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: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.

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: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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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."

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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