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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.
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
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
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.
. . . 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.
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!
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"
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 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.
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
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.
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?
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.