms race. The copy-"protection" don't have to work. Their very existance makes using content in unapproved manners ILLEGAL under the DMCA. That is what it is all about - the DMCA allows even a trivial amount of programming to have the same legal force as Federal legislation.

Using the DMCA, Adobe can, and has, written a copyright "law" that applies to their products which goes beyond the old standard copyright law and infringes on fair use.

And the courts enforce those "protection" algorithm "laws" with sometimes draconian severity. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov.

File format? PNG of course. Duh.

[ecloud]

PNG includes some compression techniques a lot like that used in fax transmission, so it's an easy conversion, I think. Some fax-to-email software already converts faxes to PNG format. And PNG includes some metadata capabilities (comment fields) which could be used for the phone numbers ("station ID's" in fax terminology) etc.

You wonder where the money goes

[twitter]

I suppose it goes to lawers who publish dribble like THIS . What an incredible, stupid, greedy list. Picture databases, email faxes? If I get an email fax spam do I get to sue the sender or the liscencer? I wish they had bought dumb chairs instead.

What a depressing organization.

Re:The winds of change

[Billly Gates]

Well we will test your theory when WinXP comes out with renting only

Re:real digital rights management

[mvdwege]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I was kind of amused at all the convoluted ways people were thinking up to the 'different spelling error in every copy'-mechanism, when there is a perfectly good and common utility to circumvent it.

And the dig at Taco's spelling comes naturally after reading /. for awhile :)

Mart

Re:The IETF needs a Patent IP policy for standards

[Zeinfeld]

Anyone who compiles plaintext databases of credit card numbers on machines connected to the Internet is asking for trouble.

Unfortunately this will never be possible unless the USPTO ends its current corrupt scheme.

At present there is no means by which anyone can know what patent applications are in progress. It appears that even the modest changes under which patent applications would be published a year after filling are now 'optional'. What this means is that a corrupt applicant can easily file for a patent on somebody else's invention.

Another common trick is to extend an existing patent to include a claim on somebody else's invention that was published after the original application. Under the current rules the applicant gets the benefit of the original filling date.

Patent fraud is real and its legal. It is even encouraged by the USPTO.

Re:what news!

[topham]

Looks like a GPL Patent. ALl Future Patents related to First Patent are free for us to use. (Us being Xerox). Seems reasonable to me.

Re:real digital rights management

[snubber1]

ever hear of diff? ok then.

Re:Standardize DRM is impossible

[mcc]

One can standardize the method while leaving open enough details to maintan obscurity.

In traditional ("real") security, yes, because there the security has the clear, definite goal of sperating the universe into two groups: those who have access to the information, and those who do not. Those who have the key/password/whatever can access this server, or decrypt this email, or whatever; those who can't, can't. WIth this aim, you can actually *use* cryptography, which is based on real, solid, one-way math; and since you are using math and not secrets to protect your stuff, you can use standards.

In "copy protection" (i.e. "use control"), however, this is not the case. Here, the person you are giving access to is the same person that you are attempting to limit. The "has access" and "does not have access" distinction is eliminated completely. The "shared secret" of the "key" that makes up the inherent obscurity part of any security is no longer something that is used to unlock the book; it is something that is used to limit when and how the book can be unlocked by a person who posesses a key. Your "enemy" is not some evil person who has intercepted your encrypted email; your enemy is the person who has purchased your product. Therefore, you cannot put the security into cryptography-style math, becuase if the person you have sold the product to can pay $25 to ANSI and get the copy of your "standard", they can see how you are preventing copying, remove the prevention, and copy all they like. In the end, security through obscurity of method is all you have, because obscuring the key is not an option-- you must give your enemy a copy of the key for them to be able to watch your dvd at all! And since the enemy has a key, all that is needed is for one of the enemy to reverse-engineer or figure out how their key works, and your copy protection scheme has become completely useless.

It is important to note here that most content-protection forms i have seen thus far-- most notably CSS-- are there with the "copy protection" aspect there not as the primary goal, but just as a side effect, with use limitations being the primary purpose. CSS is there not to prevent the copying of movies, but there so that nobody can build a nonliscensed DVD player-- meaning that nobody can build a DVD player without paying money to the dvd forum, and that all dvd players can conform to the exact demands of the dvd forum (like, nobody can watch THe Sixth Sense without watching a trailer first, or watch a japanese movie on an american player before the movie companies decide they're good and ready to release the japanese movie in america), meaning nobody can invoke fair use and use a dvd in a way inconsistent with the desires of the dvd forum. The "copy prevention" thing is there mostly as a smokescreen, and so using a legitimate open standard for dvd devices would not work here; a scheme which would restrict illegal & immoral redistribution without restricting who can build devices for the viewing of dvds would be unacceptable to the dvd forum.

Please note that i am referring only to the traditional, nefarious form of "copy protection", the one that is more accurately described as "use control". If by "copy protection" you mean some kind of watermarking/tracing scheme, then that is not what i refer to in the above paragraphs, and i have nothing in particular to say on that subject at this time.

-mcc
help me help me i'm in a windows computer lab and i miss applespell

TIFF is already standard, who needs color?

[JM]

I have been using internet faxing for years. I setup a TPC node, and also used the Panasonic UF770i fax and both worked together.

TIFF works.

Why bother with Color? Only graphic artists and print shops use color faxing. And then, the documents are usually printed on a Postscript printer, then faxed. In that case, if you have a PostScript printer and internet, why not send the plain PS file?

DON'T STARTLE ME LIKE THAT!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That title is dangerous. It looks like the IETF is addressing the question of putting DRM in internet faxing.

Upon reading the article it is clear that the post is about the two seperate issues of [the IETF and DRM] and [the IETF and faxing], but the four seconds of shocked, frozen horror upon reading that headline were still pretty bad.

Gods.. DRM built into your fax/print standard. that would be terrifying, a fax/print system with an inherent bias against flexibility at the standard level. What an ugly, ugly thought. Be more careful next time.. you might give some old, feeble-hearted UNIX/COBOL engineer a heart attack before they get a chance to read the article blurb and realise they misinterpreted the headline.

Jeez.. you might as well accidentally post a link on a for-children-only website to whitehouse.com, or something.

Re:DON'T STARTLE ME LIKE THAT!!

[Ziegerektum]

I DEMAND OPENGL faxing! pigfuckers! WE must not let micorsoft use dirctx for FAX? it won't work on linux, freebsd or perl or X-Windows!?

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are they studying Ebonics? OOOhhh, ebooks, never mind.

Re:Internet faxing is available

[EMH_Mark3]

Well, it's rather cumbersome to type the documents before sending them, opposed to just putting it in the fax and pushing 'Send'... One doesn't always have the digital copies on hand.

here goes

[Zecho]

ok I'm not an "information wants to be free" monkey, neither do I oppose the idea. But to what extent do we need (I)DRM? Understandably, commercial software vendors want to profit from their creations, and artists want to be paid for their art, but I think that this is going to reach much farther than that. I have seen how the 'net has changed in the last 8-10 years and I remember when it was the BBS ops protecting their own 'wares (which had an entirely different meaning back then) and through it all, not a lot has really changed except the technology behind it all. Big brother (whoever it may be in each particular case) wants to be assured that you only get your slice of the pie and not a part of his. It's only a matter of time before image recognition filters are in place and can monitor who is on your desktop background. It's always us [trying to keep them out of our business] against them [making us their business] and guess what! We always lose! How long until pirated software, mp3s pr0n etc just searches your drive for a liscense, and self destructs when it doesn't find it? Anyway, I suppose I'm just ranting.
</rant>

IETF on ASS, Internet Mooning Standard

[BiggestPOS]

No more mooning without following the RFC! Seriously though, is there an RFC on mooning?

Fax Format

[alexmogil]

I wonder which format (Xerox or Adobe) is going to have the first fax virus embedded... oops.. sorry, Adobe.Alex

sad, really

[Khopesh]

...to see that this "new" innovation is going to use a propietary format. Think of the bickering it will cause.... oh, right. You know why they're fighting over this, right? Same kind of problem with MP3. Royalties, it is all about the royalties. Shame on the IETF.

Re:hmm

[dublin]

The question is what makes a fax more legally reliable than an e-mail. Maybe its simply because it is harder, for the sender, to falsify the originating phone number?

No, it's the same thing that makes any other paper document legal: the signature. They may be far from perfect, but they've been the basis of all legal transactions for the past several hundred years.

Spam faxes considered harmful

[sphealey]

Of course, you might want to look at Ed Foster's discussion of blast spam-faxing and ask yourself if we want better ways of automatically producing more junk mail?

sPh

The IETF needs a Patent IP policy for standards

[hillct]

Squabling over Intellectual Property in standard protocols is short sighted. It reduces the possibility the company holding the IP will be able to have the market advantage that comes with inclusion of their technology in a atandard (because no one will bother to include their technology) and potentially harms the quality and viability of the proposed standard There are plenty of residual revenue streams that come out of such inclusion of IP in a standard, that do not have the potential of harming the diability and rate-of-adoption of a standard (like treditional IP licensing would). The article about the internat fax standard says:

Adobe refuses to support TIFF-FX unless Xerox releases rights for its MRC technology to Adobe.

Xerox, meanwhile, won't back TIFF-FX unless Adobe promises to support the standard in its next version of TIFF.

This shouldn't ever be an issue. There should be a standard mechanism implemented for management and status handling of Intelectual property which becomes part of IETS standards (protocols, file formats, etc) such that there is never a question as to the availability for use of a standard. This is the same sort of issue that came up in an earlier discussion of Dolby Digital AC-3 decoding where the standards body, the Advanced Television Systems Committee has a patent policy which states in part that:

A license will be made available without compensation to applicants desiring to utilize the license for the purpose of implementing the standard.

Unfortunately, even with this policy, Dolby Labs is making claims against the NetBSD project for inclusing an unlicensed decoder in an Open Source product. The IETS needs to learn from this situation and develop an iron clad patent and IP policy such that these issues never arise when people attempt to implement IETF standards.

--CTH

Re:The IETF needs a Patent IP policy for standards

[ZeroConcept]

Adobe refuses to support TIFF-FX unless Xerox releases rights for its MRC technology to Adobe.

Xerox, meanwhile, won't back TIFF-FX unless Adobe promises to support the standard in its next version of TIFF.

Sun has a good piece on how to avoid deadlocking conflicts, maybe they should read it?

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

does anyone actually fax over the internet? with email and all?

Re:hmm

[Guppy06]

As it stands now, faxes are legally just as good as the original, including (especially) any signatures you fax. Kinda tricky to do with with e-mail.

Re:hmm

[Erasei]

I use my old modem as a fax machine now. Since I have a broadband connection, I don't need the modem, and its a lot more cost effective (ie cheaper) to use an old modem than go buy another device that just takes up space.

Re:meetings?

[bstrahm]

The next meeting of the IETF is in Salt Lake City Dec 9-14. A list of future planned meetings can be found here

IETF Meetings

The process is simple, pay the fee, read the documents, show up prepared to make comments. The IETF works both online through their mailing lists and Face - Face with their meetings held 3 times a year.

I am an ISP product manager

[Anonymous Coward]

and DRM is the last thing in the world I want to deal with. Imagine the pains in the ass, customer service calls, etc. to deal with network-based DRM. "My ebook didn't work! It's your fault, ISP!" Yucko.

Re:File format? PNG of course. Duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, TIFF is dead as much as it is proprietary. Many TIFFs I've come across use LZW compression so they suffer the same patent problems as GIFs. I refuse to use crappy software that can't use decent non-proprietary formats. Long live PNG!

Content - RFC

[Anonymous Coward]

The new RFC 3456 is about dead Nietzsches !
Here is a link.

Re:Internet faxing is available

[geojaz]

I believe it's usually fairly easy to scan a hard copy document and email it that way, and most of the things you are sending by fax have probably been produced on a system in the office so they can be forwarded fairly easily...
Email is a great thing... even those workers in Florida have figured out how to get work home without floppies =P

Re:Standardize DRM is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

In principle, it is possible. One can standardize the method while leaving open enough details to maintan obscurity.

This is, btw, how cryptography works anyway - it is based on obscuring information (like the encryption key, or the key pair in public key cryptography). There is no security without obscurity (a Unix password, for example, is technically an obscured, user-supplied part of an encryption algorithm).

An interesting point is however that watermarking has quite inverse goals. While most authentication applicatiosn can't care less if you scramble or mutilate the (wrong) key (authentification will still fail), watermarks should maintain their information under such attempts and only be removable if the key is known.

Internet Fax Standards

[dublin]

Meanwhile, the IETF has put on hold its work toward an internet fax standard, as Adobe and Xerox squabble over a file format.

Internet Fax standards have already existed for years : Check out www.tpc.int for more info. You'll note that the entire TPC.INT system is based on several RFCs that were released years ago: see RFCs 1528, 1529, and 1530. (And 1703, which extended tpc.int to radio paging....)

digital rights management and tech arms race

[perdida]

Rights management? that's an oxymoron.

IDRM will not pursue research into the legal and social issues of DRM. IDRM is concerned with legal and social issues only to the extent that they affect or constrain DRM technology. As the IDRM RG intends to focus on technical issues, it will address technologies that promote both copy-protection and fair-use copying of digital objects. IDRM will pursue research into DRM technology with a focus on the end-to-end and IP network infrastructure issues of DRM.

What the heck? I don't think that someone who views legal and social issues as a constraint on technology should be developing the technology.

The people who develop technologies deeply rooted in the social context have truly achieved their dreams; as these technologies gain widespread use, they transform society and enrich their creators.

In the case of copy protections and other forms of rights management, these technologists are inventing far away from the wishes of society.

If the mainstream press has understood antyhing, it is that people want to widely share and download music, to create their own unique musical soundtracks and archives, and to share music for free.

If digital rights management becomes widespread, it will only be because the influence of money, and not that of a vast social trend, caused it to happen.

The technologists who make it won't ever be able to rest, they will be in a permanent arms race with those who try to crack the technology. They'll be foot soldiers in a war between money and a social trend.

I doubt that rights management, an algorithmic, bureaucratic process, can win against fair use, a social and organic process. I think the people who live and love the science of copy protection should look in the long term, and use their talents in the interests of people, rather than money.

let's think about what we are talking about

[twitter]

the right to use Xerox's IPR

? Is this the right to rearange the bits in my PCs memory as I see fit? Bunk. A modified tiff file is no more a "standard" than the original tiff. Patents on things like this are artificial and arbitrary restrictions on the use of computing equipment.

Internet Faxing? Okay, if you say so.

[Wakko Warner]

The standard seems to be: "Who the hell cares?"

- A.P.

Rights and Wrongs

[ChaoticCoyote]

If "digital rights management" is "bad", why does Slashdot put an OSDN copyright statement on its web pages?

I'm far more concerned about plugging up the Internet with more crap, i.e. faxes. Why do we need fax over IP anyway? Is it just so Adobe and Xerox can introduce a new uselss must-have product to business, or because there's any crying need for fax-over-IP?

Re:Rights and Wrongs

[Xenu]

I think it would be useful. Imagine a fax machine that would plug into your local LAN hub/switch. You could get rid of an analog phone line and transmissions would be faster.

Re:Rights and Wrongs

[Anonymous Coward]

If "digital rights management" is "bad", why does Slashdot put an OSDN copyright statement on its web pages?

"technological measures to prevent the copying of copyrighted material (which inherently have the potential to inhibhit or hinder ordianary, legal fair use usage of the copyrighted material but can never absolutely guarantee that significantly less illegal and immoral pirating of the copyrighted material in question will take place) are bad" does not equate to "laws providing copyright protections are bad".

i think that's all. thank you for eating at mcdonalds mr coyote

Internet faxing is available

[MobyDisk]

Typically, you use the SMTP protocol and the "PNG" "GIF" or "JPG" file formats. Our office uses "DOC" "HTML" and "PDF" internally. Do any of these sound familiar to anyone else?

Seriously, what advantage does internet faxing have over email? Email is fast and open-ended. It can handle any type of file format. It can be secured, tracked, provides return reciept.

If you read the article, it talks about two companies using proprietary extensions for color faxes, and they are talking IP rights before the working group has even made a draft! I'm not interested in protocols being manhandled by corporations. Standards are standards. (Remember USRobotics and modem standards years back?)

Re:Internet faxing is available

[StormyMonday]

Seriously, what advantage does internet faxing have over email? Email is fast and open-ended. It can handle any type of file format. It can be secured, tracked, provides return reciept

Thought experiment -- I have a paper that you have to sign and return to me. There are three ways to do it:

1. Snail mail: I mail it to you; your sign it and send it back. Simple. Takes the better part of a week unless we're talking international. All bets are off then.
2. FAX: I stuff it in the FAX. You sign it and FAX it right back. If you are waiting for it, the elapsed time is measured in minutes, even if it's international.
3. E-mail: If it's in a format that you can edit, and if you have a digitized copy of your signature, you can simply paste it in. If not, you have to print it out (sorry about that 400 page manual in the queue), sign it, scan it (be sure to check that the scanned version is readable), and mail the file back. Hope you're not on a slow dialup line; those image files can get big.

The signature problem is why I'm going out later to buy a new FAX machine. There's this client on the other side of the Atlantic ....

PS -- Secured I'll give you (but just try to get a non-techie to use PGP!). Tracked and return receipt? Only using proprietary extensions that do not work as required. (ie, you can refuse to send a receipt). But then, you have none of the above with a FAX anyway.

Re:Internet faxing is available

[wjr]

Not only that, but suppose I have Internet access but no fax machine, and you have a fax machine and no Internet access. In the current situation, we simply can't exchange documents short of shipping dead trees to each other. The wider scope of internet fax encompasses gateways on both ends, so I could send a document to a gateway that will fax it to you, and you could fax a reply to a gateway that would send it on to me.

Re:Internet faxing is available

[swb]

It's fairly easy to scan a hard copy when you have a scanner. When you don't have a scanner, you have some issues.

There will be a paper world that needs to be bridged. E-docs are great when everyone's in the electronic world, but once a doc jumps outside that world it gets kind of awkward.

Faxes provide authoritative origin information

[yerricde]

Maybe its simply because it is harder, for the sender, to falsify the originating phone number?

Yes. The telco is treated as a trusted source for authenticated the physical location of the origin of the fax. This can be used to back up an assertion that "The person who sent this fax was authorized to use this telephone account to send this fax," or that "My client didn't commit this murder because he was off in Chicago sending this fax at the time the murder occurred."

Use PNG instead

[yerricde]

the IETF cannot proceed without the permission of Adobe and Xerox because the new standard relies on IP from the two companies.

It doesn't have to. There's always PNG, the latest free replacement for GIF and TIFF.

Re:DRM...

[Ziegerektum]

dude! that's what i thought

DRM...

[Anonymous Coward]

that's in the kernel, right?

Broken link?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else have a problem with this link from the main post? I just get a blank page :( http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/08/13/adobe. xerox.tiff.idg/

Re:Standardize DRM is impossible

[Maskirovka]

Is it even possible to have standardized DRM?

Until either AOL or Microsoft disappears, no, it won't be possible to standardise much of anything in terms of content.

Maskirovka

you might care about the idea

[twitter]

Does the prospect of someone modifying an image encoding format slightly to TIFF-FX, then using that to claim ownership to "electronic faxes" or any image sent electronicaly bother you? Go look at the greedy claims being made for this, tunneling, and a whole host of other ideas.

Standardize DRM is impossible

[Sloppy]

Is it even possible to have standardized DRM? I thought that every single attempt at DRM, has absolutely and solely relied on security through obscurity. If you publish a standard, don't you lose obscurity?

Re:Standardize DRM is impossible

[BlueTurnip]

Sure, and that's why it might have a chance of working. Security through obscurity has never worked for DRM, so an open published standard will force them to do it right. No 40 bit keys, or software based encryption running on an untrusted CPU!

Re:Standardize DRM is impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

How is software based encryption on an untrusted cpu better than hardware based encryption on a trusted cpu owned by an untrusted user?

If someone really wanted to, they could disassemble and reverse-engineer the chips in your hardware implementation of encryption. It would just be a matter of time, and a matter of work, and there are plenty of people out there with plenty of both who would for a VARIETY of reasons (both moral and immoral) want badly to crack a form of purely hardware STO (and it is STO, still, completely, both in procedure and in keys, even if it's encryption in hardware)

You know what an emulator is? Hardware has no way of knowing if it's real or not. If someone figures out how your hardware encryption works, they can approximate it perfectly in software. If someone is told "you can't understand how this hardware works", someone will eventually figure it out just for the challenge of the thing. it's that simple.. period.

I advoid TIFF's

[Leknor]

I don't know about you but I advoid TIFFs. This sould be solved quickly with a simple agreement on png or jpeg.

When will the world learn:

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two kinds of organizations:

A) Hardware/Infrastructure
B) Software/Content

Type A has no business getting involved with type B goals and priorities. Type A's job is to make things work. Type B goals like DRM make things NOT work.

Stop it stop it stop it, stop it right now.

No-fair-use ?

[nickovs]

" Ebooks, secure content, no-fair-use (sic), etc."

The charter for this RG says explicitly that "it will address technologies that promote both copy-protection and fair-use copying of digital objects" which hardly sounds like no fair use to me. People on Slashdot all too often seem to think that all digital rights management is inherently evil when this is simply not the case. For instance, DRM covers schemes that allow unlimited copying with strong tracability so that you can make all the copies you need but if you start selling them the owners will know the who the culprit is.

You should all remember that this is an open IRTF group. If you have ideas about how DRM should work to both protect the fair use rights of consumers and also allow fair dues to the authors, then go and let them know. Sitting around on Slashdot moaning that the IETF is going to become a branch of the MPAA is both disingenuous and unproductive.

what news!

[twitter]

Squabling over Intellectual Property in standard protocols is short sighted. It reduces the possibility the company holding the IP will be able to have the market advantage that comes with inclusion of their technology in a atandard (because no one will bother to include their technology) and potentially harms the quality and viability of the proposed standard

Wow! This is incredible news: greedy claims to obvious ideas harms everyone! The patent system is broken!

from the listed Xerox rights assertment:

"Any license granted by Xerox under this Statement shall be subject to the following condition: any party receiving such a grant from Xerox must agree to grant Xerox Corporation, Xerox Ltd., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd., Modi Xerox Limited and any corporation, firm, partnership, individual, or other form of business organization at least forty percent (40%) owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by Xerox Corporation, Xerox Ltd., Fuji Xerox Ltd. or Modi Xerox Limited, upon request, a license under that party's patents relating to the TIFF-FX standard, on terms and conditions no less favorable than those granted by Xerox to that party."

So they don't just own your base, they own your hide. Yeah, right. Do you expect people like that to ever be able to co-operate or agree with anyone? That whole site made me sick.

Re:what news!

[wjr]

This kind of IP license agreement is very common in standards. In particular, that Xerox rights agreement is very similar to an IBM license agreement I recall from a different, but related standard.

The gist of these license agreements is: if we give away our IP for you to use, you have to give us your IP to use. This prevents the situation where company A puts a lot of effort into creating a standard (and it is a lot of effort - multiple employees working on it full-time, lots of travel expenses), and company B has some IP that is required to use it. A offers its IP under a license like this to prevent B from saying "hey, nice standard - thanks for the work, and start handing us the bucks".

Yes, this kind of grantback license only really protects A from B - everyone else can still get screwed by B. Some form of grantbacks say "you can use our patents in this standard for free, but only if you let everyone (not just us) use them for free" - I've seen that used too.

And don't forget: the effect of this license on you if you DON'T own any patents is nil: in return for something (the right to use Xerox's IPR), you in return are required to grant them: absolutely nothing (i.e., you own nothing so you owe them nothing).

Won't work

[sulli]

Just get 10 different copies, compare against each other, and change what's different. Microsoft Word can do that, and something tells me that it won't ever be ruled a circumvention device.

DRM == Dead, Ridiculous, Moronic. The IETF should stay far, far away from this shit.

Re:Won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

No 'copy protection' scheme can ever fully work. Copy control schemes which pretend that they can ever stop someone who is absolutely determined to pirate a given work from pirating said work are inherently both doomed and dangerous. The idea lehman proposes, however, is something i would consider acceptable (from a technological standpoint) becuase it *acknowledges* it can never be 100% effective, and instead concentrates on trying to make it somewhat difficult to engage in wide-scale piracy. You could under this scheme, if you are absolutely determined to, pirate and illegally distribute on hotline an ebook. You could make four copies of the ebook and lend them to your friends to read. But you couldn't put the ebook up on geocities or your idisk or whatever or on some wholly public website, or you'd know that eventually it would wind up being redistributed all over hotline, where the HUAC or whoever would find it, trace that copy back to you, and put the smack down on you.

This (unless the DMCA2 makes it illegal to remove watermarking from a work/create devices to remove watermarking from a work. that would be bad, of course.) manages to do the simple and feasible-- make it so that someone cannot thoughtlessly distribute a work helter-skelter or dump it on napster at random-- without infringing on the constitutional, personal, or fair use rights on the purchasers of the work, either as consumers or citizens. As such, i would consider it a nice idea, and acceptable to me as a technological measure.

Although i for one am bothered a good bit by the privacy concerns behind Random House keeping a file on me of every single book i've ever bought by them (they have to know who owns what copy for the scheme to work, right?). and i don't like the idea of having, every time i sell an old ebook of mine to someone else at a garage sale, to inform Random House of the purchase so that they can update that that copy of the book is no longer in my hands. As such, i would still consider the implementation of such a scheme immoral and unacceptable to me. :shrugs:.

The winds of change

[pkesel]

All this shouting about IP and digital copy protection and DRM has everyone upset and thinking the virtual sky is going to fall on them. All the history of commerce and ownwership and copyright and the related shows that no matter what is legislated, mandated, or threatened, any conclusion that makes a technology or product inconvenient to have or use or own will fail. Any product that cannot be owned, transacted, or used without inconvenience will fail to be profitable. Any technology that keeps a product or service from being used easily will be replaced with something new, or will be morphed (legally or not) into something that people appreciate. Otherwise it will fail. It's why radios and cell phones got smaller. It's why newspapers still cost $0.50 and books are expensive, and why flying cars aren't everywhere. It's why liquor is still legal.

What's important to remember is that it will not happen overnight. It will happen over years, decades, or generations.

meetings?

[neowintermute]

I really want to participate in this, as it seems o be a fairly democratic process, and I know the the IETF and RFC's really truly matter.

My only question is, when is the next meeting? It's not mentioned on the site. Are the meetings help online? I'm not exactly flying to stockholm, no matter how much I care.

Has anyone here participated in this kind of thing before?

real digital rights management

[e_lehman]

As far as I can tell, technically there *IS* one slim sliver hope for digital rights management on the internet.

For concreteness, suppose we're talking about an eBook. It is a given that you can't secure an eBook: someone can always run it an emulated environment and dump the text to an ASCII file. And you can't prevent it from being passed around the internet once it is broken. A system like Freenet can be made more or less unbreakable (provided automatic passing of encrypted messages remains legal and permitted by ISPs.)

The ray of hope is to make every copy of an eBook slightly different. In one book, use "grey" instead of "gray" on page 67. In another, put a comma before a short prepositional phrase on page 123. By using various combinations of these, a publisher could at least identify which copy is being passed around the net and prosecute the hell out of that person. (Copyright holders can probably get the law changed to prescribe a many-year prison sentence.)

Clearly, this is no panacea. What if someone in Cuba breaks the eBook? What if you steal the book off someone else's computer, break it, and distribute their copy? What if you buy the eBook in a way that conceals your identity? Futhermore, it might be possible to combine several versions of the text to destroy these markers. (But this doesn't look easy to me.) And even if you can identify and prosecute the original copyright violator, that's little solace to the publisher after everyone already has a free copy of Harry Potter V in hand.

But that's it: the only ray of hope I see for DRM, unless the internet itself is significantly hobbled-- which seems entirely possible.

Re:real digital rights management

[e_lehman]

Oops, you go to jail too. :-)

There are other ways to hide bits in text, such as word choice and ordering, e.g. "narrow, wooden bridge" vs. "wooden, narrow bridge".

Some authors might object that this violates their creative integrity, yada, yada, but some will make compromises for the bottom line.

Maybe this points up the real problem with this fingerprinting scheme. Even if, mathematically, one could devise a scheme where fingerprints can't be removed without a prohibitively large number of texts, there will always be someone who THINKS they can do it. And, from the publisher's perspective, that's just as bad: yeah, they can prosecute the guy who did it, but the copied text is still out there.

Oh well, I don't really want this to work anyway. :-)

Throw in a few more...

[Raging Idiot]

Tell the DP pool users to RTFM unless they are FM in which case they can SC like the little CG that they are. If you don't understand TA, then you really SN be reading it.

Puppet

[mr100percent]

It sounds as if the IETF is a puppet group trying to enforce the whims of some major corporations. Think they'll be as big and bad as the RIAA in 5 years when ebooks get more mainstream? Maybe I'm reading too much 2600

Re:File format? PNG of course. Duh.

[wjr]

The compression used in TIFF-FX is very different from the simple zlib-based compression in PNG: it is able to represent multi-layer documents, and use different compression methods on each layer.

Consider amagazine page with some coloured text over a photographic background. (Yes, internet fax isn't just black and white.) Using TIFF-FX, you can represent

• the background photograph as JPEG
• the shape of the text characters with JBIG2 (a compression standard that is optimised for compressing text)
• the colours of the text characters using another compression method suited for that

This allows you to get MUCH higher compression than something like PNG that doesn't take into account the document structure.

Adobe doesn't want competition for PDF

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, Adobe is attempting to block TIFF-FX from passing in the IETF because they feel that it is a competitor to PDF. TIFF-FX is capable of representing many kinds of documents in less space and higher quality than PDF (if you've ever used PDF for a scanned document, you know what I mean). A free, open (IETF-backed) standard would cut PDF's market share, and Adobe doesn't want that, so they're using their control over the base TIFF file format to block any extensions.

Depends where you are...

[Anonymous Coward]

...legal for over a year here in .uk

You have just reinvented a 100 year old scheme

[kfg]

Ever wonder about all those people publishing, and *claiming copyright* over public domain documents? Say the works of Swift?

What they do, in fact, is introduce intentional errors into the text. THIS they do, in fact, own the rights to. If anyone else simply copies their "public domain" work it can proven, and the copier can be prosocuted.

This makes the work of the Guttenburg Project considerably more difficult, and costly, than it otherwise need be as they actually need to pay lawyers to arrange rights to public domain documents.

This technique is also used to protect modern IP, the two most famous cases of which are probably found in the game Trivial Pursuit and the original G.I. Joe.

Some of the answers in Trivial Pursuit are WRONG. . . *on purpose.* This fact was used to allow them to successfully prosecute a company that wasn't just content to knock off the game, but copied the questions and answers, including the "trojan horse" copyright proof questions.

Hasbro knew that if the G.I Joe were at all successful factories in Taiwan and Japan would start pumping out copies overnight. They couldn't do anything to prevent them from making a selling army man dolls, but what they COULD do was make sure that if the used a real G.I. Joe it could be proven.

If you ever get a chance to look at an original, full size, ( in a couple of cases we old timers got to have the GOOD toys), examine his hands.

On one of them the thumbnail is *on the wrong side of the thumb!*

KFG