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Digital Rights Management Operating System
Anonymous Coward sent in a note about Microsoft being granted a patent on a "Digital Rights Management Operating System". Anything more to say? Nope, don't think so. After Windows XP will be Windows DRM.
It sounds like high time for some good ol' mob action. I would join in, but don't feel like being labelled a terrorist for supporting the rights of American citizens to control the products they own.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Its also not unexpected. Microsoft wants to make their OS the only one that can read digital media. Then they can convince companies to only release media in MS format. Then maybe, as a bonus, they can get Linux declared illegal as a circumvention device!
Step 1:
Get Sen Ernest Hollings (D-SC), to propose requiring OS's to use DMA.
Step 2:
Patent this concept.
Step 3:
Given enough cash/campaign contributions/graft, the OS design suggested in Step 1 will be developed.
Step 4: Microsoft, having patented this OS design, eliminates the competition, and rakes in cash.
They (Microsoft) can stop weaving the rope they intend to hang themselves with. It's plenty long.
I won't support *any* operating system that treats the data as having more important concerns than the machine's operator (me).
Buying Microsoft anymore is like saying: Please, treat me like a two year old, stifle my creativity and learning, keep me in the dark and feed me crap, and whatever you do, don't let me question your 'authority'.
Disgustedly,
If the hardware resides in my house, there will always be a fix. It may require paperclip jumpers and sacrificing chickens, but there will be a way to access data that is in memory or in some form on the computer.
Yeah, until most of the distribution/content sources begin using DRM, and then forcing all their artists, etc. to use DRM. Next thing you know, your new DVDs won't play on non Windows Media DVD players, because they are 'unlicensed' players.
Sure, there's a way around that, one could always hack that, until the DMCA rears its ugly head.
I don't think this can be good at all.
Maybe some folks will not only like, but will love this stuff.
Obviously this is intended to bew the final solution to pesky little things like user free will and responsibility.
the RIAA, etc are just going to lap this up.
Fortunately, the move to open source and Linux is picking up speed. As seen in this report in the Government Technology Mag many governments are looking in Linux for reasons of their national security.
While many folks like a comfy life, there are many that do not want the "comfy sofa technique" and who will rebel just because somebody says that they have to have things a certain way.
This keeps up, and I'll get ready to join "geeks with guns"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Look, don't blame Microsoft. If companies and organizations are clamoring for digital rights management software, software companies are going to produce it. Microsoft didn't go to the RIAA and say, "Hey, people are stealing your music, don't you want some digital rights management solutions?" The fact is if you don't want this type of thing occuring, your going to have to go after the content providers and your legislators, not the company supplying a requested product.
I think I'll stop here.
If a company has a patent for creating a DRM OS, then the SSSCA can't possibly pass, right? That would create an instant monopoly, if I understand broadly what's going on here.
Either that, or Microsoft would have to license the patented technology on a royalty-free basis, which for Microsoft's uses, makes it rather useless, right?
This reminds me of the the stuff on /. a while ago about the patenting of building codes. What if Microsoft is able to push through a law (sssca) that requires OSes to use DRM, and then they have the patent?
Yes this sounds silly, but 5 years ago a web browser built into the OS sounded silly. MS: Turning silly into reality.
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Twoflower
--
Twoflower
Unfortunately, as many crypto and media format experts have pointed out, it is impossible to truly protect content from being copied without authorization.
If someone can view it, someone will find a way to copy it. If a watermark is imperceptable to a person, it can be compressed out without anyone noticing a difference in quality.
These are based on the laws of mathematics and physics. Try as they might, the content owners and their representatives will never be able to change these immutable facts.
Unfortunately, law makers don't believe in the laws of physics or mathematics, only their own laws. When will the emperor discover that he has no clothes?
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
Yes, there was. The senator from south carolina who is not stom thurmund got put up to it. He backed down after it became aparent he didn't know what he was talking about. However, that's not to say that there won't be a similar, less broad legislation coming down the pipe (SSSCA could have applied to everything with a data input and a microprocessor).
SSSCA also said it would enforce a standard agreed-to or imposed upon by the commerce department... ol' senator hollings's staff didn't exactly do a patent search to check if a standard could get imposed upon the commerce department.
Apple would likely prefer to pay license fees to its minority owner, Microsoft anyway than leave the industry anyway.
... Must... Resist... Urge to flamebait...
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
Very true. See, what's happening here is that a company, rather than a government institution, is enforcing "digital rights management". This is essentially Microsoft's way of ensuring that all digital media is Windows-compatible only, and given most people's general tendency to flock to whatever's popular, it looks like they have a good shot at succeeding. I have no doubt that MP3 is here to stay, it's just a question of how readily available they'll be to everyday users. The latest Media Player won't play MP3s at anything better than 56kbps, which sounds something like singing underwater over a telephone. I'm fairly certain that under the auspices of Digital Rights Management, we'll start to see Windows reject the installation attempts of CD rippers, and given the fact that Windows still dominates the desktop market, that will dramatically reduce MP3 availability.
Granted, as for MP3 players like Winamp, they'll still exist, and Microsoft will have a hard time justifying any restrictions placed on installing that. It is disturbing, however, that Microsoft is becoming analogous to a government entity, where it has the power to restrict and regulate the behavior and actions of its users.
Okay, so that makes me paranoid. And maybe what I'm suggesting is a bit over the top. But it's still interesting to think about how one company has become so powerful. Then again, I look at something like AOL Time-Warner. Microsoft controls our desktop computers, fine. AOL-TW controls television, record labels, movie studios, news networks, and internet news sites. Those are the things that steer public opinion and tell many folks out there how to think. But they're much more subtle about it. Besides, if the news services are corrupt, who's going to tell us about it?
Okay, I'll stop my overly paranoid rant. If y'all excuse me, I think I'll go etch a few more conspiracy theories on the men's room walls.
/* Steve */
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of"-TMBG
Let us think about what that means. First, I assume by 'one company,' you really mean 'one operating system family.' Second, you're assuming that it will remain legal to have a non-DRM operating system. This may not continue to be the case; there is no legislation that bans non-DRM operating systems currently, but such legislation has been proposed in the past. Further, the media lobying efforts are heavily directed to getting such legislation.
Regarding the current congress and administation, there is cause for concern. It is likely that a law requiring a DRM compliant operating system would get passed, especially if it can be presented as an economic aid. The source of the worry is that Microsoft will certainly not license this "technology" to any other operating system authors. The inevitable patent battle means the world will end up with a total, unadulterated Microsoft operating system monopoly. This monopoly could be levered into all areas of software; cell phones, PDAs, routers, firewalls, basically any computing environment which can operate on the Internet.
Then again, maybe I'm just being paranoid.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
So if the government mandates DRM in all electronics, and Microsoft holds the patent on putting DRM in operating systems, that's pretty much the end of the road. Anything that uses an operating system (read anything that plugs into a wall these days) will have to go pay Microsoft for the right to exist.
Granted that's assuming that DRM requirements get passed which hopefull won't happen, but it is an interesting position for Microsoft to be in.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Let me paraphrase: Microsoft has a patent on an OS that prevents a computer from booting anything but the "digital rights OS" Seems to me this would do away with dual boot PCs rather nicely.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
One of the named inventors on the patent, Butler Lampson, is a famed CS person who is noted in the Jargon File. Microsoft Research has all kinds of famous computer folk working there, including the inventor of Qsort, the author of VMS, the author of Turbo Pascal (now C#), and others.
Of course, this rights-management is all useless (as any informed antivirus software user can tell you) as long as users have the right to execute whatever code they want on their PCs. No software is safe from attack from an emulator. They'd have to make VMWare and Virtual PC illegal, and make flashing your computer's BIOS to a different BIOS illegal to actually have this work and stop any but the most casual practitioners.
Of course the way the legal system is acting as of late, that may not be too unrealistic a scenario :-(
o/~ Join us now and share the software
MS and A/V copyright owners have been working together for quite a while to get consumers under control and have now recruited hardware vendors. With the just announced inclusion of special chip-level circuitry in hardware (today DVD players; tomorrow processors, northbridge and southbridge chips, graphics controllers, IDE controllers, memory controllers, etc) that supports proprietary MS codecs, how long before we see systems that absolutely can't be tricked into letting us defeat increasingly restrictive copyrights?
Clever hacks and alternative operating systems may not be adequate to circumvent DMCA-protected hardware-implemented protection schemes when your DVD drive, your CPU, and your motherboard are all working against you.
Can this happen? Of course. All it takes is for a few companies like Intel, AMD, VIA, and others to quietly implement some security features that aren't visible.
In a few years, when all of the hardware we're using today is obsolete and in a landfill, your new system will have a new 200X speed DVD burner and a new 1.3THz Pentium VIII with 2Gb memory and a pair of 6.0Tbyte discs, all tied together with a new 4GHz 128-bit wide PCI-4 bus. You'll be able to get 75,000 frames per second on Quake14. Too bad that none of your old hardware will be compatible with your new system, but that's the price you pay for performance. You'll be happy.
Your new system will also have a bunch of security features built into the hardware that you're likely unaware of.
Shortly after most people have these new systems, some media company will begin producing products that utilize those security features you weren't aware of. Your old media will still play, but you'll want to see the new movies and hear the new music and they'll only play if all of the security features are in place and active. You won't be able to do anything that looks like capturing, recording, or reproducing content.
Will some consumers be unhappy? Sure. Will the media companies care about them? No. Will there be anything we can do about it then? Not likely.
And, if you take the trouble to read the description of how the whole thing works, it comes down to the fact that the CPU can authenticate itself over the network at runtime by using this private key that ONLY the CPU can access.
Now, I don't know about you, but I haven't heard anything about Intel or AMD building public key / private key pairs into their CPUs. In fact, the whole Intel processor ID fiasco has probably scared them away from this area. Don't forget that this patent was filed in 1998, and was probably designed long before the PIII was released.
I think the most interesting thing about this is that it shows where Microsoft wanted to go in 1998 - they probably were working with Intel on the processor ID thing, and the next step would have been public / private keys to enable the design shown in this patent.
But it won't be happening anytime real soon. Unless maybe all those Pentium 4's out there actually have this as an unannounced feature. Unlikely, but possible - the P4 hyperthreading stuff was like that...
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Must pay royalties.
You are incorrect in your allegation that the government could not be sued for patent infringment. It actually happens now and then. Not often though, because the government purchases ip rights just like anyone else when they need to. What do you think provides the financial fuel to the military industrial complex?
Why do you think they have to purchase seat licences for Windows?
The answer is simple, because they are legally obligated to do so. If they do not the constitution itself provides for redress of grievences against the government. Trust me, MS would profer such griviences in the most strident terms. And have.
The government also collects its own patents, because if it did not it would be obligated to pay royalties to those that eventually patented the technology.
During the Manhatten project civilian workers were deemed to legally own all of their own ideas. The government thus issued a directive that all ideas, no matter how apparently trivial, were to be brought to the attention of the military command, and the federal government would pay them a dollar for each, so that IT held the ip rights.
You can find an amusing relating of how this worked in Feyman's autobiographical ramblings in " What do you Care what People Think?"
The book itself is a good read, and highly recommended even to a general audience, but the story in questiion is still highly relevant, as it relates to the ideas of obviousness of certain technological ideas. Feynman took the side that these ideas were so obvious they weren't patentable. Nonetheless, he ended up as the inventor of record of the nuclear power plant and the nuclear powered airplane. ( He also suggested the nuclear powered submarine as 'patently' obvious, but he dosn't get credit as inventor because someone else had already suggested it).
His relatings of his attempt to actually collect his dollar is extremely amusing as well. It seems the government didn't make any provision for, or believe it actually had to PAY the promised recompense. On principle Feynman wouldn't let them off the hook.
For that matter, any person who did not recieve their dollar would be fully within their rights to claim the patent as their own, as proper consideration was NOT in fact given, as required by the contract.
They could, in fact, have sued the government for patent infringment and insisted on royalties.
KFG
The SSSCA itself is unconstitutional. The argument is plain and simple.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
So, the government has the exclusive right to secure copyright. Enforcing copyright? Nope. If you look at Paragraph 401 of US Copyright Law, 1978, the owner of the copyright is required to initiate enforcement of the copyright by issuing some kind of declaration of infraction.
Plain and simple...the government cannot aid in the enforcement of a copyright UNTIL the enforcement has been begun by the copyright owner.
Now, relating this to Microsoft and their "DRM OS," there's nothing that says that some 3rd party can't aid in enforcing the copyright. HOWEVER, depending on how you interpret the law, the forced limitation on copyrighted material DOES infringe on the definition of "ownership."
As it's been said by now, according to Copyright Law, the ownership of a copyright and the ownership of the copyrighted material are mutually exclusive. Anotherwords, the ownership of a copyright DOES NOT INCLUDE ownership of the copyrighted material IN ANY WAY (Para. 202). Microsoft's limitation through digital encryption of the material when the material is owned by someone other than Microsoft directly conflicts with Para. 202.
A good example: say I purchase a book to read from a bookstore, but the book print is too small. I then go to Target to purchase a magnifying lamp so I can read the book. Microsoft is basically trying to say that it would be illegial for me to use the reading lamp to read the book unless the reading lamp was purchased from Microsoft itself.
Sorry, Microsoft, but if I own the music, I OWN the music. Your limitation of my EXCLUSIVE OWNERSHIP of the music is illegal.
I've noticed one thing curiously missing from the discussion surrounding digital rights management. What are, in the industry's eyes, the rights of the consumer? Everything I've seen about digital rights management suggests that the only rights being protected are those of the content owners. I think it would be fascinating to see a direct answer from the industry in response to this question.
One would expect, that DRM would bring significant new opportunities for the consumer; lower prices, perhaps, or the ability to share content with friends in a limited and fair way.
The DRM proposals I've seen thus far don't provide any new abilities for the consumer, though, and are therefore destined for failure since they represent a downgrade from current abilities at the same (or higher) prices. As the market continues to vote with its money for non-restricted media, I'd expect that the attempts to distort the actions of the market through legislation will become ever-increasingly shrill.
You see, now that the DMCA is law, they don't have to bother with this anymore. They don't have to have real secure hardware, or secure software. They just have to implement some half-assed, weak, pathetic attempt at security, and then sue the hell out of anyone who points out how pathetic and weak it is... Much more convenient then doing real security!
Here's my prediction of what will really happen with all this crap.
The government will extend the DMCA in a direction similar to that proposed by the SSSCA, but since that was clearly insane and would have made Linux and BSD illegal, they will "compromise".
The "compromise" will be that people can either (a) run "Digital Rights Management Compliant" operating systems from Microsoft, Apple, and maybe a few others, or (b) Get a license to run a "non-Certified" operating system. Getting the license will put you in a big database. Your IP address will be tracked. The government will get away with this because they will point out that only a small percentage of computer users will need to get licensed, and most of those will actually be ISP's running Linux servers.
Besides the ISP's and other companies, the only individuals needing licenses will be a few thousand software developers, and a small number of computer "hobbyists".
Microsoft will love this because it will be a huge obstacle to Linux on the desktop, counterbalancing the cost of Microsoft. People will think: So what would happen?
A bunch of Linux users would leave the US. A lot of them would get licensed. A lot of them would give up Linux and go back to MS or Apple. And Microsoft would win.
That's my nightmare scenario, anyway.
.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox