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What's The Future of DRM?
Cdgod asks: "I am working on a thesis regarding DRM (Digital Rights Management). I would like to get it published and instead of having the regular recycled net material, I would like to hear opinions and thoughts on how it should and could work. Think 20 years in the future, how can you see your world with DRM in place? Will it cost you a few pennies every time you look for the time on your watch? Are you limited to only coping that CD 3 times before it is locked forever? Can you think of uses where DRM will actually give the user more rights? Try to think outside the current models in place, such as video on demand, purchasing music online, and DRM e-books. And yes, I will be arguing that the current laws are not taking the user's point of view, but of the large media companies." My personal thoughts on Digital Rights Management (copy protection, for laymen) is that as long as it interferes with the user's use of the material, it's not worthwhile. Most of the current solutions which have been proposed seem more like draconian measures that will be forced down our throats...whether we like it or not.
How about if DRM in the future prevents the use of ideas from my /. comments becoming part of someone's thesis? See if you can spot the watermark in here somewhere :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
It would royally, massively suck. Which is why we need to fight it now with everything we've got. Start by not buying anything using it - DIVX failed in the market, evil DRM can too.
sulli
RTFJ.
Slashdot previously covered this. The Letter from 2020 is here.
To me, this seemed like a pretty plausible outcome of DRM.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
How about charging an advertiser or sponsor money every time you look at your watch?
Yes, once it's deleted, it will allow the user to recover valuable hard drive space.
sulli
RTFJ.
So, you want the Slashdot community to do your homework for you?
:)
I can't get a handle on this. Can someone explain.
One thing DRM might do is enable me to share my personal information privately with one entity, without fear that the entity could share it with others. (That is, if DRM could work.)
That might be good, but I'm much happier with the world we live in now!
I work in tech M&A...and can tell you that DRM iniatives will manifest themselves whether you like it or not. I can also tell you that the market for video content though is viewed as pretty distant still. ie, commerce in viedo content over broadband - excepting porn of course which is and will remain ubiquitous.
As far as DRM goes - I do view it a little like software proection. There's always someone on the outside who is a better coder than the group on the inside and can break it.
Here's your future: Millions of people will refuse to adopt these bullshit standards. They'll figure out a way to write a college thesis in Word without paying Microsoft by the character. They'll listen to their rightfully purchased CDs without paying the RIAA by the hour. And the US Government will throw huge numbers of these non-violent "terrorists" (read: you & me) in jail at huge expense.
You can use our current drug policies as a guide to the future of DRM...
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
I see that it will change little from what we have right now.
There will be law and technologies that will prevent user from using digital content illegaly (however that word might get defined in the future) but folks will always find a way to use it illegally.
The way I see it digital content control will probably end up beeing used the same way the illegal software is controlled: costs too much to stop individual "cheaters" so they'll concentrate on proper corporate control.
In short, we'll probably have to pay for most of the stuff but most of us will always find a way to get content for free and there will be little that anyone can do about it and most pay services will suffer. I see it as a battle that "big corporations" just can't win.
Really effective DRM (that is, DRM that's based on something other than the DMCA to make it "effective") would require some fundamental changes in the world of computing devices (of all sizes). Regardless of the strength and cleverness of cryptographic packaging technologies, if there is a pathway through the computer for digital plaintext then the DRM scheme is ipso facto defective.
On the other hand, the introduction of pure hardware schemes that retain the cyphertext of the protected material until it is transformed (within a tamper-proof sanctioned device) into perceivable media (image on screen, sound from speakers) would have a chance of real effectiveness. Now this would represent a profound change to the way we normally think about computing devices and about the freedom we have to put together systems of any type using whatever basic parts can be found. Such work would still be possible of course, but DRM-protected media would be unusable without the presence of secure tamper-proof decoding hardware.
The need for such hardware (which, by the way, is not sci-fi: check Intel's work on secure digital interfaces for digital flat-screen displays) implies a controllable market, since some organization would have the power to issue or not issue licenses and keys to manufacturers.
I think the current availiability for stuff on the Internet is good, might even say great. But if that is blocked with DRM, the Internet will just be a place for big companies to make money.
Though, for possible new things, like video-on-demand, etc., DRM is the only way to make it work, and I think it's ok. If I rent a movie and have to return it the next they, I'll be just as happy when I "rent" a video on the net, and it will only be possible to watch it once, or for a limited amount of time.
, so to speak. IMO, most of what we're currently seeing in the realm of DRM won't stand the test of time.
Why? Okay, let's start with the idea that in order to have a truly "strong" DRM system, you have to tack on strong encryption. Thus far, most systems proposed have failed this critical test. Please, no flames about the DMCA, because let's be realistic: the vast majority of people (meaning aside from a few "example cases") will never be "found out" for copying songs over networks, etc.
Second, all it takes is a little oppression for a lot of people (mainstream folks, not just geeks) to get really angry. We're already used to voting with our dollars anyhow; this will probably severely curtail heinous attempts at nasty DRM in the future. As long as a freer, easier (or just as easy) solution exists, the company or group providing it will win out.
I'm a little groggy at the moment (sorry, coding too long), so this may not be my most intelligent and coherent post ever. But I'm sure you get the idea. Thanks.
Think that, except for firemen coming in to regularly set fire to all your media. No matter if you're grandfathered or not: there exists the picture of impropriety, so better to err on the side of safety.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
and instead of having the regular recycled net material
You came to slashdot to avoid recycled net material?
That's courage.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Have you ever used Emusic? You pay like $10/month and you get access to everything in their catalog. It's all MP3 so I could certainly distribute it all over creation, but why would I? If somebody else wants to hear the music they can get their own subscription. It's very easy for me to share a few songs with friends which gets them interested in the bands and gets them signing up for the service.
A thing I've noticed in my personal use of Emusic is that I've discovered music by a lot of obscure bands I never heard of that I like. I mean since I'm paying for it anyhow it's worth it to me to download a whole album by some band I've never heard of. I can just delete it when I don't want it. Why go buy the new album from some big name band for $15+ when I can download music for free?
Trying to impose pay-per-use technology on music is just going to turn people off to it. If you want proof of people's reaction to this, just look at DivX. People like to own things, and they hate having to deal with complex rights mangement architectures. The only way you could find a DRM that would be really appealing to people would be one that's transparent, but by it's nature it can't be transparent because it has to stop me from doing something forbidden by the publisher.
If The big RIAA labels opened up their collections to me and charged me like $15-20/month to download all I want, I'd be all over that. But if they had some goofy DRM technology on the music, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Ok. Ok.. I got one: The right to prevent people from running my programs. The right to prevent people from listening to my music. The right to prevent people from reading my comments.
Hey! are you reading my comments?? Stop it! They are mine!
And don't you dare using my idea's in your own comments!
If I were to look 20-30 years down the road at a U.S. ruled by DRM via laws like the SSSCA, I would have to say it would be a pretty sad place. First of all, you have a generation of people who will have grown up beleiving that its normal to have to pay for *any* kind of information, and then think its taboo to share that information.
People will collaborate less and will have learned that it's 'wrong' to pass along data or information of any kind. This kind of mentality will manifest itself in an atmosphere where it's considered morally and ethically wrong to try to do things without doing them in the approved (legal or corporate) manner. I don't see a lot of technical or scientific innovation coming from people who have this mindset.
The Dark Ages was a fairly direct result of the Catholic Church's desire to control information, in their case, religious doctrine. The crusades brutally crushed scientific, philosophical, and mathmatic progress in the middle east. Human progress came to a virtual halt for several centuries.
This is the same thing. Instead of a rich, powerful church, we have a oligarchy of rich, powerful corporations who beleive it is in their best interest to control information of any kind, be it entertainment, scientific data, math, or any kind of production algorithm. The future is grim indeed if these companies get their way.
The renaissance, the richest period of exploration and innovation in human history happened when the controls imposed by the Catholic church started to break down and both religous and scientific information began to flow freely.
Freedom of Information == Human Progress and Advancement
Proprietary Information == Fear, Paranoia, Superstition, and Human Misery
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Presently, I'm trying very hard to not download any music from Napsteresque programs because I want the artists to recieve some money for thier work. Fairtunes.com didnt seem to have a working list the last few times i went to it, so at the moment I dont have an option other than paying for CDs.
When I listen to music, read a great essay, hit a good webpage or what have you. I want the artist/author/composer/creator to know that I liked thier work, and if it's a means for them to earn money I'd like to see that they get some, be it a tip jar, banner ad, or just paypaling them a few bucks.
The system where an artist creates a work and then gets less than 5% of the final sale price back from the publisher is wrong. The publishers and promoters should work for the artists not the other way around.
DRM could be used to efficiently distribute lending materials over the web while maintaining copywrite. That way you could view or download material from your house and be able to use it for the same 2 week or so period of time you can now from the library. When the time is up you can renew or ignore. Now today authors and copywrite owners are paid by some factor of unit sales be they private or to libraries. In the digital version copywrite owners get paid per a licence fee arragement. If the library wants to be able to distribute 'x' copies of the material it purchases a license to do so. Not one more version is permitted and if you the customer see it in the catalog you might be given a "all available copies have been lent out until 'xxxx'" message. That way the whole notion of infinite copies can be ignored. And certainly material could be copy protected or encrypted so that you couldn't relend. Allow printing just like photocopying is allowed today.
Digital Rights Management is bad for users in the short term, will take some wrangling and creativity on the side of the license holders. They are trying to create technology and legislation that will allow them to know who and when someone uses a property that they license.
Initially, it will be more expensive for people to listen to music or read books, because instead of buying cd's or books, you buy the right to hear the song or the right read the book.
People will pay what they feel the material is worth. If I think that listening to a Wu Tang Clan is worth 3 cents, and they want 8, I won't pay. In terms of the market, this makes the market more efficient and provides some feedback to the artists. It also makes it possible to bundle in things like advertising to offset the cost (advertising is more valuable in this case because they know who they are marketing to.)
In the future, people will be able to pay for whatever they want, and the number of choices available to them will reflect the value they percieve in the service.
Troll Like a Champion Today
Newer DVD Rom drives now have a region lock. This can be disabled of course. Newer discs can check your player for the initial region it was set to, and disable it, forcing a full reset. The next generation of players will require that the player will disallow all playback of protected discs until the player is returned to the manufacturer to be reset. Naturally the manufacturers are against this, but the MPAA has a monopoly . How can they refuse.
DVD phase 3 goes even further. It is a requirement that all DVD compatible equipment have a GPS receiver built in, and a mobile telephone connection. This will call the local anti-piracy organisation if it detects a non-permitted disc. By eliminating codes for older players, the industry hopes to slowly migrate people to more restrictive products.
Leaked documents suggest that they will soon be incorporating technology to allow a limit to the number of viewers. This will mean that when you buy a DVD, it will lock itself to the first player it is used on, and will only permit a maximum number of people to watch it at any time. Do you have a larhge family? You'll need to buy a licence for more people. Eventually the entire world will be controlled by corporations. We are working to prevent this, but the power of the media giants is too great.
Can you think of uses where DRM will actually give the user more rights?
No.
There will be two kinds of users:
Who cares what it's like for them? Sheep deserve their dreary blurred so-called lives.
Whenever DRM interferes with something they want to do, the user will crack the DRM. It will take no significant amount of time/effort/thought/ability, because the user will just download the tools they need from The Internet.
Attempts to suppress the tools will be utterly futile. Even the Hague crap won't make a sizable dent.
If by some chance I'm wrong and tool supression does work enough to keep cracking tools out of the mainstream user's hands, then the mainstream will resort to "piracy" to get cracked content that they can't crack themselves. So the user goes to store, buys a movie, then doesn't even both to open it: they just download the cracked copy from the internet, and then watch it. Eventually, they see the pointlessness of buying the unopened content. So the future for content providers, in a world where crack tools are successfully suppressed, is bleak.
Have a look at this stance on DRM, yes I'm an employee, but I wish we could make the big five see the logic.
Our position on the DRM.
Bend Over
Most of the current solutions which have been proposed seem more like draconian measures that will be forced down our throats...whether we like it or not.
is it possible to have something you feels is a 'draconian measure' shoved down your throat, and like it?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I bought the videos..
...
I bought the wide screen version..
I bought the THX videos
I bought the Laser discs
I bought the DVDs
I bought the Super DVDs
I bought the holo cube
I bought the
The only scheme I have ever seen that actually works is the use of CD keys in online games to make sure that there are only unique (and in theory paid for) clients connected at any one time. Of course this scheme is useless for anything that doesn't require a net connection. So long as the online game servers are where the fun's at, the user is out in the cold without a legit copy. The key part of this scheme is the dependency on a resource that is outside the user's control and can't be modified. Without the actual use of a remote resource for a major part of he product's functionality, though, such a scheme would be intolerable (why would you want to log into the internet to listen to a cd?). This also does not prevent the thing from moving around, only the simultaneous use of a single copy.
Microsoft's WPA scheme is similar to this, but since it's only a one time verification and gives the user time before he has to set it up, it is vurnerable to tampering.
The really interesting problem in DRM is not what happens on the desktop, because on-line/live-time subscriptions aren't too hard to do by issuing new licenses repeatedly.
It's in the portable market where DRM will sink or swim. Right now, very few portables fully implement SDMI or anything else. All but a few lack the secure clock required to prevent people from beating dates by rollback.
The ones that do implement clocks or real security are proprietary and have low market share, like Sony's WMA-wrapped ATRAC3 devices.
Share and Enjoy!
I don't believe anything that restricts anyone from copying, transporting, changing, or presenting media is right. It's a basic natural freedom that people own what they have in their hand or in their head. Why should anyone else own and control something you hold in your hand, on your computer, on some sort of media or even in your mind? It's simply wrong. If I have it, I think of it, I own it. No law should prevent people from controlling their own environment. Owning people is wrong, so how is owning people's ideas or media's right?
Question everything.
Given our current situation (I'll explain what I mean by that in a bit) I don't think DRM is possible.
If a publisher presents you with some content in a form that's suitable for you to use you can do whatever you want with the content afterwards.
No matter how good your encryption is and how carful you are about the keys, at some point you have to give the user the plaintext.
Of course plaintext also includes plainvideo, or plainsound, or plain.
The only way around this problem will involve massive restrictions on our freedoms.
Not the kind of restrictions that Emmanuel Goldstien gets worked up over but really serious restrictions.
If a company could controle who you talk to, who you listen to, what you're allowed to say etc. and had a realistic way of enforcing this, then they could protect their "digital rights". Otherwise they'll flounder before they even get started.
Actually I don't know why Adobe, the RIAA and their ilk even bother trying. I'm pretty sure there are formal rigerous proofs that they're doomed to failure.
are two different things. What will be is an intrusive system backed up by lawyers and men with snooping equipment and guns. What should be are proprietary systems for contents delivery and no interference with general purpose systems. Kill the SSSCA and all of its progeny.
Unfortunately, this is an issue that's not going away. On one hand we need to fund works of intellectuals and artisans, on the other hand we need to have them available equally to all and keep them able to be built on.
The current thinking on intellectual rights is preventing the next wave of thriving for humanity. Its based on the single provider model. Basically a single author (be it an entity or person) provides and benefits a piece of work (or component of a larger work). This has been somewhat successful although the new era of the internet and mobile technology makes this more challenging. The best example of this is UNIX. It would be very hard to put together a UNIX without paying a large number of organizations for rights to their code. (Putting aside open source, GPL, BSD and the "new wave" for the moment)
Although, it will seem like a cliché that this would be advocated on Slashdot, I think the open source model provides the answer. Many big names in computing have invested in both single and multiple authors of technology. Linux, Apache web server and Apache's Tomcat are great examples of this success. The idea is that important information or artistry will be funded and developed by several groups who share in the reward. This is enforced by what has been called a virus clause in the license.
Rather than toll gating, use contribution as the principle currency.
So this is great when applied to technology but how about music or other works. The current record industry is based upon an old system of market and return that may one day become irrelevant. I'm not saying this should be done away with, but the works it produces are most suited for a teenage or intellectually disabled population (the backstreet-nsynch-98-degree-town-boys and Britney spears -- disregarding her appearance). New works would be heavily contributed to.
So how could someone make money this way? Performances for one, higher quality distribution (mp3s aren't CDs, and copies don't go very far). Support and assistance, (so you want to add some riffs to that new matchbox 20 cd, rob Thomas calls you up and helps you with the fingering). It sounds a little far fetched but so did the open source movement.
With all this said, it will be along time before the powerful interests can be taken on. In the end they'll surrender to the unavoidable trends and reap more profits and rewards than ever before.
Not plausible? You are already managed digitally in your company by an employee number. A check is digitally sent to your acct. through a number in a bank. Your personal information could be easily but into a couple gigs of info to be sold to the highest bidder or rented out at a reasonable price, without you lifting a finger to help or stop it.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
People are whining that they can't make money until there's DRM (Digital Rights Misappropriation). Gee, porn is doing just fine. No DRM. Maybe these other folks just aren't providing what people want.
The business is what makes production stuff, and if they can man more money, they will. To make more money via controlling devices(whichever) is to lock down rights of a user, so to make people buy more. Make money out of nothing is the paramount of business. Questions wether users may strike back and use controls to their own advantage is somewhat valid, but evolutionary one. Everyone can guess, but no one can predict. Guesses that are in same direction are lucky.
My guess is, media controls are swing of large media to make more money, rape the customer, before they go out of existance. Whats more, is that media controls encourage waste, digital and physical one. If CD plays only 3 times, I have to throw it out. That would contribute to already large amounts of waste this world produces.
If I can hear song three times, I have to redownload it, and bandwidth is not free(network admins have to eat too). My contention is that maybe if media control systems are there, and open for everyone to use, then small artists can gain from that, combining digital control and digital revolution. Truth is, corporations will impose a certain way of media control, patent it, and quash anyone who uses it and does not pay licence fees. Thus artists who are not part of RIAA would be extorted from income, ability to make, record and sell music that most common media players will play.
Its like guns. One way they are evil, the other they can balance power between government and people. Just a technology.
p.
A reasonable, fair DRM system is not possible, AFAIC.
;-])
At some point the bits that build the information are decrypted and pristine, and therefore can be trapped and copied at will. Without infringing on users rights - or introducing a system that is far too open to abuse - there is no real way of ensuring that digital data is not captured/copied or otherwise used in a way that doesn't violate current copyright unless you're willing to infringe on the fair use rights of paying customers. Unfortuneately, this is a case where there is no middle ground to speak of nor does there seem to be a high ground. The position of power is and will stay with the public, not the content producers. Therefore - unless we become a corporate police state - the media creators will have to bend to the will of the public. (Did I just say that? Ech. I have to put the Katz filter on again
That said, we're left with 3 choices to compensate content producers:
1) Have content producers sponsored by other entities (which opens a whole new can of worms)
2) Grants to users - and therefore more taxes to pay for it.
3) Direct payment to the content producers - maybe a link prceeding or embeded in the content.
Guess which one I'm leaning towards...
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Actually i lived so far away from any educational facilities... so i had to improvise. Everything i know now, i learned from watching your mom go spread eagle on a 3rd rate porno rented from the store down the street. I learned my pc knowledge from watching you on your webcam type code with one hand watching a very young Natalie Portman pour hot grits down her pants.
I actually bought 2 copies of 1/2-life. Once when it first came out and then when they released one of the expansions.
When I moved I lost both of the jewel boxes.
So I downloaded a key-generator and after a few tries I ended up with a key which worked for network play.
Furthermore, this scheme has very limited applications. How would you apply this to music, or videos, or e-books?
Perhaps more features. I can see some uses for a robust watermark that identifies artist, song, and album.
Of course, most of the uses center around improving my cataloging of songs that I didn't rip from CD myself, so maybe the DRM people wouldn't be so excited about that...
Any publisher should be allowed to do anything with their work that they own that they please. If anyone is stupid enough to buy it then more power to them.
If they choose to protect their work through DRM measures, rather than with copyright law, then they lose all recourse to use copyright law.
This means that as soon as anyone anywhere breaks the encryption used, that the work enters the public domain.
This is a very good trade off, because it ensures that the publisher has a monopoly right to distribute their works, but also ensures that the work will much more quickly enter the public domain in just 5-10 years.
Everyone wins.
However, DRM in my opinion, is only useful if it meets the following conditions:
Is transparent to the user.
Requires no processor overhead.
Is secure. (increasingly difficult, arguably impossible) If the DRM is circumventable it's pointless.
It's cheap, and doesn't raise the cost of the medium. If it's costing more to protect it than it's saving, it doesn't belong there.
It must allow at least one copy to be made.
All in all, that's a very tall order. So I doubt any time within the next ten years these things will be realized. Until then, consumers will continue to scream bloody murder.
--I hate big sigs.
Microsoft will use thier monopoly, and be backed by nearly every company. Linux will be portraid as it one was - as a hacker thing. I'm expecting to find out that microsoft is sponsoring the SSSA. This way, Microsoft can squash Linux, and everyone except the linux hackers are happy.
Microsoft will build in DRM into all products. Everything you do will be encrypted only for you (or whom ever has your public key) Encryption will be transparent. That is, webservers will automatically encrypt any download as flagged to be under DRM.
Getting a DRM key will be something like a personal certificate. You'll pay for one from microsoft or verisign or some other party that will verify you before they give out the key (maybe a CCN is enough)
Installers like InstallSheild will have it built in. They will not hold entire files decryped in memory, by using a block cypher and only hold 1 block at a time, this getting the decryped content in its entirety will be hard.
Linux will have to adopt DRM is it is to remain legit against Microsoft. If it is not seen as legit, then no company (except for the embedders) are going to use Linux.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
What if any new DRM laws also had to apply to every individual's personal info as well as whatever corporations want to protect (like music)? The corporations might think twice about whether they want DRM. If they had to license your personal info FROM you in order to market TO you, I'll bet it would seriously impact their marketing. "Oh you marketed to me without licensing my info? That'll be $10K please".
FP
in english?
The problem with DRM is the same as with computer security. It's very easy to secure a computer so that no one can use it. It's very difficult to secure a computer that a great many people need to use in a great many ways, while at the same time restricting any unauthorized users whatsoever.
Media companies really want to stop unauthorized use of their copyrighted material. Copying a CD and giving it to someone else is illegal. Copying a CD or creating a compilation for your own personal use is legitimate. The problem is allowing the legal copies while preventing the illegal ones. And it's a very difficult one to solve. It's much easier to simply prevent all copies whatsoever.
Anyone who thinks that "fair use" means giving away copies of music or books is a thief and an idiot. Remember this: if you stop paying for your media, they will stop selling it to you.
There's a story of a king who passed an edict forbidding the tide from rising. He sent his soldiers to the beach with orders to beat the ocean back if it didn't obey the edict. The King was trying to make a point that even he, the almighty King, could not alter the forces of nature by a simple decree.
Imagining a world where successful DRM laws exist is no different than imagining the world if the ocean had been held to the King's edict.
I could be wrong. I suppose if all hardware manufacturing was nationalized, borders were sealed, and prisons were cleared of drug users (to make room for copyright offenders), it may be possible to put digital media genie back in the bottle.
If it is possible to have successful DRM, I guess imagining the future would be like imagining the present if the printing press had been outlawed by the Monks who were put out of business by it.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
I would think that the best solution for the users would be if DRM was done away with all together and we lived in a society (world) of free information and media. However these are just dreams and the fact is that the dmca is going to be tough to get rid of. With that in mind here might be some changes that would make things more "friendly" for the user.
1) I have a real problem with the current protection scheme on cds and dvds (computer or audio/video, games it doesn't matter). The problem is that current laws seem to say that when you purchase this media that you are entitled to the actual physical disk and whatever media is included on it. So if you buy a game and it becomes damaged then you're out the money you paid for that game. I believe that this hurts the user and saves the company, as in these licenses suck. I personally feel that the physical disk should not have anything to do with this when you purchase something and that you are entitled to the media. Hence you should be allowed to make backups of everything you own that is software related. Currently somethings work under this (you can make copies of cds on tape as long as you don't sell them, and roms are legal as long as you own the game although I believe emulators are not *shrugs shoulders*), however dvds don't and in the future more stuff should be going to dvd. Of course if I want to illegally make copies I can (theres all kinds of stuff out there to do this) but you should see my point that I should not have to illegally do anything to something I own.
2) Streaming media will probably end up a rental or subscription fee which I'm not sure if I have a good argument against at this moment. I mean its hard to argue with video stores and thats how I see most of that going.
3) E-books have proven to be just a bad idea anyway. Nobody (apologies to those who are e-book fans) seems to care all that much when titles are still printed paper. Eventally I'd imagine that the publishers in time will start to only release large amounts (not just some Steven King book) of books to e-book, forcing people to switch. However, if I have a friend and I recommend and own a book, I'll let them borrow it. Will e-books work the same? Can you trade materials as long as you don't sell them. I have a feeling this is going to be an ugly fight.
4)Software subscription (ala Microsoft) is not going to work even if forced. Look I love linux but I know its currently not ready for the masses. However Microsoft's idea of a Microsoft Bill (like a cable or telephone bill) is just alittle to ambitious and I'd imagine that this is going to hurt them. On a side note, if Microsoft benefits from its monopoly then how can they justifiably argue that distributing copies of pirated windows hurts them?
Media protection is definitly going to become an interesting topic of discussion over the next 20 years or so. I wonder if we'll start to see different licenses as we do in the computer world (digital media is nowhere near as old as computer software... with the first cases being cds about 10-15 years ago). Will some publishers allow a GPL type license, who knows... all I know is that these laws have to stop because ultimately the user gets hurt.
ps - I think its funny if a company gains enough market share to be called a monopoly then the govt claim them to be detrimental to competetion. But if a bunch of companies (collusion) gain up to start a board (hmm... sony, sharp, etc and dvd technology) that regulates what you can and can not do with something and what companies can and cannot do with something (why don't we see any legal open source dvd plays? because the damn license fees cost a fortune for css) then thats legal. Well... maybe us users should start the coalition for user rights (sort of like a union) to keep a say in what rights the company and the users have.
ok, i'm done.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Though digital may be one way to describe an idea and provide a means for its implementation it is not unique in this respect. We are coming close to describing genetic material in a way that provides its own method of implementation. :)
:)
It is possible that within 100 years you will have to leave the planet to explore ideas without being sued. You could even find out later in life that you are a living violation of copyright.
me@steeg.com
Some protester jumps into the foreground and slams a cherry pie into Jack Vallenti's face, is wrestled to the ground and subdued by Thought Police, and dragged off.
Now I think, "Wow, that's really cool shit. I'm gonna add some footage to my next editorial on my web page!"
An hour later, I hit Play on my Tivo^2 only to find out that the network has instructed the device to not play back the event (or, worse yet, edits out the pie scene on the fly) because Vallenti has a 51% stake in ABC-MS-AOL-TW Network, and decides that the pie incident is too humiliating.
That evening on ABC-MSNBC-AOL-TW Network Sanitized Evening News, we see the day's event (recordable now) in its edited state.
Archivists now only have the version of history that the Network wants them to have.
An extreme scenario, to be sure, but technically feasible. Imagine if this happened when some really important event occurs.
Method of processing duck feet
. . . when distributing IP for the personal use of the consumer. I'm thinking specifically of cable TV and video rentals.
The advantage of cable TV is the subscription model. It's better for the consumer, because their cost-per-use tends to be lower. And it's better for the content producer, because their revenue is steady, reasonably predictable, and not subject to spikes and canyons in usage. Lesson learned: consumers vastly prefer to pay a subscription fee for a huge library of content from which they can pick and choose. Compare this to pay TV or video-on-demand, the revenues for which lag pathetically behind a the regular cable TV subscription base.
The advantage of video rental is, well, obvious. People who are not willing to pay $20 to own a copy of a movie may be perfectly willing to pay $3 to rent it for a few days. Lesson learned: cost-per-unit for "ownership" of content is too high for most people, if they're unfamiliar with the content in question.
Both modes of commerce are subject to piracy. However, the effect of piracy is mitigated by the fact that the copies which are made tend to be of lower quality compared to the original. Case in point: I'll tape every single episode of the Sopranos, but I'm still willing to shell out cash to own the Special Edition DVDs so that I can watch them in widescreen. Lesson learned: people like the freedom of making copies, but they're still willing to pay for a higher fidelity / more contentful version.
I think the real solution to DRM can be found in a subscription-based broadcast-on-demand model, which allows people to easily create (analog quality) copies to store locally on their machine or carry with them in their personal music player. People who want digital quality simply need to either a) buy the CD, or b) be connected to the network.
Now, this might not be very satisfactory in the short term -- your Rio-like device would be restricted to tape-quality music. But there's a great deal of push already to expand the country's broadband and wireless infrastructure -- in another 20 years it would probably be perfectly feasible for your personal digital music player to store nothing more than a playlist, wirelessly streaming the music as you go.
I think everyone wins under this model -- what little revenue companies lose from file trading would be more than compensated for by the subscription base, and consumers would have the choice and flexibility that they crave.
In the end, DRM management will hinder, not help, even those who seek to profit from their creative works. The petty steps needed to make use of copyrighted material under DRM will ultimately have to give way to yet another system I see as the ultimate answer. Such a system will have to be a broad subscription based scheme, where instead of paying specifically for each creative work, you end up paying a general rate, and then have access to all those works. The authors and publishers then earn from that based on the proportion of how much their works are used. Even a random sampling of 5% of usage would give a fairly accurate measure of proportion for the various works to determine how much each author and publisher is paid.
Take a look at some of the big MP3 collectors. There are some people with over 100 gigabytes of downloaded music. At the statutory wholesale publisher rates paid through HFA, this comes to over US$100,000. The retail value of such collections could be US$1,000,000. And it would take months just to listen to everything once. But these are people who would not go buy all that at $12/CD. They aren't downloading it to be able to listen to it all, but for the stud factor of having an awesome jukebox. Eventually we will reach a point where we can have any creative work delivered in real time whenever we want, and even mobile at some point. We'll be paying for delivery of content, not the scale of the choices. Many of the downloads now are to achieve scale of choices, and that will be greater as bandwidths and storage leaps allow, but eventually it might not be needed (except for those unwilling to pay a dime).
Imagine paying a rate about the same as cable TV or internet access that lets you listen to any music you want, any time you want, anywhere you want. Whether you listen to the same 5 tunes over and over, or jump around among 100 genres, your rate would be about the same since it would be based on what is delivered, and at most you could listen to about 43,200 minutes a month (there might be a lower price for listening to less). Once this kind of service is available, there won't be much value in actually storing the music. As long as the pricing structure is based on fixed time, rather than how many different tunes you have access to but rarely listen to, it will beat not only most piracy, but also recorded media sales (why buy 1000 CDs if you typically listen to about 20 of them?).
It might still take another decade for the music industry to get a clue and try to build it this way. Last mile bandwidth is not there yet, especially mobile, for everyone. And then it might take a few more years for the motion picture industry to "get it", too. But eventually it will have to happen. DRM will then simply be a yes or no question.
The system won't be totally perfect. There will be those unwilling to subscribe at all, and will still steal music. There may be privacy issues regarding what we listen to. Some of this can be addressed by legislation (whether we agree that it should or not). Some of this can be addressed by the open market. And some of this can be addressed by technology. The delivery is certain to be encrypted. The ability to decrypt it is certain to be isolated to hardware like portable players and sound cards in your computer (the software would just be shuttling an encrypted data stream through, and hence open source operating systems won't be a risk). Time window based encryption would prevent storing the data for later playback (and this defeat delayed leakage to non-payers). Interim technology could allow doing a combination of storing encrypted streams with live delivery of a time window based key (and the hardware still does the work).
Given this, storage of music by consumers won't be needed, and thus DRM will be moot. This is still a few years off, but mark my word, it is coming as soon as entertainment executives figure it out for themselves.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
that did not make too much sense, but I am impress that you pushed all the keys on the keyboard!
I would think that the best solution for the users would be if DRM was done away with all together and we lived in a society (world) of free information and media. However these are just dreams and the fact is that the dmca is going to be tough to get rid of. With that in mind here might be some changes that would make things more "friendly" for the user.
1) I have a real problem with the current protection scheme on cds and dvds (computer or audio/video, games it doesn't matter). The problem is that current laws seem to say that when you purchase this media that you are entitled to the actual physical disk and whatever media is included on it. So if you buy a game and it becomes damaged then you're out the money you paid for that game. I believe that this hurts the user and saves the company, as in these licenses suck. I personally feel that the physical disk should not have anything to do with this when you purchase something and that you are entitled to the media. Hence you should be allowed to make backups of everything you own that is software related. Currently somethings work under this (you can make copies of cds on tape as long as you don't sell them, and roms are legal as long as you own the game although I believe emulators are not *shrugs shoulders*), however dvds don't and in the future more stuff should be going to dvd. Of course if I want to illegally make copies I can (theres all kinds of stuff out there to do this) but you should see my point that I should not have to illegally do anything to something I own.
2) Streaming media will probably end up a rental or subscription fee which I'm not sure if I have a good argument against at this moment. I mean its hard to argue with video stores and thats how I see most of that going.
3) E-books have proven to be just a bad idea anyway. Nobody (apologies to those who are e-book fans) seems to care all that much when titles are still printed paper. Eventally I'd imagine that the publishers in time will start to only release large amounts (not just some Steven King book) of books to e-book, forcing people to switch. However, if I have a friend and I recommend and own a book, I'll let them borrow it. Will e-books work the same? Can you trade materials as long as you don't sell them. I have a feeling this is going to be an ugly fight.
4)Software subscription (ala Microsoft) is not going to work even if forced. Look I love linux but I know its currently not ready for the masses. However Microsoft's idea of a Microsoft Bill (like a cable or telephone bill) is just alittle to ambitious and I'd imagine that this is going to hurt them. On a side note, if Microsoft benefits from its monopoly then how can they justifiably argue that distributing copies of pirated windows hurts them?
Media protection is definitly going to become an interesting topic of discussion over the next 20 years or so. I wonder if we'll start to see different licenses as we do in the computer world (digital media is nowhere near as old as computer software... with the first cases being cds about 10-15 years ago). Will some publishers allow a GPL type license, who knows... all I know is that these laws have to stop because ultimately the user gets hurt.
ps - I think its funny if a company gains enough market share to be called a monopoly then the govt claim them to be detrimental to competetion. But if a bunch of companies (collusion) gain up to start a board (hmm... sony, sharp, etc and dvd technology) that regulates what you can and can not do with something and what companies can and cannot do with something (why don't we see any legal open source dvd plays? because the damn license fees cost a fortune for css) then thats legal. Well... maybe us users should start the coalition for user rights (sort of like a union) to keep a say in what rights the company and the users have.
ok, i'm done... oh my bad about posting this twice, I screwed up the first time.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Of the top of my head...
One DRM will continue to advance. Artists and others who wish to produce media/works deserve to be compensated if they wish. The question becomes how we handle this. In my ideal world...
-- Non-encrypted formats will continue to exist for those who choose to distribute this way.
-- EncrypteOf the top of my head...
One DRM will continue to advance. Artists and others who wish to produce media/works deserve to be compensated if they wish. The question becomes how we handle this. In my ideal world...
-- Non-encrypted formats will continue to exist for those who choose to distribute this way.
-- Encrypted formats will be built for new media (video/audio/stills) that is difficult to crack (nothing is impossible). These formats will require the use of an authentication for an individual using their hardware of choice along with some type of smart card along with a password/pin. The item will be usable for some number of times/length of time. This will be some small payment amount, similar to micro payments.
-- We will get some type of "key" downloaded onto the hardware. This key can be transferred to someone else WITHOUT cost. If I purchase an old Beatles song and decide a month later that I don't want it, I should be able to "give" this to my co-worker. We easily connect our hardware devices together and I "give" him my key. No longer can I play the work. Perhaps he even "buys" the song for half price and I can then repurchase if I wish.
-- Patents/copyrights will have their length shortened. Perhaps we need to develop different lengths for different media. Movies are copyrighted for 5 yrs. Music, 3 yrs. These are just ideas, personally I am not sure what lengths I'd like.
-- Items that lose their copyright/patent will be released into the public deomain. Once in the public domain, anyone can distribute/reformat/alter the works, though they cannot be resold commercially without some compensation to the author. Perhaps the reuse should be 10% of the cost of current media?
-- What if I could "rent" a song, say the new CD from Brittany Spears for my son for 3 months. Suppose if cost $2. I could drop this onto an MP3 player for him, or perhaps it would be automatically burned on my Sony DRM machine (that cost $200) onto a CD that would work for 3 months. I'd do it. He'd be tired of it after that. What if I could "reactivate" that CD next year for $1 for another 3 or 6 months. It's still be worth it.
-- Relatively few of us actually copy CDs for others. Once (if in the real world) media companies recognize this, they will start to actually develop programs that people will use (and want to use). My time is more valuable and I'd tell a friend to buy his own copy.
Don't forget the following when exmaining DRM
-- It must be convenient to be successful. If it is difficult for me to use, I will not use it and commerically it will not succeed. If my mom can purchase a music CD (online, download, etc) easily and it costs $1 to listen to 10 times, or for a week, and it is a simple button push, she'll do it. If it requires efforts to use or circumvent, she won't use it.
-- The economy of defeating the encryption must be below that of using it. I've downloaded movies (that are in theaters) from the Internet and viewed them. They suck. The quality is so far below that of renting from Blockbuster or going to see the movie, it's not worth the cost. Audio is different, but there will be some economy of scale that works.
-- No encrpytion is foolproof
-- 90% (or so) of people will be defeated by minimal encrpytion
-- 1% (or so) of people will never be defeated by ANY encrpytion
-- 9% (or so) of people will take advantage of the work of the 1% to defeat encryption.
These are some quick thoughts, and I really welcome feedback. If DRM is really to move forward (not just get implemented), everyone has to have realistic discussion of the rights of everyone, artists, consumers, and companies.
Originally intended to provide a public benefit -- to encourage and promote the widespread availability of information -- copyright law has been distorted to the point where it allows a powerful few organizations to control vast seas information, allowing access only those who can pay fees that are often unreasonable. Gone, too, are the days when we could realistically expect copyrighted material to be contributed to the public domain after a reasonable period of time. Our national concept of "copyright" is a perversion.
Before we legislate "rights management" into hardware, we ought to ask why we have these "rights" anyway. And if the answer isn't solely to promote the public good, we should do away with them.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's not draconian if you have a choice, and you do have a choice in the matter based on your wallet.
Don't like the DRM measures coming forth on CDs? Don't buy the CDs. Don't even listen to the music. While some pop bands are obviously a profit-centered venture, most artists actually *do* want you to listen to their music; measures taken to stop this listening will not only hurt the labels in the pocketbooks, but also get the artists themselves to argue against whatever measures are being taken to reduce public listening.
Also, let me just say that paying "a few pennies every time you look for the time on your watch" is X-Fileish and activistic to the extreme. Obviously this is not going to happen. Do you think high-level executives in the government and military personnel (to cite recent events) would ever warrant this?
For that matter, I'm a firm believer that the subscription plans in place now (like cell phone bills) will eventually be dwindled to nothing based on current competition. There are only so many minutes a cell phone company can provide in a month. After a while you hit limits, and gradually the costs erode to practically nothing (similar to water and electricity, communication will eventually become publically-owned).
http://www.freesql.org/sssca.htm
Intellectual Property laws cannot be enforced in a digital world without a strong police state. So we will end up with either the abolition of IP laws and the entire concept of IP or we will end up with a strong police state that essentially polices peoples thoughts and ideas. I think that in the long run, there will be no middle ground.
The JungleBoy
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
All data can be written as bits and those bits are easy to move around and copy because we have such powerful machines and networks.
The companies that thrive on scarcity of bits will succeed in making more and more stringent laws to stop the flow of those bits until such a point as poeple rise up (as in 250 million guns).
Then, people and government will eventually realize that:
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO HAVE STRONG COPYRIGHT PROTECTION AND FREEDOM SIMULTANEOUSLY NO MATTER WHAT "TECHNOLOGY" OR "LAWS" PEOPLE TRY TO IMPLEMENT..
Understanding that this problem cannot be solved with technological means, understanding that this problem cannot be solved by throwing everyone in jail, and understanding that artists still need to be paid for what they do...
A national tax on storage media will be institituted and will be used to make sure that artists make a decent (if not extravagent) living. Sort of like what happens with tapes and CD's today, except the taxes may go up somewhat. But, the taxes will never get too high because again, 250 million guns.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
That's why the SSSCA will make non-DRM controlled hardware illegal.
Eventually, after enough hacking of the systems, PCs will be required to be tamper-proof, DRM enabled, no end-user access to raw bit streams, etc. The SSSCA could pass, and the certified systems required by the act could include such requirements.
And the DRM system will likely prevent playing of unauthenticated content. Ostensibly to stop people from making analog recordings of music with a microphone, but it would also make independant music production impossible. The legally mandated system could require that in order for a piece of music to play, it would need to be signed with a valid key - and only the RIAA could license such keys. Onle would then need an RIAA license to make music.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
actually the only buttons i know how to push are ctrl+alt+del. and i can't make sense, i work for palm.
I think everyone wants freedom over their computer hardware & software. My computer is my domain, my email, my data. This is my castle, and nobody should have control over it. I put up firewalls to keep hackers out, I'm not letting lawyers in.
People need to realize, that their computer is the same as their checkbook, credit cards, journal, diary, love letters, children's pictures, private thoughts. The data is ours, and mine ours alone...
DRM gives companies control over you and your hardware. They must have control not for the loss of revenue but for the increase in revenue for the future. The future is a data oriented future, you will have smart hardware in every appliance in your life. This data be it multimedia or logging is worth money.
If all these draconian laws are passed, I can see a day where your shopping trip to the grocery store is logged, and when your home control computer sees you have the making for a bomb (Kitty litter, plant supplies, etc) the Police are notified.
Remember the old saying, "Don't copy that floppy?" They didn't have control over your hardware. In the future, You Can't copy that floppy, You cant even view it. (That will be 19.99 thank you)
... so it's not a question that makes much sense.
...
It's impossible to create software or hardware that prohibits copying. Any such mechanics would require cryptographic technology in an advanced fasion, hardware or software. The problem is that nomatter how good the algorithms are and nomatter how long the keys are someone will manage to crack it, not nescesarily within the first days, weeks or months but it will be cracked.
One option is for the manufacturers is to frequently change their algorithms and keys, giving the crackers no time to crack a format before there's a new to crack. This however won't be tolerated by consumers. The manufacruers can't - in fact - preserve backward compatibility at the same time as preserving cryptographic security. Buying or upgrading software or hardware every second month.
Therefor - as I see it - DRM is misson impossible. If the entertainmentindustry really want's to protect their work people must learn to respect other peoples work, and offer it cheap. As for closed format - not nessecarily cryptographic software - it should be outlawed to create proprietary formats to exchange information on. The writer is the owner, not the software creator. It might even conflict with free speach. Imagine if the alphabet was a closed format and what would happened if you violated that.
DVD manufacturers could always supply their discs with an armed guard/supervisor. Imagine that
Look a monkey!
A hundred years ago, we didn't all listen to the same music from the same artists, watch the same plays with the same actors, all read only a handful of common books that were blessed by Barnes & Noble as "top 20", etc. There were orders of magnitude more people singing, playing instruments, writing, painting, etc. Today's "superstar" system, whether it's music or novels, is an artificial convention perpetuated by publishing companies. When everybody can be their own publisher, however, the publishing companies go away, and so does the "superstars" business model. Without publishing companies and the "superstar" business models, digital rights laws may transition to better support regional or topical arts, rather than Fortune 500 conglomerates.
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
You may or may not care about a very short essay I wrote on this subject that was published at here, entitled "The Alexandria Effect", in which DRM leads to a new sort of Dark Ages, similar to what happened after the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Well, by then, of course, The Corporation(TM) will hold exclusive copyright on your world, so to see your world with DRM in place you'll have to pay The Corporation(TM)'s license fee and use The Corporation(TM)'s DRM-enabled YourWorldViewer(TM). Your eyes, which you could use to see your world without paying, will therefore be considered illegal circumvention devices under the Domination by Media Corporations Act, and will be either removed or retrofitted with DRM circuitry at birth.
sed 's/In Soviet Russia/In NSA America/g' < yakov-smirnoff-jokes.txt
It is true that there is always someone clever enough to crack encryption schemes. But for the everyday, average Joe Sixpack, those methods may prove to be the brick wall between them and the full enjoyment of the material.
I do, however agree with the last paragraph. Respect needs to be shown on both sides. And besides, lowering the price of copyrighted material will take some of the incentive away from piracy.
I can see the future of DRM boiling down to a "pay for everything" situation. Keep in mind this is not what I think SHOULD happen, but what MAY happen:
The net itself would have basic access charges, and huge databases of information broken up into catagories. Each person would have an account from which fees are deducted, and different rates would apply to different usage periods (primetime would cost more). There would be no distinction between watching an episode of "Days of Our Lives", and accessing data on the weather patterns of North American for a 10 year span. More currently poignant information would carry a higher fee, but not always. For instance crop reports from Brazil on the day of release would be spendy, since they would be of huge interest to OJ futures investors. I also see information resellers popping up, and complex systems of payment necessitating info brokers (either real or virtual). I imagine that personal virtual agents will tirelessly comb the nets for things of interest both professionally, and personally. Advertising will dwindle through these feeds, but become larger and more "in your face" through others (such has the flying bill boards that follow your focus in Snow Crash). Text will at last be interchangeable with audio/video, and languages will become almost irelevant. But fair use will constitute getting to read/view the data in the first place (ability to copy and or distribute will cost extra). I also believe that people that violate the rules in he extreme will be hunted down and jailed/killed/disappeared, and publicly decried as manaces to our way of life. Minor violators will have the stigma we now apply to those who steal cable.
1. it presumes guilt - "we know you're going to steal this, so we need to impenetrably lock it down." I, for one, don't appreciate their assumption that I am a thief.
2. it ignores the Constitutional limits on copyright - the Constitution grants copyright for a "limited time"; without key escrow, so that the content can be opened to the public domain after the "limited time" expires, the copyright holder effectively has permanent copyright.
3. it leads to the "death of information" - information (art, music, literature, etc.) that is strongly protected by technical means with non-escrowed keys will disappear from the world much more quickly than otherwise, which steals from us all.
stevebarr.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/barrst/goto.pl?ecomm
Not perfect, but a starting point...
information, which music and movies media...really break down into digital data, wants to be free. empowered consumers will dominate to the point of removing laws protecting 'information' what's known is known, if you want to make money, do live performances. All the methods used now will be muted when my 20Ghz Linux wristwatch can decrypt in "realtime".
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
But what happens when the media companies wise up and start including DRM in all their publications? What if every single CD couldn't be copied without violating the DMCA's circumvention clause? Would people just stop buying CDs? No, plenty of people would. A few might boycott, maybe even a huge percentage. But how long will people go without media (music, books, news, etc.)? Long enough to put these companies under financial duress? Maybe; it would sure be nice, but I'm not too optimistic.
But I don't really know what to do, either. Even if the DMCA were repealed, publishers would still try to make it a pain in our ass to use what is ours as we see fit.
Distraction by Bruce Sterling gets is close to what I suspect is the near future..
Any DRM system is only as strong as the authority behind it, I'd argue that in the modern world no authority can be strong enough to maintain a global DRM, so any authority that tries will be underminded. Try to enforce a DRM, your whole system will fail.
So we're left with the alternative, various DRMs enforced by various people in various places, but ultiamtly people just do whatever they can get away with. And its orbiting data vaults, strong crypto, spread spectrum, sterographied hell for anyone who tries to stop them.
The question I want to know is, what would happen if we threw the whole idea of 'copyright' out the window? You can copy anything you want, and sell it.
Existing publishing industries would definitly be screwed by lean mean bootleggers in 10 seconds, but after that, what would really change? People would still enjoy music, perhaps they'd simply try and really connect with preformers rather then forming a fake relationship with them though their publishers.. Live music might return to emmance as the primary way people get their rythm fix. Donno..
One way or another, ultimatly no copyrights is the future.. What else is possible? A transgalactic mind reading RIAA? Space is big, we'll be living there, how are you going to deal with that?
Maybe this time will be looked back on as the 'age of intellectual property'.. It's only been an issue since sheet music, handy digital technology may make it a non-issue soon.. It'd form a nice little era..
The future most likely doesn't hold the grim predictions from say, the Letter from 2020, but that doesn't mean we should assume that everything will always be honky dory.
You can use our current drug policies as a guide to the future of DRM...
Just because people resist drug laws doesn't mean they aren't criminalized, prosecuted, and persecuted for violations. Just because the current laws being drafted are anti-constitutional doesn't mean they won't be passed. In fact, I can't think of a better example of why not to allow these laws to be passed than the example of drug policies that you just gave. The only way to ensure your rights and privelages aren't trampled is to be eternally vigilant. The attitude that everything will just "be ok" is what allows things to go wrong in the first place. Assuming that millions of people will do the job of protecting your freedoms inevitably comes to bite you in the ass when millions of people assume the same.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
with a very simple question: "Does this particular law increase the freedoms or quality of life for the majority of individuals it will apply to?" Traffic laws are a good example. The law that says you must drive on the right (in the U.S.) increases your freedom to move about by reducing the chance that some other fool will be driving on the left. Laws that are passed to increase someone's profits do not pass this test. Laws that increase someone's profits are the direct result of political bribery, and political bribery is a fact of life in the U.S. of A.
The real thing I see coming out of a DRM future is foo-on-demand. Think of a song? Type in the name and get an instant download, at high quality, high bandwidth, with the lyrics and all supplimental info, with all the ID3 tags intact and correct (a few cents for a single play, maybe a dollar for unlimited plays). Missed Enterprise? Download any episode of any tv show, again, fast, painless, legal. Maybe even free for the version with commercials embedded in it, a buck or so for a commericial-free version. Ditto for movies, books, games, software, or really just about anything that can be digitally transmitted. Pay a few dollars to watch some movie, widescreen, in DVD quality, and then if you want a few more to download the entire Collector's Edition DVD, so you can burn it yourself. Of course, all of this assumes that the FLAs are will ing to allow all this, but...
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
I assert that perhaps the "revolution" is a complete upheaval in intellectual property law and therefore economics as a whole. IP law is fundamentally hostile to civil liberties. I would prefer that the American media industries lay everyone off and the US GNP drop like a rock due to a sudden decrease in fresh media exports than have the Federal government criminalize most computer users just to protect Jack Valenti's job. They shouldn't be allowed to arrest everyone!! This is exactly what George Orwell was worried about.
When do you think the last time Hillary Rosen paid for a CD was, anyway? It is time to demand a drastic and unpleasant change in order to safeguard our civil rights.
What's going to happen after this is we'll find another media,technology, etc that somehow is slightly 'grey'(read: loophole) in these DRM matters and milk it for all its worth and then some. And by the time they finally pass another one of these laws, the large corporations will be crying with their empty bags of cash for another solution to this blight on their bottom lines. The first and cardnal problem being that they are milking us dry first by getting together and setting prices for media at non market-derived prices (= =market collusion= =illegal). Proof: why are all CD's no matter who/where made the same price?
Never trust a bald barber; he has no respect for your hair
Yes, I see the need for copyrights and the need for money to go to authors/performers, but with this thing we call the internet, WE the consumer can have a more drastic effect on music and music tastes. As an amature musician, is sickens me to see how little moeny in the sales of CD's/albums actually goes to the writer/performer. It is on the order of 2% post-cost, depending on fronted money and contract.
What I think is happening is that the huge record corporations forsee a possible future, a future where THEY dont exist! These laws they are trying to force-feed down our throats, through careful manupulation of our govenment and senators and laws, ways to keep their corporations around and consuming our money.
Here is what I'm talking about, a possible future: You, the listener, go to a music review/posting site, reviewed by 'critics' and rated by the fans, maybe even a comment-style feedback. Here bands/music/concerts/genres are reviewed. This is your first stop for music, hear about a band. Next you take the link to their website(paid for by the band). Here you get a 'taste' of their music in whatever form: mp3, realaudio, newmusicform_2.0, whatever. So you decide that these guys dont totally suck so you purchase their music and download it digitially. Say it costs $10, where does that money go? TO THE BAND, minus the upkeep for website and hosting.
So, where is the big music corporation? NOWHERE! They arent needed to front the money for a 100k CD production run to reach every record store in the world, they arent needed to pay for play-time on radio or MTV, they dont take 90% of the money! Sure, radio and tv are the 2 largest ways to get music out and heard, but probably not for long.
I only listen to the radio in the car on the way to work(and until I can afford a new cd-player for my own music). Radio is horrible, all that overplayed crap. Most people I know hate the 'traditional' popular music radio, MTV? there is no music there anymore and it only spouts what music the corporations want YOU to buy.
What Im trying to say is that the possibility in the future(or now, we have the technology) is for the consumer to filter what gets pushed as 'good' and for the artist to get the money, not the corporation. This is what I see as the downfall of music in the late 20th century. Maybe a movement like this will spawn a new wave of music and genres like the early 20th century spawned.
More random thoughts: Now, I HATE buying CD's they are expensive $10-20, and most of the procedes go to Sony or BMG, not the artist. With the system I proposed, there is no large upfront capitol need to reach 1million listeners, the internet is extremely cheap way to reach so many people, and here the huge amound of money people spend on music goes to the performers/writers, the ones that actually DO the work, and deserver the cash. This is my 2cents, not really related exactly, but I think it needed to be said. Please pick this apart I want some feedback.
DOWN WITH CORPORATE CONTROL OF MUSIC!
The question is, can anyone put together a DRM system which will work, for all values of the word 'work'? In other words, a portable system for digital rights management which can be used for all [relevant] types of media, on all [relevant] types of device, which does not incur any [significant] additional cost to anyone.
With all that said, I think that it is clear that DRM will always be defeatable. The issue is making it undefeatable *enough*. There is literally no way to prevent people from copying media unless you control all parts of the work stream. That means the content creation, signing, storage, and playback all have to be controlled by whoever ultimately owns the rights. But if you can make it so that, for example, the only place you can get the unencrypted digital information is at the speakers, and make it expensive enough to get the data out, it will discourage 99% of the people.
This is why the RIAA is so concerned about mp3 music; It sounds fantastic (at high enough bitrates, or with VBRE), has no DRM, and is easy to get your hands on. A friend of mine (grin) has downloaded some 14 CDs worth of music which he likes in the last week and a half, from USENET's alt.binaries hierarchy alone. If he liked, he could also get similar quantities from FTP sites, lists of which are maintained by bots on various Irc channels. Oh, and that's mp3s, not CDDA, naturally, so figure about 9 or 10:1 since most of them are 160 or 192 Kbps.
We're all familiar with the bad side of DRM, mainly that you can't copy your data, which prevents you from listening to it with any decent quality on a range of equipment, and that if you lose the key, you're in trouble. Certainly those two issues need to be addressed in any successful DRM scheme.
But what we [geeks] at large tend to forget is that DRM could be a good thing. DRM is coming whether we like it or not, much like splitting the atom, or the use of fossil fuels, or even irrigation - All three of those things have caused harm to people and the environment that will take decades if not centuries to repair, if we begin now. But all of those things can be used for good, and so can DRM.
For instance, a scheme like Circuit Sh!tty's Divx (Not DivX ;-)) could actually be good for customers, but it fell short of the mark in every way. First of all, they can keep records of what you watch, when you watch it. Second of all, the quality was poor. Third, it only worked on their players.
I cannot personally envision a DRM scheme which will be successful which will not involve the first of those issues. You cannot come up with a serious DRM scheme which is not easy to break without central management. For portable devices with only analog output, you can check rights when music is transferred to the device. Everything else either is now connected to the 'net, or soon will be, so this is not a serious limitation.
As for the privacy issues resulting from a central server, I don't see any true resolution to that one for the paranoid. If you were truly given to flights of fancy, you might project a future which had (among the other currently existing classes) two groups of people; Those whose lives are transparent, and those whose are opaque. The opaques will use only open source software, hardware, and so on, which doesn't do any reporting; They will have their privacy and thus their freedom, but will miss out on quite a bit of innovation. The transparent people will be tools of the media and government, much like they are now :) Their minds will be precisely targeted by advertisers and states which know exactly what they want, and when they want it, what they like, what they are doing... Terrifying, really.
I do not, however, see that as a real possibilty. What I would like to see (In the US anyway; I hope the rest of you get something like this too) is federal law requiring that any records pertaining to you be opened to you at no charge so you can see just what they are collecting. In addition, you should be able to find out who else has access to this information, and who is looking at it. You can then choose who to do business with it based on their privacy policies. In other words, any file with your name on it should be provided to you at no cost. Restricting access to such records to internet or walk-in only is reasonable, as anyone can go into a library and use a computer.
We, the people of the world tend to forget that collectively, we are the ones with the power. Any time you get enough people to group together, you can make things happen. I don't have advice on how to educate the "common man" on DRM issues, but I assure you that it will become an important part of how all of us live our lives, hopefully in a very transparent manner. Of course, in that transparency lies the inherent danger of DRM, so there needs to be some method of oversight.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As I tried to bring up in this gnu.misc.discuss thread from May:0 3b7e0c0&rnum=1
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&th=bc413818
in order for free software or open source content to be developed easily and with fewer legal issues, given the laws as they are now, we need good audit trails regarding free licenses tracking the source of contributions to a package. A DRM used to preserve freedom by tracking the free licenses downloaded or newly created content was under could help us all to create more free content, because it would make licensing (and attribution) easier to deal with. In short, a system where the free license automatically followed around the media or code would make free content easier to handle and redistribute (as opposed to keeping free licenses in seperate files not directly associated with the content which require extra handling steps and which are not easily machine readable). (Note: this is not to be in favor of restrictive DRM's as usually designed by media companies because those make much "fair use" of media impossible).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You have (at least) two questions here. What should be the overall goals/philosophy of DRM and what is a possible to accomplish.
Regarding the first, it is conventional to suggest that DRM is either "for" or "against" somebody - people are frequently place into categories of RIAA supporters or consumer supporters. Arguments here frequently revolve around what users "should" be able to do/not do and the profit margin of RIAA members. I would suggest that none of this belongs in a discussion about DRM.
I would think that a fundamental goal of DRM would be to allow producers of material to do with it what they wish - to offer it to consumers in a manner that they wish. Consumers should be fully informed (ha) and make decisions concerning whether or not they wish to purchase the material as licensed.
In other words, lets allow producers to control their material and offer it to the marketplace in a controlled manner and allow consumers to decide what use of the material they wish to purchase. In a perfect world producers would probably like to offer up free CD's that cannot be copied and only played say three times, for a fee you could purchase a CD that could be played indefinately, but not copied, for a higher fee a cd that could be ripped, still higher a cd that could be copied. Consumers could decide on a CD by CD basis what they wish to purchase - not lawyers and politicians.
The sorts of rights conveyed would depend on the material, the producer objectives, and consumer desires. I write lots of articles - some are fore scientific publications that I would like as widely deciminated (without profit) as possible, others are commerical articles that I want tighter control over. New artists may offer up loosely licensed material for promotional purposes and hope that consumers will like their material enough to buy tighter licensed material later on. etc.
Now to the what is possible section - consumers are not fully informed at this point - but the issue is pretty new to those not reading slashdot regularly. The last thing that is needed is RIAA to be "covertly" selling restricted CDs - this information must be clearly conveyed for a market to work. Secondly, I am not sure that producers will ever fully gain the upper technological hand. Likely they will always be seeking to fix the latest security hole.
instead of having the regular recycled net material, I would like to hear opinions and thoughts on how it should and could work
In the past month, how many front page posts have there been concerning DRM, and how many times have the same opnions been hashed and rehashed here?
I am working on a thesis regarding DRM (Digital Rights Management). I would like to get it published
I really hope this is just a troll. Having Slashdot do your coursework is lame, lame, lame.
Many people misunderstand the saying "information wants to be free" as "information has some kind of cognative ability that wishes itself to be provided at no cost". This is completely wrong. Information wants to be free (as in speech) in the same way that lightning wants to take the quickest path to the ground, or that water wants to run down-hill. It's not just a saying, but a scientifically provable fact. It's called the second law of themodynamics.
Information, having no physical manifestation, follows essentally the same laws as entropy. It will continue to expand and find ways of copying itself until it is evenly distributed throught the world.
DRM is essentially impossible for the same reason that entropy can not be stopped. Of course, there will be limited successes, but they will be short lived. Encryption will protect a CD at least *once*. But after the key has been used to open the CD, the music is free to be copied away to less restrictive mediums. The same is true for physical attempts at protecting the data. Perhaps a very special CD can be created with a very delicate film that only can withstand being pelted by laser light a few times before it degrades, but all one has to do is copy the data on that CD away during one of those first few times and, again, it can be copied to a less restrictive medium.
There is really only one way of creating any sort of "real" DRM: legally. You would have to create laws that literally control each and every human being on the planet. You would have to create laws that ban and criminalize outright any legacy CD-burners, hard drives, floppy disks, MD's, zip disks, etc and present the market with your own special versions that fail *physically* after the third burn (And it must be a complete and total *physical* failure. The drive must be incapable of continuing. If you create drives that simply set a flag when it's time to stop buring it won't be long until someone creates a patch to unset said flag).
Unfortunatly, even going the legal route will only lead to temporary DRM. Once information is freed from it's cage, ways will be found to copy it. It may not be easy to make ne copies at first, but ways will be found.
The end result of all this, if you are trying to make good guesses about the future, is that one of these days, somone will begin to question what exactly "Digital Rights" really are. Can the "rights" to ideas really be bought and sold? Do people even *have* rights to thier own ideas? It may seem like a given, this day and age, to say that a particular artists song belongs to him (ok, technically, belongs to his master at the RIAA, but that is a whole different rant), but in the future we may not feel the same way, who knows.
Someday, we will have to, as a nation, perhaps as a would, rethink a lot of our business models we use to create our economy. Right now we are dealing with the digital realm of this battle, but it won't be too much longer before the first rudamentary "molecular copiers" will start to emerge, capabel of making nearly perfect copies of anything from Nike shoes to dollar bills. If there isn' some serious thought put into what exactly we plan to do when the revolution comes, we will be in serious trouble.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
The problem with DRM is that it's purpose is to profit the corporations at the consumer's expense. Since the question is how it _should_ work, here's my take:
1. "First Sale" rules would apply. If I purchase (well, license) something, I should be able to sell it at any time.
2. Multiple media and devices would be covered. I don't want to have to purchase the CD, then buy MP3's for each of my portable devices and my home MP3 server! Buying the item once would entitle me to use it on any of the devices that I own, *at any time*, without restriction (or further payment).
3. Replacement data or media would be the producer's liability. If the item in question --either a physical product like a CD/DVD, or a set of MP3/MPEG files -- is lost or destroyed, the content producer would be obligated to provide replacements in a timely manner and at no charge.
4. Handle "life-issues". People cohabitate or get married. Households can split up. Children may enter the situation, and then leave ~18 years later. Any consumer-friendly DRM would have to take all kinds of real-world situations into account.
5. Right of return. Regardless of the reason for dissatisfaction, a consumer should be able to return a copy-protected item with no hassles. The rules would have to different for various kinds of media: spending four hours with a computer game is not the same as spending four hours watching a movie. But if it can't be pirated, then there's no reason to refuse returns!
As to what will _really_ happen in the future, I think that the media companies are going to screw consumers until legislation or legal action stops them. And then they'll choose another angle and start the consumer-rights erosion again.
It would seem that the overregulation of hardware design eventually leads to its abandonment. DAT, DivX, prior casualties.. I wonder why the hardware companies don't lobby this stuff out of existance, after all they are the ones that foot the bill when it comes to R&D (it doesn't cost the RIAA/MPAA any money when nobody buys Sony DVD players because of the hardware restrictions).
I remember when the Rio first came out, MP3s were a radical new concept at that time. No real restrictions, they sold a lot of hardware. Now you have to double check all the fine print before you buy these things. Even software like WinXP has problems, and I'm certainly not going to shell out $300 to find out what I can't do with my computer now that I could do before...
That's the part that I don't get. Sure, they can sell DRM to companies to produce it, but how are they going to make people buy it? Not many people I know are going to buy a CD you can't play in your computer, or rip into MP3.
What would I be willing to pay for? Well, if I had broadband, (which I can't get) I'd pay 10-20 bucks a month to be able to download tracks out of the RIAA's library. In MP3 format. ALL of the library, not just the crap they want to push on me.
Now unless they lock down the hardware it will never work. Nothing at all stopping you from running line in to your sound card, record as WAV, rip to MP3. Most other media works the same way. Locking down hardware would stifle innovation and make America a technological backwater in a few years.
What they really don't get is DOWNLOADING MAKES THEM MONEY! I've bought a lot more CDs than before I started on MP3, simply because I'm more interested in music. The truth is that it has nothing to do with money, but about control.
-- When a fool hears of the Tao, he will laugh out loud.
I have not read every commment here but wanted to toss in a quick thought.
The main issue in DRM is whether users of copyright-protected material out to have a defined right to use. Currently, a user has the right to use a copyright-protected work up until the point of making a copy (I can buy a sheet of music and play it in my house, perform it live, blow my nose in it, use it as TP, and so on. Yet, I could not take that sheet of music and make one single copy of it without committing copyright infringement). Fair use, for example, is not a right, but an affirmative defense to a claim of copyright infringement (as in, "Yes, I am committing copyright infringement by copying this CD to mp3 format to play in my mp3 player, but it's okay because it is a fair use of the material (because I am the only person that will ever use the mp3)."). This system worked pretty well (not perfectly) before technology made mass infringement more visible and track-able and gave copyright holders the ability to implement protections designed to prevent certain types of infringement (protections that often also remove uses that are otherwise defensible as fair). Thus, the best way to limit DRM schemes designed by copyright holders is to grant users a specific set of rights of use and provide them with enforcement mechanisms (grant the average consumer the right to sue someone who makes a copyright-protected music CD which prevents the user from copying that CD for personal use). In this way, users are allowed to police violations of their rights on their own, just as copyright holders are now obligated to police their own rights.
Asking about "digital" rights management, is short-sighted as the rights management issue will extend beyond the digital realm with the introduction of nanotech. Consider:
Given time, you could probably think of many more.
I don't believe that, in the future, DRM will be absolute. We will always have formats that do not enforce rights; you will always be able to 'pirate' information, regardless of the form.
Now.. DRM will be an important part of media delivery in the future... but the thing that will make DRM work is not a better DRM solution... it's the content itself, and the price we pay for it.
You see, as long as a CD costs me $20, I'm going to try for mp3 instead. It's not because I can't afford to spend any money.. but given that I can get it for free, the cost of the associated extra hard-drives to store my growing music collection on, plus the internet fees to get it, are still far cheaper than what it costs me to buy a CD.
If, on the other hand, I could just pay Music Company X $20/month and be able to stream *any song* from their *entire library of recorded music* whenever I wanted.. I might just go for that. It needs to be cheap enough that it's not worth my time to pirate the music.
The same goes for video. Well.. actually.. it's almost true of video now. DivX is great.. but DVD's are surprisingly cheap, and hence, DVD piracy is not really an issue. Oh sure, people rip DVD's and download divx (or whatever) over the net... but I doubt it's currently affecting DVD sales to any measurable degree. DVD is a large increase in quality over the online versions... and it's very convenient.
Books as well. I won't pay for an E-book yet; because I can't lay in bed and read it comfortably. Real books still present some value that a digital copy just doesn't have yet. IN the future, however, if I could pick up my little book-like electronic reader, log-on to it with my finger, and pick which book I want to read, I would again be willing to happily pay a subscription fee to read books.
Now some thoughs regarding online music delivery.
I should be able to pay a monthly fee that entitles me to listen to X different tracks a month (spread out over different categories if they like.. this is just the basic idea). Now.. I should also be able to pay some small 'extra' fee and 'purchase' a title. This means I can listen to it anytime I want from anywhere I want, from now on, and it won't count towards my monthly subscription. Of course, it would be fair to have some hard limits relating to simple bandwidth use as well... as a separate issue from music titles.
Basically, in a nutshell, media delivery companies have to make paying them for the media more convenient than pirating it. They can either do that by exerting legal pressure (going to jail for pirating one song is not convenient).. but more realistically, they'll have to simply make more available the way we want it.
If Hollywood relaxed. Allows things to continue as is, we might have progress.
The main reason for all these DRM ideas right now is because so many people feel they can do whatever they want with the media they have, reguardless of if they purchased it themselves or not.
Now, if Hollywood just relaxed a bit, let people do what they wanted, and suffered the loss. The people would feel the pain of it. Movies wouldn't be as good, less TV shows, bands would produce lower quality music.
Eventually people might realise that they should pay for the stuff. Thus they would be able to persnoally encourage the development of the media they like. They would realise that if they want good media, they should pay for it, not abuse it. So free music would abound, and poeple would pay for it if they felt like it.
Of course, the truth of it being, I doubt Hollywood would suffer very much if they just sat back. I don't think quality would go down. Mostly because prices are fairly bloated as is.
I myself, support free music. I bought a copy of a great Fiddle band the other day after having listened to their MP3's for about half a year. After finding how much I liked them, I actually bought two copies, one for me and one for a friend. I hope they create more music.
l8r
from DRM is that once I purchase something, I own it - not the rights to distribute to others, but the right to make copies onto various media as I see fit for my own use. I don't mind paying for music or video, but I want to know that I don't have to pay every time I want to listen to a particular song.
I also want a persistent rights checker that recognizes that even though I purchased a copy previously, I am licensed to use that product even if I'm not in the original purchasing location.
It should be easy to use, secure, and should only be used for rights management, not marketing.
And it should be optional on some devices. If I choose not to install it, I can't use the licensed media on that machine - so be it. But I should have the ability to opt out of the system.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
I can picture a culture of outcasts diligently working on cracking the encryption schemes used, in hidden monasteries and old warehouses, living off of pirated satellite connections and covert tunneling in other's data.
Neato. One might be able to write a "Canticle for Leibowitz" style book with this as the main idea...
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I used to worry about it more, but the more I think about it, the more I'm confident that every so-called "rights-management" scheme will be cracked or compromised. If not that, someone will reproduce the material in a non-protected form (imagine a group of 1000 people on the internet each re-typing pages out of e-books, for instance).
I was just reading again about some of the cracked e-book readers, like the one that XOR'd each byte with each letter of the string "encrypted". In other words, XOR each letter with the same single byte. A 7-bit key. That literally made me laugh out loud. To think that shit like that is covered by the DMCA! Why did they even waste the money writing it?
If it makes them feel good, fine, go ahead and put in the DRM stuff. I just won't buy it. If I really want it, I'll get a cracked copy of whatever it is, or hope that an un-crippled variation is sold from some other company. Though I MIGHT buy the occasional DRM stuff just to try and crack it (and then get rid of it on eBay if they'll still allow that).
It'll be just like the copy interference they used to do on computer software. I remember when I was in lower school, trying to crack Apple II copy limitations on the games that I bought (didn't need to crack them on the games I copied from friends, somebody else already did it). I just tried programs that worked with one of the many techniques they used, throw in a little knowledge of ProDOS and DOS (remember those?) directory structure, plus a disk editor, and no problem. It never occured to me then that this was actually something that was supposed to keep me out! I thought it was just the way things were, like the insides of the toaster happen to be held in with screws and I had to use the right screwdriver to take them out.
I can just imagine the young people of tomorrow playing with a copy-crippled CD, coming up with ways to get around it. Maybe it will even encourage more people to learn about hardware and software (Hey Mom! I made a couple LFSR's out of 74HC-series logic, connected it to the digital output and I decoded the CD! Listen! ... Oh that's nice dear. Have you finished your pre-algebra homework?)
So, bring on the DRM!
Used to be that whenever I installed/reinstalled Windows, I could use the machine from the get-go. Increasingly I'm forced to connect to Microsoft's "Windows Update" server and download the latest bleeding-edge updates because one app or another isn't working right. DirectX, "critical updates," et al are making me more reliant on the Net: I now think of a Windows install as one part CD, one part downloading all manner of updates. Don't get me started on the "activation" process for new WinXP installs. I see DRM as an extension of this- besides the usual restrictions (pay-per-song, etc.) the thing that bothers me more is the fact that I'll have to be Net-connected somehow in order to "renew" my music/video/content. I'm a notorious data-hoarder, and I don't like the idea of any of my content expiring on me. Assume DRM caught on in a big way a year ago, in early 2000. Ten years from now, when the then-current iteration of DRM is all but forgotten/outdated, how will I be able to view my WTC attack footage? There is *important stuff* on the Internet which would suffer a great deal from DRM, no matter how lax it turns out to be.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
The problem we have with DRM is that the technology is used to selectively enforce copyright owners' rights, but not the public's rights to fair use.
If fair use rights were also enshrined in DRM software (and any copyright owner's attempts to restrict fair use rights punishable under the same provisions as the DMCA), you would see less opposition to DRM.
in order to have a truly "strong" DRM system, you have to tack on strong encryption
This is the most fundamental failing of DRM, and why (in it's current form,) it will never work.
At it's most basic level, encryption (weak or strong) is designed to allow person A to send something to person B without anyone else (person C) being able to view it.
It is not designed to allow person A to decide when and how person B can view it, or whether person B can send it to someone else.
These are two VERY different goals. In the first example, once person B has the data, s/he can view it any time they want, rewrite or mangle, or even send it to someone else (with or without encryption.)
If the goal of DRM is to prevent person B copying the content, then there is no technical way of doing it.
To quote Bruce Schneier, trying to make bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet. Encrypting the data will not alter this fact.
The problem is, nobody has come up with a way to make bits uncopyable - and the people who believe that encryption will do this simply don't understand encryption.
A BDSM-ish Giger biomech picture. A writhing, streamlined, scaled thing being jammed into the maw of a once-human thing chained comfortably to a frosted plexiglass seat.
Don't do that.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Debian's apt-get is the best realization of this future. It's a little scratchy around the edges- but there is where the real innovation in desktop OSes starts.
Of course, I recently switched to Slack because there's a deeper part of me that doesn't trust something so automatic...
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Fast forward to the 80's and 90's through today. Hardly anybody plays an instrument. It is virtually impossible to make a living as a working musician. DJ's and CD's are vastly preferred to live bands. A small pool of incredibly-successful performers -- performance corporations, really -- dominate the airwaves and the music stores. A mere million-seller is a disappointment. Great musicians can't find work, and play their music as part-time hobbies.
What changed? A few things.
1. Powerful music publishers and distributors now control the industry more tightly than did the old Hollywood studio system.
2. Changes in IP laws have essentially eliminated the concept of 'public domain,' except for very old music, making some of the cornerstones of music illegal unless license fees are paid: theme-and-variations, quoting material from other songs (a fundamental jazz technique), quoting lyrics, and performing or adapting music written by others. It's hard and expensive to follow today's complex licensing and performance rules. Why bother? Buy Musak.
3. The industry's stranglehold on performance and publication has generated enough profits to allow manipulation of public taste. At this point, a public has been molded that doesn't want to hear a local band playing at a bar, but instead demands concerts with superstars, light shows, pyrotechnics and other special effects, performing exactly what was heard on MTV, preferably using lipsynching to ensure that no differences exist. This is *not* intrinsically the way public taste would have developed without guidance by the industry.
This is a complex issue, and obviously many other aspects of our lives and cultures have changed dramatically since WWII. However, the death of musicmaking as a core feature of USA life is a tragedy, and I'm convinced that neverending copyrights and powerful publishers take major responsibility. They claim to help performers, but instead they have contributed to the destruction of music as a profession and the elimination of all but mass-produced music in the lives of most of us.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
copyright is in need of a drastic overhaul and any DRM based on the current notion of copyright is screwing the public.
Ever been to mp3.com? ampcast.com? javamusic.com? Those "everybodies" you talk about back when weren't all on the radio either. It was just a social pastime. We have different social pastimes now (IRC?). However anyone that is still interested in music personally, rather than being pursuaded into it for social reasons has PLENTY of oppourtunity to get into it. And even MORE oppourtunity to get their music out to the public than ever before. /. is almost a completely glass half enpty crowd. Though sometimes the glass really is also half full!
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
The entire point of economics is to manage the scarce resources of life. The entire point of technology is to beat that scarcity.
What happens when that scarcity is made a relic of the past?
Folks like R. Buckminster Fuller thought about that. As a matter of fact, he believed that we've already eliminated most of physical want through industry, and it's just a few folks who want to continue to reap the personal benefits of a hierarchical society that keep anyone poor. I don't entirely agree with him, but an alchemical nanotech future would certainly threaten the hierarchy of the simple protection of life.
Would hierarchy nod its head and vacate its throne? Who knows.
We don't know if this future is even possible- but past experience has shown that whatever we humans dream tends to happen. It just takes time.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I think the DRM initiatives are not aimed at pirating alone. The new standards will also be used to keep new competition from arising. Before independend artists or small companies can publish material, they'll have to sign restrictive agreements and pay lot's of money. If you cannot afford this, you're out of luck.
Look at the restrictions of the DVD burners of the new Macs. They won't hinder piracy. They just make sure that not anyone can create and market new content.
And that's only a first small step.
There was a post earlier about hardware devices and the inherent restrictions - RightsMarket.com seems to have a pretty decent software only product, that according to their website:
"provides software and services to securely distribute digital content and prevent unauthorized use - even after delivery. Offering solutions for both text and audio in the areas of ePublishing, eLearning , and eHealth, RightsMarket enables organizations to capitalize on the enormous opportunities inherent in distribution over the Net."
Maybe this is an option that would work?
10 years down the road, think about the fact that all the new content in the world is locked up with some kind of DRM, and reverse engineering is illegal (thanks DMCA!).
Now, jump forward another 10 years. Some of the businesses have died, or "shifted focus," etc. Since the content they produced could not be kept, duplicated, converted to the latest mpg9 format--because of DRM--it can't be found. If found, it can't be "played". It's lost.
Think about the implications of this for historians 100 years down the road trying to play a DRM-controlled song from a company that has been out of business 90 years.
Without the ability to personally archive songs/movies/etc and convert to new mediums/compression formats/etc, content will be lost. Especially on something that isn't "commercially valuable."
A simple example: No video footage of one of the Super Bowls exist today. Even though 2 major networks filmed it, neither one kept the footage for whatever reason. The average person didn't have a VCR back then to make personal copies. Lost through negligence.
The only reason we haven't seen so much of it in the past is because we used dead trees. Pick up a 200-year old book. Yep, you can still read it. Now, pick up an 8" floppy disk that is 20 years old that had an etext copy of that book on it. Can you read it? Nope, even though the text of the book is on the disk, it can't be read. That's a physical problem (since there aren't any more 8" drives around). Now, throw the complexity of DRM onto that 8" disk. If you found a drive that could read it, you still couldn't because of the DRM. With a software/firmware solution, it just magnifies the potential problems an hundredfold.
Only so many "popular" movies will be converted to DVD. How many thousands will be left behind in VHS-land. Twenty years from now, will a VHS player be legal, and/or functional? Will the VHS tape itself have deteriorated? Will DVD even still be around?
Do you want access to our society's music/books/movies/culture to depend on a specific business or technology? If so, the longevity of that content is cut down to years, rather than centuries.
The destruction of the library and Alexandria was a major blow to the intellectual world for centuries to come. All it would take in the future is an economic downturn!
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
I've read several posts now on this thread, and as expected, there are many contrasting viewpoints. Lets examine some of the more extreme ones, cause i think they raise some interesting questions.
.. but doesn't that mean we wouldn't have a much of an economy either? Yeah, we'd have innovation (assuming the exchange of info is actually productive), but how are people to make money off of that? Perhaps we should abolish money? Perhaps we should just setup a society where we not only setup free exchange of information, but how about free exchange of everything? The idea's not without its merits. Your house falling apart? no problem. Everyone pitches in and builds you another. Who pays for it? everyone, but not in terms of money. The cost of such a society would be to contribute your skills and and talents for the betterment of society. We don't compete anymore, we just live, and through living, we better ourselves and put those resources not required to maintain or raise the current standard of living for everyone into research for further advancement of society (Sounds an awful lot like star trek doesn't it?). Hold that thought... and now come back to reality. Reality right now is that no matter how much you want it, society isn't ready to give up one of the most basic concepts of our way of life: everything (information, ideas, goods, services, etc) must be quantified. We have a concept that a guy schlepping fries at a McDonalds is providing a less valuable service than say a doctor giving you a triple bypass cause you ate those very same fries for 50 years. If you don't go all the way, which is probably not what the majority of people are trying to say here, then i ask the question again. How does the line between what should be free and what shouldn't be drawn? Who decides who draws it?
One such view was the "information should and must be free" ideal. I would love a society in which free exchange of information was a reality. I think there could be many advantages to such an environment. But lets be realistic here. Anything that has advantages has disadvantages also. Perhaps we just don't concern ourselves with the truth about such disadvantages because we're too busy hoping for something that we know isn't attainable in the near future. That is, we're too busy fighting for the cause to be concerned about possible consequences. A theoretical argument then is what i offer. Lets say for a moment that society progressed to such a utopian vision of free information exchange. What price are we going to have to pay for that? Before we answer that question, lets ask another first. What exactly is the line that we invariably must draw between what information should be free, and what shouldn't be? I'd like to pretend that such a line needn't exist, but again, lets be realistic. If we had a completely free exchange of information, then wouldn't that mean that nobody could lay claim to any concept or idea, and in turn make money off of that? Of course that's what it means, cause otherwise it wouldn't be free or complete, right? Remember i'm arguing the extremes here, and If this seems ludicrous to you, or if you're one of the people who had made an argument like this and feel i'm misrepresenting your argument, then you're probably right, i am, but i'm doing it for a reason.
So here we are, we have a totally free exchange of info,
So here we are, stuck between where we are now, and where we would like to be. What about the other way? What about the people who feel there should be more control over information. They probably feel threatened by freedom of information, cause they realize that it would shatter their current status in society. I guess that's what it's all about isn't it? I mentioned that the utopian view of free exchange had disadvantages. The main one i'm trying to communicate here is that we would have to radically change our current paradigm of society, in favour of another. The more radical a change, the more resistant people are to it. Well, most of the arguments on DRM are nothing nearly as extreme of course, but i don't think that just cause we're not going to extremes here that it doesn't mean that we're not going to have to pay the same price. We would have to alter our way of thinking. This of course is on a much smaller scale, but the fact remains.
So what does that mean about DRM? I guess it means that this is just another segment of the inevitable change in society. The arguments i've read thus far seem to be very concerned with the current situation and what should or shouldn't happen, and rightly so. Certainly they're probably a bit more relevant than talking about abstract extreme views of what might become of how we handle things now, but i think it's a good idea to take anything we do now as the foundation for the future we are going to live. That *is* how it works after all, and maybe we should step back from time to time and give that a moments consideration.
The whole problem with DRM, in my opinion, is the flawed mentality behind pay-per-use. Pay-per-use is complete BS. Movies with plot twists like The Crying Game or Being John Malkovich can really be only watched once before losing significant effect. On the other hand, some songs can be listened to over and over again without you getting sick of them.
I would love to see a future where DRM divides media into "pools" of content and creates connetions between pools.
For example, Paying $X fee adds a movie to my pool. It doesn't matter if I go see it in a theater, or on video, or streaming from a website...i forever have the right to watch that movie whenever and whereever I choose. I see this adding value because it creates a huge market for alternate formats.
Let's say I'm offended by foul language. The studio may not see the value in marketting a movie below an R rating. However, on the other side of things...if some small company wants to create a PG version of the movie, they can't because they don't own the rights. Under the pool system, I pay the fee to add the movie to my pool, and then I go get it from whoever I want. That may be the studio's distribution company releasing the R-rated version on DVD, or it may be that small company's PG version on VCD.
Content pools also need to cover all media forms. If I pay into a pool for a song, that should give me the rights to the video, the lyrics, the songsheet, etc. Studio wants to release bonus footage for a movie already out? That's fine except everyone already in the content pool for that movie thanks to previous purchase automatically gets access.
Pools also need to overlap based on real-world relationships. I should be allowed to cross into other pools. For example, it is logical that if my sister owns a CD, I could listen to it. I technically have access through her. So my content pool would also include the ability to access anything in the content pools of my friends and family. The only difference is that it would not extent to anyone who had me listed as friends or family. IE, I can "borrow" a song that my friend purchased, but a non-mutual friend could not then "borrow" that same song from me. Or perhaps they could, but they would have to have an additional "extra generation" fee to be paid.
Content pools should also be linked topically to provide additional value. For example, purchasing the pool of an extire favorite series, like Simpsons or Star Trek. Or even larger, a Sci-Fi or Animation pool to inclusely give me access to everything at once. Considering how there are not addtional costs, it makes sense for companies to offer wholesale licensing to their entire collection. Media distribution and mass production are completely separate. Yes I'll have to pay for the CD, but if I can do it myself, I can save myself some money. If there's a market to release it in vinyl, someone can do that.
The key to this whole paradigm is separating content from format. There needs to be companies that make money from producing content and other companies that make money from distributing content and NOT BOTH. If I found a better way to distribute things, I should be allowed to walk out tomorrow and make a company to do it. I don't have to worry about licensing, that burden is on the user. Someone comes across my media, they whip over to the DRM warehouse, at it to their pool, and then enjoy my version.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
If the MPAA, RIAA, book publishers, etc... want to distribute all of their products in restrictive formats that don't allow fair use... then fine. What we need is for someone to come up with an alternative. Let's take music as an example:
Right now, I would love to go into a music store and buy a CD (or whatever other format) and have something that I can play in my car, play in my house, easily load into a device that will allow me to make play lists, etc... play on a portable device. Maybe the CD contains the music in several different formats... like a track hidden to conventional CD players that has MP3s of all the songs on it... I'd rather have a professionally produced MP3 then one ripped by someone with buggy MP3 software.
Someone needs to provide this alternative. It can be done. Then they just need to show demand and start signing up artists... small and big. Once you get one or two big artists... well maybe they will all eventually come over to the new formats. Bye-bye RIAA.
The only reason the RIAA can do what they are doing is because there is no alternative type of media out there.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
I'm involved in church music. We have two licenses, CCLI and LicenSing. Read the permissions - and the prices here.
A couple of points
I see DRM making being legal easier, and making composers get the royalties that they're due.
YMMV.
It's not "copy protection." It's "copy prevention." Yeah, it's a small point, but the first step in changing people's perceptions of an issue is to change the language they use to describe it.
Nope, no sig
Dear Slashdot Readers, Please povide me with all of the content I need for my thesis paper. thanks.
...of my being able to access something easily, I'll find a way to live without it.
Just about everyone I know who was using the early generations of copy protected PC software stopped using it after a short time when it got too difficult to use. Soft bits, writing to special floppy tracks... all those schemes turned out to be a major pain in the butt. I had some software rendered unusable because I had a hardware failure that required replacing the floppy drive. Another time I found myself unable to move some software from one computer to another even though such an activity was allowed by going through a de-installation procedure which re-enabled the installation procedure on the distribution floppies. They never thought about the case where your hard disk crashes and you are unable to properly de-install the software.
I predict that no ``content provider'' will be offering anything so compelling that users will bend-over backwards, turn around three times, and buy special hardware in order to use some software, music, etc., etc. that's protected using any of the DRM schemes that I've heard about.
Going back to one example in the main post: If anyone attempts to charge us for looking at my watch, someone will invent the wrist sundial and people will buy it. Maybe the fact that no one's currently charging us for the time of day explains why we can't get it from vendors. :-)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Stop calling it "copy protection". It is not protecting anyone except for the big companies. If you want to dumb it down to laymen terms, use "copy prevention". It's scary when even /. editors call it copy protection.
Anyways, I don't know if anyone has said this yet, but the way that artists make money with the internet is pay-per-download. We need an easy payment system -- one or two cents per file.
This solves the Napster problem. How? You'd be downloading straight from the author. If the artist is putting his songs up, it likely that he'll put up all (or most) of them. This means you have a better chance of finding what you're looking for. You also get guaranteed quality. You don't have to worry about spending half an hour downloading a song that might be really noisy, or even the wrong song. Plus you get the warm fuzzy feeling of putting two cents straight into an artist's pockets.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
The big audio conglomerates would want to charge huge per song fees like $12 per file, or some obnoxiously high rate such as $250+/month for a limited number of downloads.
In reality though- with functioning peer sharing networks as an alternative, no one would subscribe to such a system unless it were really cheap, such as $5/month for unlimited downloads with high quality files, fast transfers, and a comprehensive selection.
Do you see why they havent gone that route? You cannot be a useless fat layer if noone will feed you.
Neil Stephonson's book snow crash had this great idea.. an online 'library of congress'. People all over the world submitted data into the system. THe data was analyzed, sorted and stored. Common information was free to the public. Sensitive or valuable information had a price tag on it. THere was a sliding scale, everything from free to wicked expensive. The system paid the contributors every time someone bought their data submissions. I thought it was a decent solution, pragmatic in that 'we control the information' big brother way.
Honestly I think the future is what we make of it. The Free (as in beer) Software idea is revolutionary. IF (or when!) free software expands to a user friendly plug and play kind of system then purchased or rented software will be obsolete. Thats markets at work. What is the trickle down effect of free software? Think free software of the caliber that ILM and Lucas use. Whats the production cost of media on free software? Hardware and labor. As we create tools that allow individuals to compete with the established media giants, the cost of media lowers. Once it drops below a certain level then DRM is almost pointless.. why protect valueless data? Currently the reason why entertainment data is so caught up with DRM is the strangle hold a few small companies have on the distribution of said media.
The other end of DRM of course is private data. Think medical records, tax records, finacnial information. Those tend not to be consumer level information.. in the way that entertainment digital media is a consumer product. Strict and fair privacy laws (thank god for the EU and their policy!) require excellent DRM. That is the where the juicy valuable data will be, and it really wont be a consumer issue but more a banker issue.. we'll choose to store our valuable private data with institutions with the strongest security if we are afraid of hackers, or we'll store it with the most user friendly, or we'll store it with the cheapest one. Markets again will force changes that consumers want.
Right now, public radio is (IMHO) by far the best thing on the radio. At this point it's pretty much self-funding. Public TV is perhaps further behind, but there are some things it does really well. Expanding similar models to new media and new audiences does not seem impossible at all.
It's hard -- an imagined Public Music wouldn't have Britney Spears no matter what. There's something monopolistic about celebrity. OTOH, in a more efficient production, the preferences of smaller number of people can still produce great stuff with the resources available.
If you imagine that just 2-3% of the population subscribed to some sort of Public Music, and payed about as much as they otherwise would have on music, how many musicians could they support? Since the music produces was unencumbered, there would be better grassroots marketing than the RIAA could do, even if Public Music didn't have the money to give radio stations kick backs.
Can we stop saying DRM and Copy Protection, please. These are euphemisms created by content owners to reduce the effect of such tools on lay users. Let us start calling at Access Restriction Mechanisms or something. That is what they are! Even secure, cheap or user friendly DRMs are basically used to restrict access to the Copyrighted material.
:-(.
For a layman to understand what these are, we need to call them by their proper name and get rid of these industry jargons. Most people wouldn't bother to understand what DRM is and "Copy Protection" might even give them some kind of secure feeling
I accept to pay some royalty, but i want to own something. My biggest concern is: will i be able to read my future ebooks after thirty years? Will there be the correct reader after thirty years? Software industry seems to say no, for example the war for standards. More, hard-disk crash is similar to have your house burned. Will i be able
to lend a book to my sister?
There are two huge daunting problems with DRM, both technical and social in nature.
Technical Issues:
Most DRM suffer from a fatal flaw. They trust the client (hardware, software or individual) to manage rights properly. For example, CSS counts on the DVD player to keep both the CSS algorhithm and the encryption keys secret. Any such system will be cracked eventually. Once cracked, the only way to keep it from being worthless is to legally enforce totalitarian control over information distribution.
For DRM to function as advertised, there needs to be a server in place to handle authentication and authorization of clients. Few DRM systems are set up this way (Two examples: Automated Cable TV Pay-Per-View systems and Circuit City's Divx system being one example).
Social Issues:
People don't like to have rights taken away. If they've been able to do something before, and they're told they aren't allowed to anymore, they get upset. DRM systems will not be accepted if they're being used to remove rights.
Similarly, if there is are two competing systems, and one uses DRM to make things more restrictive than the other system, it will greatly hurt acceptance. For example, DVDs and Divx disks were in direct competition. Both use DRM, but DVD's DRM system is much less intrusive than Divx's was. The only advantage Divx offered was slightly better prices (at least when first introduced). Most people are willing to pay a little bit extra to not have to worry about making phone calls and expiration dates.
Let's look at a successful DRM system. Most cable companies allow you to purchase pay-per-view events through the cable box, this is a DRM system. You hit a couple of buttons, your cable box contacts the server, the server verifies that you are allowed to view pay-per-view, charges your next bill, and sends your cable box the key to access the particular show you requested.
While the system isn't perfect, it shows the halmarks of what I consider to be requirements for a successful DRM system:
* It allows you to do something you otherwise couldn't do (watch almost new movies or events without leaving your sofa).
* All critical security issues are handled on the server side (yes, except for channel lockout, I said it wasn't perfect)
* It's easy to use (12:00 flashers can even order pay-per-view)
* It makes use of an existing business arrangement, so there are not financial or contractual issues to iron out
* It makes use of an existing data connection, so there are no privacy issues to iron out (they already know who you are and what you're watching)
I think we are going to see more and more DRM systems in the near future. Assuming that most civil liberties stand in most countries (at least most of those with a consumer market), I think most DRM systems will fail, badly. The few that survive will have many of the same things going for it that pay-per-view has now.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
I could see a scenario where pubilc libraries could be charged a small license fee for each patron that views an eBook (or other electronic recording, such as music or movie). being a public service, patrons wouldn't be responsible for the charges, the city would. This would put an economic strain on many already suffering library systems.
Furthermore, libraries might then be forced into paying for a license for only popular works. For example, a mass distributor could license Steven King or an Encyclopedia for 10 cents per viewing, while the small-press distributor with a more obscure sci-fi book or specific non-fiction book would cost 20 cents. Libraries would be more likely to cary only what's popular. What's missing then?
This is especially sad when it comes to the children's department. When I was a kid I learned what makes up the world from books in the library. The first book I can remember picking up was a computer book when I was 10. If that book hadn't been in the library, I probably wouldn't be a highly skilled software engineer right now. I feel bad for children that might face a library with a very limited book selection.
The problem of course lies in the flawed Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which (thanks to millions of dollars worth of lobbyting power) confuses copyright with copyprotection.
_______
2B1ASK1
I could just as easily say that DRM will increase innovation!
You could, but you'd be wrong.
As the music "industry" tightens it's grip, more and more small bands will get greater exposure through places like ampcast.com, garageband.com and javamusic.com
The problem with this is that it ignores the SSSCA.
Under the DMCA, it's illegal to circumvent DRM, or to own a device that could circumvent DRM. Under the SSSCA, you're not allowed to have anything that doesn't enforce DRM.
The implications to this are subtle, but incredibly profound.
Since all devices that don't enforce DRM are illegal, there will be no MP3 players (as we know them today.) Instead there will be MP3DR(TM) players, which will refuse to play anything that does not include DRM information (after all, the only reason that media would not have DRM information would be if this information had been removed.)
This means that Joe Garageband will have no outlet to independantly distribute his music. In order to do that, he'd have to buy an MP3DRM license, which (like the CSS licenses) will cost more than his house.
In a world where every piece of technology enforces DRM, independants will have no way to distribute their work.
It will be even worse than the current RIAA oligarchy - today, anyone with a couple of hundred bucks can distribute their own CDs; in a SSSCA-world, that gets changed to anyone with a couple of hundred bucks and an additional hundred thousand dollars can distribute their own DRMCDs.
The drug analogy is false. Intoxicated and adicted people obnox their neighbors. Obnoxious people get put in jail. People who create software and music are productive and useful. No society that quashed productive activities has lasted very long. All societies have had laws and mores regarding intoxication. Even the most primative societies have strict rules on time and place.
Freedom of speech and publication are better analogies. After all, free software will continue to flourish given the right to publish code. It is impossible to keep people from saying and writting what they believe, as they can conceal themselves and publish anonymously. Drug useres can not conceal themsleves forever and the substances they depend on for their recreation have no legitimate uses besides medical perscription. There is no substitute for free speech in a viable society. There are many better ways to entertain yourself than intoxication.
Drug use is a thing to put into the past.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I see no future for DRM beyond the next few years of froth as we come to grips with the implications of abundance and the importance of openness in the realm of ideas, information and algorithms. DRM is the death throws of an information scarcity based worldview. The existing players are doing their damest to insure a new information abundant open world does not replace their world. Ultimately, for the wellbeing of all of us, they must fail.
Fundamentally I do not believe in "Digital Rights" in terms commonly used which is a supposed "right" to block the free flow of information and require others to do the same. I believe in freedom.
How about a world without DRM. Copyright law applies to any work, whether or not it is "digital" and all this DRM bullshit is a "job-security" scheme for big business. No, let me rephrase that. Big business thinks it has the right to profit. It doesn't. Furthermore, markets change. Businesses have to change their management methods in order to stay in business and make a profit. These businesses think they can sit on their ass with their thumb up their butt and rake in the millions. They're wrong, and this should NOT be supported by technology or laws. And there needs to be competition, so that companies need to make quality products in order to stay in business. The whole copyright and patent thing was supposed to provide for TEMPORARY benefits, to encourage people to share their work. Big business has and is and will continue to abuse that system to the max. No manager or executive in big business today gives a flying fuck about quality in products. They only care about their bottom line. The most effective way to achieve this is by getting all sorts of horrors of laws passed. Essentially, the government and all these businesses are a supermafia that provide "protection" to each other. In effect, they're eliminating the necessary competition and replacing it with monopolies that control various markets. Furthermore, do you remember a few years ago when people talked about convergence? Let me remind you: computers and televisions and stereos and phones and shit were all supposed to become interoperable and stuff. The combination of DRM technology and laws, all these companies will essentially control everything technological that we do. To make matters worse, they make violations into felonies, where people will get thrown in prison alongside rapists and murderers. This is the beginning of a police state, because one thing leads to another. Think I'm full of shit? Wait 20 years and then come back and reread this comment. Oh wait a minute, it probably won't exist anymore because the Ministry of Truth will come around and rewrite it so it says the opposite and tells how wonderful DRM is. So fuck DRM and fuck all those who support it. If you support it, fuck you! The government, Walt Disney, Microsoft, AOL Time Warner, the RIAA, MPAA and every other thug I've forgotten to mention have no business telling me what hardware and software to use, and to throw me in prison when I try to get real work done with products of my choice. So fuck them too. Remember, one thing leads to another.
Keep the medium's clean. Use a small hardware key as the mechanism to enable access to the device that plays the medium. Enable the key via remote technology that way users don't have to plug it into the device playing the medium. I guess it would be like a form of cyber cash sort of because you would go to the store, buy a cd and the cashier would add the cd's UPC code to it thus one now has purchased access to it. For internet users if they download a song and wish to play it the player would already know whether or not they already purchased access to the song via the remote interface to the hardware key. If they purchased access then it would play. That way if someone purchased a cd and a record, for instance, then they would be purchasing the medium for each but access only once!
How would the hardware key work as far as computers or other hardware devices are concerned? Well I imagine there will be a DRM software API for it. Perhaps a blue-tooth connection would be build into IP players and the IP would indicate to the DRM interface that access was required. If so then get the key from the hardware key nearby (which ever one that might be). If no hardware key was available for access, then the user of the IP would goto there key and indicate purchase of access if they believe that the purchase amount is appropriate. Also the hardware key should have cloning ability. The owner of the hardware key would pay to get a clone hardware key. If access was not required then the IP would play by default.
This all sounds complicated. The ultimate result of DRM will be that people will become accustomed to older IP which has expired its IP licensing period (Shakespeare's works and others). There will become a primary pay market for the elite and a secondary market for the non-elite. The elite will become arrogant and snobbish and stale. The non-elite will have the creativity and the fans and will continue to do concerts and whatever else in addition to providing IP distribution which individual users will then burn their own cd's and what have you.
Just my thoughts.
The statement below is FALSE
The statement above is TRUE
I almost bothered with a real reply that about the difference between HL keys and the system that was discussed - which is used in games like Tribes2 where there is a master server (just like UT,Q3) but there is also a login server. The login server ensures that your CD key is not being used by another player.
But then I figured why bother...
Here's my vision for the future. This won't really be possible in 20 years unless we somehow come to terms with the evil that is perpetrated by letting corporations be 'citizens'. But I think it's a nice idea anyway.
As manufacturing technology increases and physical needs become easier and easier to meet, the most advanced country will be the one with the most advanced information. Allowing greedy business men to step in and buy rights to content so that they can milk it for easy money is not only somewhat disgusting to writers/artists/musicians, but also counterproductive when we are trying to advance the state of information. To think that selling something for more money adds to the GDP is an indicator of the sad state our capitalist system is in.
Information has more VALUE (remember value != money when things are easily duplicable) when it's widely disseminated for everyone to have access to it. Therefore, if we want to protect content creators rights and still maximize productivity, we need a system that involves no corporations skimming off the top. I would favor a system where there is a free distribution mechanism, and a reliable 'dividend' system whereby end-users could donate directly to the content creator. The system would work even better I think, if there was a general fund coming from tax dollars where each citizen had a set amount of money that they could earmark for different content creators. This would truly let the people decide what is worth paying for. The implementation is far beyond any current technology though... we couldn't even begin to think in this sort of mindset until we get real campaign finance reform and GET CORPORATIONS THE FUCK OUT OF GOVERNMENT. Thank u
EMusic's low quality mp3s are ok for dialup users, but I'm not about to waste my time with the trial membership, let alone fork over any cash for tin can recordings.
There is a market here and money to be made. They should offer 128kbs downloads for $5/month and high quality ogg vbr downloads $10/month. If the servers were fast I would belly up to the bar. Right now my best option for price/selection/quality/interoperability is illicit channels.
We have the best government that money can buy.
20 years from now it will be discovered that this post was the final inspiration for a couple quiet college students to change the world by bringing lawforge.org online leeding to DRMs demise.
Powered by sourceforge, lawforge took an amazing open source software collaboration system and turned it into the worlds most amazing instrument of true "for the people, by the people" democracy.
Within months of going online the system included
e-lobbying facilities and a foundry for connecting
lawforge crafted bills with elected officials to sponsor them. Harvard's OpenLaw immediately started a close collaboration with the site
providing a vast wealth of real legal expertise.
In 2004 riaa and the mpaa were both ruled to have
used many of their copywrites in an anticompetitive manner and lost the ability to
claim infringment. Napster immediately reverted
to its original, subscription free operation, and
music sales reached an all time peak.
This coincided nicely with a few high profile DRM cases (the berkely e-textbook riot, and the problems the senate had with its new tablet computer and e-legislation system). Couple that with growing consumer unrest (mostly due to a new active license authentication scheme deployed by microsoft) and increasing awareness in the business world that the only companies seeing ROI on DRM products were those selling them, the mood was set and the first bill crafted by lawforge
easily passed the house, senate, and was signed into law.
The Consumer Digital Rights Act of 2004 had many
effects, most of which, like the growth of the
VHS tape industry surprised media industries by
actually resulting in increased sales and new
revenue streams while protecting "common sense"
rights of consumers.
The rules governing click through licensing and opt-in systems are notable, but the major
impacts for geeks are the severe restrictions
placed on copy-control hardware and software.
In an almost mirror opposite of a bill proposed in
2001 (the sssca) CDRA mandates open standards and
interfaces for all enduser data in hardware and
software systems, including purchased data such
as audio/visual data or databases. The CDRA also enshrines the right to reverse engineer and recognizes code, be it object or source (just translations afterall) as protected speech. The economic boom resulting from the increased interoperability
and connectedness of systems is record breaking.
Even the DRM companies fair well, changing strategy and becoming security companies marketing an extra layer of protection to corporations and government for their sensitive data.
And all because a couple geeks somewhere realized
it would be a neat hack to redirect and transmogrify all the geek bickering about proposed new laws into actually creating new laws they support which protect them.
It's time to escape the legislative fire fighting
mode and spew out some good hacks to create a
manageable system.
DMR, Digital Content Ownership, Copyprotection, Anti-Fair Use all boil down to Value-for-Value Paid.
It isn't just money. My world is limited by TM&E, Time, Money and Energy. I have limited amounts of all three. Once you get past food, clothing, housing and a car, there is a furious competition for disposable income, free time and my personal energy budget which gets expended coping with modern life and putting up with the hassle.
When I consider a purchase/investment, these are things I take into account.
1. What does it give me besides a bill? If I am not interested in that, end of discussion.
2. Can I afford it? Forget the purschase price, what is the cost of ownwership. That includes the cost of leveraged replacement. If there is a significant risk of being rendered obsolete by the unavailability of players, readers, etc. then that is a hassle factor. For example, I would never buy an item with a built in self-distruct timer.
3. Can I afford what I must give up to get/use this item. Could my money/time/effort be better used elsewhere? When I step back and stike the bottom line, will I feel satisfied or cheated?
4. Is it practical? There is no way en eBook is as rugged and dependable as a dog-eared paperback.
I can sit on a paperback & not break it. I can read it without using electricity and the battery never dies. And I can afford to forget it somewhere and lose it. Try that with an eBook reader.
5. Is it worth the trouble to use it? Food Processors do wonderous things, but are shelfware because they are so complex to set up, use and clean. The higher the hassle factor, the less value an item has im my world.
6. Is it worth the time it takes to use it? Why would I rip a CD or download music when it takes hours and ties up my PC and internet access? I can get a better product in 15 seconds at Wal-Mart. It isn't worth my time.
Historically, copy protection schemes have failed except in nitch markets where the user feels the value of the item is worth the hassle of a dongle or like mechanism. Remember when software was distributed on floppies and the catalogs put stars beside items that were copy protected?
All these scheme are aimed at the legal purchaser of the product, not the thief. The bad guys use the digital equivalent of Xerox machines to do a bit level copy that is absolutely identical to the original.
To be practical, any antitheft mechanism must allow the legal purchaser to exercise what he feels are his legal "Fair Use" rights, be brain dead simple for the legal user and not compromise the value of the product for his normal use.
For example, a CD that plays in my stereo, but not in my car is defective and will be returned for my money back.
Those who chase the chump change represented by Fair Use copying will fail because they abuse, threaten and criminalize the purchaser of their product.
When this happens, I will use as little of that product as I can, will jump to a an alternative when it become available and, in the mean time, will use whatever means necessary, legal or not, to exercise what I feel are my Fair Use Rights.
Prohibition tried to outlaw drinking. It didn't work because the average person saw no value to it. Excessive DRM will likewise fail because the average person feels no obligation to enrich the greedy holders of digital copyrights
It's more interesting than anything else here!
Here you go!
I wasn't aware of that. So how does one become a record label? I mean conceivably couldn't you sign yourself? :)
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
The thing that gets me about any digital rights management scheme is the complete disregard for the other half of an obviously economic problem. *Lower prices* would get me to put up with just about any restriction. The RIAA and MIAA should learn from the software industry where horribly inflated prices have created insurmountable piracy. The perfect example of this is shareware. I always pay for shareware because it's rarely more than US$50. Software that costs $1000 a license is way off my demand curve. If an ebook cost a dollar or two (which when you subtract from a book the price of physical cost and overhead is about what they're worth) I will happily pay for copies -- and even pay for copies for friends.
There are two variables currently in digital media: convenience and cost. They are also inversely proportional. Make it inconvenient, and people will find a way to get it for free. Make it cheap and people will happily jump through a few hoops.
In all the discussions about DRM, streaming audio, perceptual encoding, etc., I do not think I have read one mention of DRM in Liquid Audio. The sound quality is quite decent all-in-all. It uses watermarking to uniquely identify content. It uses various parameters to set number of plays, expiration, whether or not to allow burning to CD, and so forth. Yet hardly anyone is using it.... They seem to have the technical issues pretty well solved and reasonably balanced against consumer needs, but evidently not much market exists.
I bought a downloadable live show in LiquidAudio by the artist Momus from the CDNow site some time ago. Supposedly I can move this file from one computer to another, but have to supply a credit card number again. Frankly I do not recall, andit does not matter much for the following reason:
I was also able to capture it digitally, so that I could edit down some of the between-song quiet (the banter, btw, is quite worth keeping), and make it fit on an 80-minute CD-R. Now, I would be quite leery about redistributing it, due to the claimed link between the watermark and my own self (via the credit card number). But, I was indeed able to alter this content to my preference, and copy it to a new medium (CD-DA on CD-R media).
The method of copying, btw, was to send the audio to a pro audio card, and record the monitor mix (pure digital) in a sound editing app.
Any way they try to stop this would also stop me from being able to record and mix my own, original creations, in which I hold the copyright. Somehow I doubt the RIAA would mind that very much. But, I do think that the very least a centralized government could do is to protect the ability to create intellectual property in the first place!
I suppose Liquid Audio could refuse to stream to a pro card. Then I would have to buy an ordinary low-performance sound card to hear this content. But then we have those pesky analog outputs to contend with. This is where the watermark comes in...
Plenty more to say on this topic, but another time.
Let's see, I have a vauge memory of the British legalizing opium in China. The problems created were so great that the adicts were exected without sympathy later. It's hard for addicts to support themselves, and they turn to crime to obtain the impossible quantities they need before they overdose and die.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My prediction for the future of DRM is: VASTLY LOWERED PROFITS for users of it.
I will deprive those who deprive me of my fair use rights, of profits.
DRM is a method of extortion - plain and simple. And the risks are too high. If the clearinghouse goes out of business, is attacked, or has a problem with the DB - I'm denied use. Do I get to sue when I can't watch the movie I 'licensed'?
Besides - when I see a commercial saying "OWN it on DVD or VHS today" - the whole concept of 'licensing' seems somewhat suspect...
For 200 years Copyrights and Patents have worked just fine. Leave them alone. The fact that people pirate anything is just market forces at work. Charge less, and more people will buy it. Rip us off, and we'll return the favor
How do you give 10000000000+ people access to the key to a certain door (the key to decrypting the content you've sold them) without at least one of them being smart enough to realize he has a key in his hands ?
...
Any sane person should realize this simply cannot be done. Try all you want - law - encryption schemes - watermarks -
The only thing it *might* be able to do is give you a very strong argument in court that you indeed produced the content (watermarks can be used for this purpose). that is if they are undetectable, otherwise nothing can be accomplished with them.
Now the smart *NOT* thing to do is to prevent academics from working out a decent theory about this, so that in turn one may be able to use it to actually put a decent lock on one's content (although I think they will probably prove mathematically that it cannot be done)
any thoughts ?
How many inventions or advances over the last 20 years were supposed to "lower costs"? So why didn't things get any cheaper? Because they lower costs to the producer, but the producer just takes a higher profit. Don't ever believe an argument that says "technology X will lower costs to consumers" unless the producers are subject to market forces - which the music industry is not.
The real future is in authenticity. Just look at the satire mp3s on the net that get attributed to Weird Al Yankovic, that he never wrote. How do you know that this song you downloaded is really by him? How do you know it's not? How do you know that it wasn't modified to delete an explative, delete a line one person didn't like, add in a new stanza in order to defame the artist, etc? You don't. There is no way to prove that the movie you're watching really is an unedited copy of The Godfather. You can't be sure that your copy of Eminem's latest CD isn't the Lovey-Dovey-Censorship-Agency's "modified for familes" edition.
What would you be willing to pay for a method to prove that yes, this song is the artist's original? Or that this movie has not been edited for television? $15 a CD, I doubt. But 50 cents a song? $1? I'll let the economists figure that one out.
What we need is to expand watermarking and key-based signatures (NOT encryption, signatures) to make it easier to confirm that a given piece of work is authentic. Instead of CDDB being a clearing house for stealing people's information about their CDs, make it (or something like it) into a low-cost subscription service with public keys. When you play an mp3, the track info for is is confirmed against the key (which you can download permanently) to check that the file has not been modified. If it passes, you know that this is a "genuine, authentic *insert work here*". If it fails, you know that chances are it is not. If you care, you'll go and find a real one. If you don't care, that's your perogative.
Notice that nowhere in there is there any copy-prevention mechanism. None. Copy prevention is alien to any digital system, and is inherently weak, defeatable, and in the end futile. Authentication, however, is a booming industry, and is of legitimate value to the society.
Protecting against lies is in EVERYONE's interest. Preventing copying is in no one's interest, not even copyright holders.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
What is this DRM thing? Some new
scheme by copyright and patent mongers to
force everyone to use thier copy protection
scheme?
Screw that. I will save in whatever format
I like and I will share it with whoever I want.
And no lawschool DRM mafia can change that.
Wired Issue 9.10 (on newstands now) has a very in-depth article on DRM, including the methods that content developers are looking at, who the major players in the field are right now, etc. In a nutshell, prepare to pay more than once for everything.
The full article (along with the rest of the issue) will be available online on Oct 16: http://wired.com/wired/archive/9.10/.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
We currently have copyright laws simply because it is logically impossible to retain physical control of something once it is released. These laws allow copyright holders to seek compensation if their works are used without the copyright holder being adequately compensated. All proposed forms of DRM are flawed in that they have a goal which is impossible to realize.
Laws like the DMCA seek to bolster this illogical scheme by making the earlier actions involved in the process of violating a digital copyright, also illegal. It will of course have no effect on the determined thief, and it will greatly tempt the law-abiding to become criminals due to their aggrivation over the inconveniences DRM-attempts will surely impose.
For companies who wish to implement DRM-like controls over their data, there is only one possible solution. Never physically release the data from their own control. Using decryption hardware inside tamper-proof USB soundcard/speakers, they could prevent everything except re-recording with an analog microphone.
How can you make such a tamper-proof speaker? Well, one way might be to have the decryption key stored in a CMOS battery-backed RAM, and the case rigged so that various intrusion types would disconnect the power, erasing the key. The interior might be pressurized slightly, with a pressure switch detecting changes. Easily broken fine wires could be incorporated throughout the plastic case and even through the front speaker grills. The interior could have a light sensor. Dozens of other methods could make it arbitrarily difficult to get an electrical connection to even the analog content.
To play protected content, you must have a set of these speakers, period. Their only problem would be creating a standard and getting the public to use it. If they gave such speakers away for free,
they might actually have a chance of getting such a scheme accepted. Heck, they could actually "loan" or rent them to people, with a regular schedule of "quality checking" to make sure they are still whole. Also, portable music systems could be developed which were built entirely into a set of tamper-proof headphones.
Regarding re-recording from analog, some people have proposed using watermarking systems to make even analog sounds identifiable as protected content. The idea is that you could then build/mandate sound cards which would refuse to digitize such content via the line-in jack. Even if a watermark could be developed that didn't hurt sound quality, the hardware necessary to digitize audio can be easily constructed from standard off the shelf components. Once digitized, the watermark can be filtered out. I think that there is no way that this can be prevented, without making electronic component availability more regulated than guns!
In short:
If companies want DRM-like control, basically they should/must provide the hardware to view or experience it. The same concepts can be applied to video or E-Books.
Sorry if this is a bit rambling.... Off the top of my head and all...
That's no mere story! It's recorded in Herodotus' Histories. The king in question was Xerxes II, ruler of Persia in ~450 BCE. He was trying to build a bridge across the Hellespont (in the upper right of this map -- almost 2/3rds of a mile, no small feat back then) when a sudden storm tore apart the almost-completed bridge.
Xerxes flew into a rage and ordered that the Hellespont be given 300 lashes with a whip. During the whipping, the scourgers were instructed to say a variety of hateful insults to the ocean, and then a pair of leg irons were thrown into the sea as additional punishment. To top it all off, he had the sea branded a few times!
Xerxes wasn't really trying to make a point so much as he was a megalomaniac (he believed he was an incarnated god).
I believe the saying goes something like "Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense to the writer."
(Extrapolation to our current commander-in-chief is left as an exercise for the reader.)
DRM is a tool to enforce law, not making law.
So, DRM should fully comply to law, acknowledge differents of law according of time and space, and well prepared for change.
By fully comply to law, a DRM should represent the lawmaker will, to protect the creater as well the public. A DRM should not enforce an act when there is a need of involve from court or other parties, for example, if there are gray area or there involve rights of particular individual or party. DRM should report to the authority for record but not enforce an act. A concept is very important is that a DRM should not prevent access in any circumstance because it will protentially breake the law. DRM should report the access instead. In one word, DRM should fully comply the law instead of partially comply to the law.
There will be a lots of changes and different in law involved. DRM should be flexable enough to adapt to the changing environment. To make that smoothly, a machine readable language or a structure for represent the law is very needed. Law maker may even use this language to use this language in validating or simulate the new law.
Encourage create, transmit and consume of intellectual works is so fundament in our life, that intellectual relatived law will be more and more important. Right now, only the vendors is interested, but there are current trans that ordinary people is getting more and more involved into it.
It is land and capital to the old economic that intellectual properties to the new economic. That is very very important. If there will be war because of it, I would not be very surprise. That is even preditable.
DRM is so important that they should be under very seriously audit and monitor, Its application should be open to all, making it trustworthy and traceable.
The problem about the idea of "copy protection" for media (music, video, books, photographs, etc) is that it overlooks the basic principle of data: *** If you can read it, you can copy it. ***
People that are intent on preventing people from copying should forget DRM and focus on adding value to the original. In case of a CD, make it come with a coupon for 50% a ticket to see that artist in concert, or a signed photo of the artist, or anything else that would make the consumer want to buy it.
The most DRM will ever do is potentially make it more difficult for people to get "good" copies of the data. I've seen several people in this forum talk about encrypting the data and having all kinds of hardware support so that it is unencrypted at the last possible stage before a human needs to interpret it (hear the music, etc). This is all interesting, but this is easily circumvented by running the "speaker out" lines to your stereo, or another computer and recording the analog output. Then you can re-encode the recording into MP3. Most of the time (and I have done this), the result is excellent.
*All* DRM techniques for media can be circumvented in similar ways. I saw a webpage (wish I could find the URL now) where a guy took one of the e-book readers that stored the text encrypted and proceeded to place the reader on his scanner and scan the book page by page. Then he ran the scanned pages through a program that converts faxes/images into raw text by image recognition of the characters. It took him a few days to do it, but he was able to make an exact copy of the book. I thought it was hilarious. I'm sure the people who engineered the e-book reader's security never thought of that. I mean, if someone was patient and determined enough, they could just copy the book by hand just by typing it in.
DRM is a bit different for computer programs or things that are dynamic and have user interaction as they can require interaction with a remote server for verification. Thats why CD keys with online games work, or the "dongle" that some high-end applications use to verify a user. However, these things are not perfect, there are ways around them too (intercepting network data, cracking the binary, etc). Its just a bit more technical than running the speaker out to your stereo to record your favorite song.
DRM will never solve the problem. It will always fail just due to the fact that "if you can read it, you can copy it". The most it will do is annoy people and cause unending frustration for the people trying to support DRM. Give up now and focus on added-value to the real product... something that seems to have been forgotten.
Look, it says right in my post that I don't like the idea of DRM. I also hint that I don't think it's feasible. Why are you attacking me like I'm a proponent? The poster of this story asked for ways that DRM could be used to benefit the consumer. I think this is a legitimate one.
The people who are saying that DRM could "obviously" never work for this are also not thinking very hard. What if:
I send the various bits of my information to buy.com, encrypted in such a way that they cannot read it. However, they CAN send the data to the post office / UPS (for shipping), my credit card company (for billing), etc.
Maybe:
I encrypt a random number, buy.com's unique ID, and my postal address with the post office's public key. I send this to Amazon.
Amazon can now verify with the post office that this is a real address, and ask the post office to ship a package to me, without them ever knowing what my address actually is. The post office will reject the message if it says buy.com inside but comes from amazon, which prevents anyone who steals this information from using it. The post office might use the random number to reject future uses by amazon, so that they can only send me that first package and nothing ever again.
Now, I'm not saying that's feasible or foolproof. But at least it has no deficiencies as obvious as "they could just write it down". Some DRM is more clever than you think.
Good luck. Let's use 128 bit keys. That's only 16 bytes, so it's practically nothing to transfer.
There are 2^128 possible keys.
Let's say you could have your client send one billion packets per second, and that you had a million clients. That's about 2^20 * 2^30 = 2^50 keys per second. Now, let's run that for a billion seconds (32 years). You've tried 2^80 keys. That is only 1/281,474,976,710,656 of the total keyspace.
How could you expect to get random collisions with such odds?
I've read the commentary to date and it seems to me that the entire theme is about bilateral rights.
h /) is a very thought-provoking exploration of these issues.
Our word "own" is so absolute. I either own something or I don't. But what is it that I own? Do I own a copy of a book, or do I own the words in the book? If I own a physical copy of a book, do I have the right to destroy it? To give it to a friend? To lend it to a colleague? To sell it to someone else? To scribble on it? To criticize it? To quote from it? To copy it? Many of these rights are well established in the law or by traditional usage. Many of the efforts to control digital rights in the modern era are disturbing because they violate our concepts of some of the rights that we are used to having with things like books.
Clifford Lynch's piece "The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World"
(http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/lync
Anyway, the world is a lot more complicated than just "own" or "not own". Most things actually have multiple rights claimants, even including "simple" things like music.
Here are two examples - anatomical X-rays and music.
A friend of mine once told me that after our lunch meeting he was on his way over to the lab where his orthopedic X-rays had been taken. Why? Because he'd heard, accidentally, from them that they were soon going to discard his X-rays but that they'd give them to him if he came to pick them up.
Given that he's an athlete who stresses his skeleton and suffers injuries periodically, he concluded that keeping the historical record of his skeleton would be of significant value to his personal health in the long term.
Hearing this made me think about the "ownership" of the X-rays. Who owns them? Is it the lab that created them physically and had custody? Is it the doctor who ordered them in the course of treating my friend for his various injuries? Is it my friend, whose bones were depicted?
Each of these has some sort of claim. The lab has a claim because they did work to create the pictures. The doctor who ordered them has a claim because she used her professional judgement in deciding what X-rays to order and spent time and effort in evaluating them. My friend has a claim because they're of him.
Here's another example. A piece of music has quite a large number of claims on it. The person who wrote the lyrics can make a claim, as can the person who wrote the music. Sometimes they're the same person, sometimes not. The singer who sang the words has a claim. So does each musician who performed, whether as a soloist or as a backup artist. The engineers who did the recording and the mixing have claims, as does the producer.
In the music biz these claims are usually either ceded for up-front cash payments, or are spelled out in contracts.
A digital rights management system should be flexible enough to accommodate all of these examples.
And, by the way, these are the simple ones.
It's my understanding that Felons can't vote in many states of the USA. Therefore, those prosectuted for copying IP will be denied their democratic voice. Not that Democracy isn't a major sham anway.
Time to start encrypting and spoofing everything - or time to Smash the State and do away with private property once and for all!
Vive La Revolucian!
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
We have different social pastimes now (IRC?). [We have...] even MORE oppourtunity to get their music out to the public than ever before. /. is almost a completely glass half enpty crowd. -- AwfulTruth
/. terms, think of pre-1970 as the age of open-source music, and of the recording industry as a monopolistic trust that used a combination of legalistic, marketing, technical, and social forces to impose a Microsoft-style music infrastructure. You maintain that individuals can still pursue music to their hearts' content in their free time, and that's certainly true, just as independent programmers can develop their own operating systems and programming languages. But if you want to make a living in the music biz, or in the software biz, you must walk down very specific avenues. To continue the analogy further: in another 25 years, if the software biz develops like the recording biz, there won't be any normal career path for an average person to become a professional programmer; a few braniacs will go to work for Microsoft and a handful of large developers, but the rest of the world will just push the 'play' button and be happy with what we're sold, just like CD music customers.
You make a valid point. But 'getting music out to the public' is not the same as experiencing live music in daily life, or having a reasonable chance of making a living as a working musician. I agree that we have new social pasttimes, and perhaps my position is a little 'in the old days things were so much better, blah blah blah'; as I said in my original comment, this is a complex issue of long-term social change and I didn't mean to trivialize it.
However, I still maintain that our culture has lost much by taking live music out of our normal experience, and I believe that the recording industry gets much of the credit for this shift. By analogy, to put in in
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
To ban "political contributions / donations" (aka BRIBERY) altogether.
Why can't politicians run for elections without donations? If all politicians are stripped off their election donations, we still have a level playing field. They should be paid with TAXDOLLARS, not bribe money.
There is NO valid reason why corporations should contribute. How they're going to survive should be totally dependant on economics, not laws. Governments should not interfere how business is done, well, maybe except anticompetition laws. That's why we should let DRM have its own life, and do nothing with it legally.
How, then, can companies protect their works? Good question. More protections. But they shouldn't depend on laws. There had always been a competition between protectors and crackers. They were doing it purely technically. Which was all good - if you cracked my protection, I'll strengthen it. Only the sucker would want the laws to stand by them, to "outlaw" the crackers - even if they don't steal.
I mean, if you leave your door wide-open, how can you accuse somebody of entering your house to take some notes and then tell his friend what he saw in your house? It should be all legal.
And with corporate (minority) interest out of the question, majority interests will be served better.
Eventually the pubilic learns that which the nerds already know. Please they have computers now right. Besides the fact they think of them as boxes with the awsome power of windows. HAHA. The public will feel raped and will lobby against these laws. It is unfortunate that we will just have to continue to find solutions to solve these problems created by well paid nerds, or is that not in a way fun to us?
I think that Col. Klink is actually confusing Xerxes with King Canute (or Knud).
Canute's courtiers, during their profuse brown-nosing, claimed that Canute was "So great, he could command the tides of the sea to go back". He made his point in return by having his throne carried to the seashore, and he sat on it as the tide came in, commanding the waves to advance no further. The point being that kings, while `great' in the minds of men, were nothing in the face of God's power. Were Canute an atheist, he would no doubt have done the same thing, only citing the "power of nature".
This reminds me of a headline from The Onion book: "World's Largest Metaphor Hit By Iceberg".
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Posting as an AC so not to undermine myself politically (and no, I'm NOT who you think I am.)
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
(I'm sure I'll lose yet another Karma point for this one, but...)
What is the word "draconian" in reference to? I first (and only) think of the Weis&Hickman Dragonlance books. There was a race of dolts named Draconians that were rather prevelant in the stories.
Anyone?
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Well, whatever you write, don't leave Charles Dickens out of it...
Electricity and water sure don't cost "practically nothing" in Los Angeles county, buddy. I doubt that Sprint and Verizon expect their cell phone plans to cost "practically nothing" in our lifetimes, either. Next time don't drink the bong water.
...when mankind finally invents replicators(things that convert energy into matter)...
I would have like to have had the chance to participate in this discussion, but I was asleep :(
If there is anyone still reading, let me ask you this. Do you watch TV? If so, is there anything that you like to watch religiously? Enterprise? Coronation Street? Friends back before it Jumped the Shark? And did you ever go out and forget to tape it, then ring your mom or your mate, ask them to tape it? Well unless they can break into your house, say goodbye to that.
Because DRM will also apply to TV. Programs will be copy protected. So you will be able to tape a first-run episode of The Sopranos, but only if you don't watch it at the same time, and you will only be able to watch it once. Or that old Friends episode, that's been on loads of times, so you will be able to tape it and watch it however many times you want, but don't expect to be able to lend it to your girlfriend's dad so he can watch it too.
This is not stuff that will affect geeks only. We need to be telling people about this, people outside of the napsterriffic MP3 downloaders.
Here's an idea. Find out your TD/MP/Congressman/Tribal leader's favourite programme. I'm sure that this sort of person regularly has to get someone to tape the News to see if theyre on it, or Bull Island to see if they're on that. Then tell them that they will not be able to do that within 3 years.
Then see how long this shit lasts...
The internet can provide a marketing and PR medium - a word-of-mouth campaign works better than any number of radio plugs (Blair Witch). A meaningful, user-friendly, consumer-driven DRM mechanism can ensure content creators can get paid for their efforts, and effectively bypass the distribution network altogether. What then is the role of the middlemen ?
This works at most "human" scale projects; movies are typically too big and expensive for individuals or small groups to be able to put together, although the a DRM-enabled broadband internet distribution network might work well for smaller productions.
It is a possible outcome - not a likely one, given the clout and political buynig power of the big media companies.
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
>On the other hand, the introduction of pure hardware >schemes that retain the cyphertext of the protected >material until it is transformed (within a tamper-proof >sanctioned device) into perceivable media
Hmmm....Remeber the Cue Cat?
Above guy is right.
.. 40 years later? What if he takes the matter to small claims for a ruling, and not hanging onto the end of a phone. Blind and diasbled support?
... outch
But on weakness, figure this -who is going to pay for all the extra hardware, phone support - for the life of the product. In the real world, every mass produced item is lean and cheap. DRM added stuff would go against a 200 year trend of cheaper products.
With a bog standard CD, it gets sold, and rest is profit - no additional support costs. . easy.
With DRM, you are asking joe consumer to pay extra for hardware that does nothing for him., except give him and his kids hassles. He looses the key and rings up for support - first six months may be easy, but what if 10
Talking of hardware, those sat decoders rarely last more than 6 years before being useless. I think this has about the same consumer support as digital television - none, or only if it works with what i have now.
Music: to be effective, all car radios will have to be replaced. The cost to play also has to be low... otherwise em will borrow or rent a 2nd hand cd - or book - and these will be around 50 years more - just like vynal records.
Who pays the capital re-equipment cost? what if all keys are somehow revoked, and all the ned flanders ring up to rightfully demand satisfaction. Support for PEAK demand is what matters, not average. The cost of refunding viewers for a 4 second boxing match
Consider all these fly-by-nite moble phone want-to-bees. The support costs are vastly underestimated, and product life underestimated.
In short DRM is doomed, unless libraries and the local video shop fare orced to close down, and a five year jail sentence for lending magazines etc.
Germany has involatile laws re above
I liken DRM to car wheel clampers - extortion according to Scotish Judges. So if in 20 years time, my never played impulse bought CD/DVD fails to play, then the legal damages will hurt.
Due to royalties ect, the big four media companies can't wriggle out of future claims like this - class actions.
In short if there companies want legal protection, then they had better start stashing away money for class action legal suits in 20-100 years down the track.
O. To get around this, they will have to clearly label the disk - good for 3 years only or the like.
Bang goes the collector market , but they will have to discount the product.
I believe the past is the key to the future on DRI. From the introduction of the 8-bit home PC, copy protection has been around in the form of bad sectors, encrypted or altered-format disks, etc.
Judging from the 'cracking' and "0-day warez" BBS sites that sprang up like toad stools, my thought is that it didn't work. Everyone that wanted a copy of some IP (illegally) could get it. Often, with features the original didn't have, like trainers and immortality modes.
Not even the mighty FBI could stop the kids. Of course, today, they'd be known as "terrorist cells" traced by demand for soda, pizza, and bandwidth.
In those glory days of 2400bps-14400bps modems, it was a single company doing everything they could in-house to keep their released programs safe. As any then-15-year-old hacker could tell you, it was fairly easy to break once you had a clue what was going on. The programs were closed-source, of course, and nobody was available from Electronic Arts or Sierra to leak how the protection worked. But it didn't matter. Often, all was necessary was finding a conditional jump in assembly code and either removing it or (my favorite) reversing the logic of the jump.
DRI will require a standard API across the board. It must be a fairly open standard, one implemented by many different companies different ways to achieve exactly the same spec. Of course, there will be licensing and NDA's to use the spec. But, de facto, it will be open.
Everyone who makes any program, anywhere in the world which must interface with DRI information must be trusted not to give away the milk cow. This could be intentional, by creating a program or chip that disregards DRI entirely. Or, a simple coding error or hardware misdesign could achieve the same effect. Lest we forget, it was a poor implementation of the DVD CSS that was ultimately attacked- by a kid.
We live in a world where we can't even get a 100% working closed-source OS from a single company. What will a multi-company, multinational hodgepodge of laws, DRI tech, and various unscrupulous coders bring? It would have to be mandated and codified by bureaucrats who couldn't begin to keep up with the inventive attacks of _kids_, let alone professional thieves. It will at best be fingers in the dike from the outset; and come crashing down with the first torrents of demand from the public at large.
And we can't jail all the kids.
-Ouija- poke 53280,11:poke 53281,12
If you want to read an interesting example of a working DRM system check the article on DoCoMo in Wired.
DRM has two types of users: consumers and producers. If the DRM technology is proprietary AND it is a standard, then the owners can limit supply, thus harming consumers and other producers. I suggest that the very legitimacy of DRM requires that it utterly level the playing field between producers. This affirms free market principles with all the attendent benefits to consumers and producers. When we standardize on a proprietary technology, we are killing progress in that area. What makes that acceptable? If we standardize on a proprietary DRM that not only kills DRM development, but also kills producers of the content it is purported to protect, then it is a fraud. Plain and simple.
Just as proprietary DRMs should not be criminalized, neither should they have the power to criminalize. We have a well-established legal precedent that allows us to reverse-engineer that which is not patented. Patent protection is a well-conceived means to balance public and private interests. To criminalize the act of reverse-engineering is to admit that the patent process is not sufficient.
The legitimacy of Law is directly proportional to the consent and involvement of those subject to it. The same can also be said (in a free society) about enforcement.
No legislation without representation.
The only conceivably good thing about effective DRM (assuming it ever happened), would be to reduce the amount of gouging that's justified by piracy.
The basic idea is that if it takes a software company a million dollars to produce and support a piece of commercial software, and they have a million customers, they could charge $1 per customer and break even. But if 100,000 buy it, and the other 900,000 get a pirated version, they have to charge $10 per copy to break even. So if effective DRM forced all 1,000,000 to buy it, they could sell it for a buck.
Same goes for movies. If they do pay-per-view, and everybody has to pay each time they view it, the price per view could be lower than it is now with the studios still making money. Personally, I like movies, but not obsessively like some people. And I think it might be nice to have some of the people who watch movies a billion times offset some of my casual viewing.
Of course, this won't happen. If DRM is implemented, it will not be effective. Perhaps it will be largely effective, but I seriously doubt any DRM will be effective enough to prevent software and movies from being pirated and sold on the streets of Moscow. And even if it does, the studios would just make more profit, not sell for less.
-Esme
Sure, creating public domain music has become very difficult:
- each song has at least 3 rightsholders: the performer, the songwriter and the composer of the music. Often a record company is the fourth.
- IP right laws have been modified so that it will take decades before some music will become public domain.
However: there are hunderds of thousands of music groups in the world. Most of them perform do it for the fun. They perform a few times a year and they may have a self-published CD - but they don't make money on it. A lot of these groups would love to make some of there music freely available.
There has been a website that devoted itself to publishing free music (I can't remember the name) but they had to shut down. However, as internet becomes cheaper at some day free music will become a factor.
When computers first became popular, so did copy protection. I quickly learned what a great evil it was. ...
I bought software that frequently didn't ever work, or stopped working quickly, because of copy "protection".
I have never received any benefit from copy "protection", nor has anyone I know. I've had backup jobs fail. I've had software refuse to install. I've had
Copy protection is a misnomer. It is theft. It has stolen weeks of my time and hundreds of dollars from me.
Making copy protection legal is no different from making any other protection racket legal. Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but not much.
As soon as feasible I refused to buy any software that was copy "protected". The analogies between copy "protection" and the MS license were one of the key determinants in my decision to switch to Linux.
Been there, done that, once was enough, thanks.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I agree, and I add that the part that you may not have clearly stated is that the music companies are not out there to sell you what you want, they are there to sell you what they 'have'. A tactic that clearly displays this is the census method of ad development. 'Corporate Americans' already have a product about which you are asked questions that ascertain the best method to sell you the product in question. They want to know what you desire so that they can make the product sound as dreamy as possible. The funny thing about artistic endeavours is that art is subjective, so if 'Bust-A-Move Records'says that an artist is the 'greatest-thing' the american consumer buys it lock, stock, and barrel.
This is the perfect example of a capitolist system using the herd mentality against the uninformed. The problem is not capitolism it is ignorance. So I stress again, Inform yourself and (more importantly) inform your friends.
DRM technologies are based on crypto; crypto tends to be open - a well-publicized algorithm is usually favoured over an obscure home-grown one. The products I've seen so far (and I have implemented some DRM solutions in the field) are pretty obvious. It's unlikely the media companies could control a DRM scheme - it would be too easy to crack, and you could easily imagine a napster-like revolution based on publicly available crypto and a handful of clueful bands.
I'm not saying it will happen, just that it could, and if it did, it mightn't be the worst thing in the world....
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
DRM - significantly Complex
Digital Right Management is very complex. Don't think about "what you do" (Can I read Chapter 1 in an e-book, then listen to Chapter 2 in the car). That is way too easy. DRM is about what you do, where you do it, what language you do it in, and how you do it. For instance: Hardcopy, Large Print, English, in Canada is one specific option of a contract. Or Audio, French or English, for USA distribution between 1/1/01 and 1/1/02 with a new Personal Digital Player by MegaCorp.
The first issue (in the process chain) is quantifying contract law. Most digital assets are acquired thru contracts. These contracts are written by lawyers. Now I love lawyers, I am related to several, but they don't write in Boolean logic. As such, computers have a hard time interpreting the contracts.
If you can't digitize the rights, how can you digitize he access?
Don't minimize this problem. To minimize this problem (by quantifying rights) would be to fight an entire industry (the legal system - which lives to fight nuances).
I have developed a recent DRM for a very high-end Publisher. It ended up on the shelf, because the legal group struck it down.
Prometheus