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.

Comments

Torches, anyone?

[Zen Mastuh]

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.

Re:Torches, anyone?

[Mr_Matt]

Holy crap - I wasn't thinking about torches until I read this little snippet from the patent:

The unusual property of digital content is that the publisher (or reseller) gives or sells the content to a client, but continues to restrict rights to use the content even after the content is under the sole physical control of the client.


...and later still...

The user that possesses the digital bits often does not have full rights to their use; instead, the provider retains at least some of the rights.

This "peculiar arrangement" (verbatim from the patent app) is everything that is wrong with the application of copyright law to digital media as opposed to analog media. Microsoft got it exactly right - it's a damn peculiar arrangement. Unfortunately for us, instead of realizing the crappiness of this situation, they've integrated the peculiar arrrangement part and parcel into a computer operating system, to the maximization of profit both for Microsoft and for "digital content providers." Here we have something as fundamental as a computer operating system designed around an idea that destroys rights we've otherwise enjoyed for literally hundreds of years - for nothing more than to line the pockets of people who are already famously rich. Time for torches, indeed.

Well,

[Gannoc]

This patent was filed January 8, 1999, so this is kind of old news, but hey, I'm always up for bashing MS...

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!

Re:Well,

[Eryq]

Then maybe, as a bonus, they can get Linux declared illegal as a circumvention device!

I wish this were just a joke, but thanks to the DMCA it may not be. Don't be surprised to hear Redmond begin to attack Linux more publically (and before Congress) as

• a "hacker's OS",
• a "lawbreaker's OS",
• a "cyber-theft tool",
• a "favorite of cyber-terrorists",
• a "threat to the economic security of the U.S.

If the DMCA becomes firmly entrenched (so that it is as taken for granted as, say, the law which says you can't operate a car without a license) , MS will simply drift all its protocols/formats into new proprietary and copyrighted ones which it will be a crime to reverse-engineer.

At least, that's what I'd do if I were an evil megalomaniacal SOB (or even if I were just running a publically-held company with a lot of powerful shareholders).

One ring to rule them all

[Jeremy Erwin]

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.

There's always a way in.

[siliconvortex]

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.

We have seen the Future

[Alien54]

Welcome to Microsoft Planet, folks.

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"

Good news

[Jobe_br]

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?

Summary of a DRM OS

[twoflower]

A digital rights management operating system protects rights-managed data, such as downloaded content, from access by untrusted programs while the data is loaded into memory or on a page file as a result of the execution of a trusted application that accesses the memory. To protect the rights-managed data resident in memory, the digital rights management operating system refuses to load an untrusted program into memory while the trusted application is executing or removes the data from memory before loading the untrusted program. If the untrusted program executes at the operating system level, such as a debugger, the digital rights management operating system renounces a trusted identity created for it by the computer processor when the computer was booted. To protect the rights-managed data on the page file, the digital rights management operating system prohibits raw access to the page file, or erases the data from the page file before allowing such access. Alternatively, the digital rights management operating system can encrypt the rights-managed data prior to writing it to the page file. The digital rights management operating system also limits the functions the user can perform on the rights-managed data and the trusted application, and can provide a trusted clock used in place of the standard computer clock.

So, basically you're screwed. If you load any software they don't approve of, the OS itself will prevent you from accessing any protected content, and any programs which _can_ access the protected content. Looks like something designed to prevent situations similar to the current DRM "fix" programs.

Twoflower

Re:This is good news...

[laertes]

That means that only one company will be enforcing DRM.

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.

Death of linux?

[GreenCrackBaby]

A fundamental building block for client-side content security is a secure operating system. If a computer can be booted only into an operating system that itself honors content rights, and allows only compliant applications to access rights-restricted data, then data integrity within the machine can be assured. This stepping-stone to a secure operating system is sometimes called "Secure Boot." If secure boot cannot be assured, then whatever rights management system the secure OS provides, the computer can always be booted into an insecure operating system as a step to compromise it.

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.

Microsoft has some really major people on this...

[Hobart]

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 :-(

resistance is futile...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Arrgh! No one's read the claims yet!

[Azog]

So far, none of the posters here have actually read the details of the patent. So everyone chill out for a second and read this critical little quote from the patent text:

The CPU manufacturer equips the CPU 140 with a pair of public and private keys 164 that is unique to the CPU [...] Other physical implementations may include storing the key on an external device to which the main CPU has privileged access (where the stored secrets are inaccessible to arbitrary application or operating systems code). The private key is never revealed and is used only for the specific purpose of signing stylized statements, such as when responding to challenges from a content provider, as is discussed below.

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...

I'd be interested in industry opinion

[Phil Wherry]

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.

Re:Arrgh! No one's read the claims yet!

[Azog]

Oh, I totally agree that Microsoft would love to do that be the only "legal" OS. And it may happen, but it won't have anything to do with this patent.

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:

Well, I can pay $200 for Windows and be up and running tonight, or I can fill out a big, scary form, send it in to the government with a $50 dollar fee, and be licensed to run Linux in two weeks..."

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.
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