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Hardware Copy Protection Battles
substatica writes: "Law.com is running this article on the content industry working to convince congress that not introducing hardware copyright protection ( as well as copy protection built into OS, Software, Web Browsers and Routers ) would eventually lead to the "industry's destruction", as put by Michael Eisner. We've been able to copy VHS for over a decade and they're still making movies. Does anyone really think that the movie industry will be eradicated due to copyright infringment?" Consideration of the SSSCA has been put off a few months, but it will be back. The Register covers one part of the split between content and hardware with this story about Philips getting more uppity about their Compact Disc logo, a follow-up to this story. The Reuters article that the Register refers to is here.
Call it Copy prevention because that's what it does!! Perhaps Copy interference even.
does the industry deserve saving? Maybe it's destruction would not be all bad. I guess we can all be thankful that there was no big scribe's union when the printing press was invented.
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
If you've noticed, the trend in the past 10-20 years or so has been for the entertainment hardware companies and the content companies to be acquired/merge/etc by one another. For instance, Sony owns Columbia, Matsushita (parent company of Panasonic) owns at least a stake in universal, etc. Or on the PC side, Microsoft is doing a lot with NBC.
It's possibly scary because now, instead of facing inertia from the electronics firms in terms of integrating DRM, now it changes the economics of the sitation, because now it will be in the hardware companie's best interests.
I don't know about this, but could this be perceived as possible anti-trust violation? Could you imagine if Microsoft bought a stake of a major PC maker?
Hmmm.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I just received a letter from my senator, John Edwards (D-NC) on this very matter.
He says "Thanks for contacting me to share your thoughts on the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA.) I appreciate hearing from you."
"As you know, this legislation, which has not yet been officially introduced in the Senate, would prohibit the manufacture of digital devices which do not include government-sanctioned copyright-protection technologies. A number of people have expressed concerns that this proposed measure is overbroad and that its restrictions on the duplication and distribution of digital content could be harmful to the technology industry. I understand your concerns."
"As a member of the Commerce Committee and the Judiciary Committee, I will keep your thoughts in mind should the SSSCA or similar legislation come before the Senate. I will also continue to consider ways to improve our copyright and internet security laws so they better serve the public. Your letter will help me in that work."
"Again, thank you for contacting me. Please let me know if I can be of assistance in the future."
"Yours sincerely, John Edwards"
What scares me here is, the continued work to improve our copyright and internet security laws....
We propose that all motor cars be limited to 5 mph, redesigned to eat horse-nuts, and regularly drop excrement on the road where others might slip on it. Only through this can our industry, essential to the American economy, be protected from these new dangers.
Taken to the extreme, the only way they will ever ensure rights management (whatever that means) is to encrypt the data stream from head to tail. This is a boon for everyone involved. Hardware manufacturers will build new hardware to support encrypted content, software manufacturers will write software to run on that hardware, chip makers will make chips fast enought o support the new software. It's a win from top to bottom in the industry. People will pay per view/listen and the rights stream will be assured. The government will love it because they get to collect taxes. This is a Orwellian Utopia. Of course Michael Eisner loves it. The only person who gets screwed is the consumer.
Screwed is the right word. This will kill independent/non-commerical artistic work (you won't be able to use that perfect U2 song for your student film). It will cause a huge social detriment (If I hadn't pirated everything I could get my hands on ten years ago, I would be a administrative assistant instead of a network architect. Side note: I would also not be recommending the purchases of volume license of the program to businesses).
This is our society marching towards a new caste system. We are already being turned into one big sheep, consuming what we are given.
There is a huge solution, though... Let's turn the TV off and stop listening to commercial radio. Expand your horizons and listen to indy media. Take a walk or read a book, or hell, write a book. Stop playing video games and watching TV. Stop wasting life with instant gratification.
Mass media is the new religion (how many people attend the church of the West Wing every Wednesday?) and religion is a tool to keep the masses in check. How does that make you feel? How does it make you feel that Michael Eisner is using the money you paid for your kids to see the lastest proprietary disney fable as a detriment to their creative futures?
Philips had the great insight that it isn't copy protection, it's actually a "mechanism for stopping the playback of music", which it is.
"The Music Industry's" intention is to thwart PC playback until a later date, when CDDrives that enforce copy protection will be available.
My question - this obviously forces a spurious obsolence of existing CDDrives, for the sole purpose of forcing the above upgrade which has no actual benefit to consumers, and screws every existing CDDrive Mfg on the market. Doesn't this border on a predatory innovation under anti-trust laws?
I'd love to hear some insight on this.
-SBB
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
"the Hollings bill would make it a civil offense to develop a new computer or related technology that does not include a federally approved security standard preventing the unlicensed copying of copyrighted works. In at least one version, the law would make it a felony to remove a watermark or flag from copyrighted content. It would also outlaw logging onto the Internet with any computer that removes or sidesteps the copy protection technology. "
So, if this gets passed, would we all be forced to upgrade our computers before we can legally log on to the internet? I can't imagine that most Americans would be able to afford this. Will the Cyber Police haul away Joe Poorman for not being able to afford an upgrade? And what about people in other countries? Could they use their old computers?
to get such "cops" into hardware.
Case in point, the serial numbers in Pentium Chips. Everyone from the biggest geek down to your 90 year old grandma was screeming bloody murder about it. So much that (I believe) Intel has stopped the practice. Or if they havent, the bios can quickly disable this "feature"
The problem with hardware is "who is going first". Answer? No one. Its suicide. If Intel came out today and said our chips have the new "super-duper-clipper-dipper-chip" in it that stops all copying of copyright material (work with me on this one). AMD's stock would FLY through the roof, people would flock to AMD processors, and AMD would be king.
Until there is either an extremely fierce law or just one vender who makes hardware X, it is nothing but talk and wants by some very uneducated people who believe that a computer can do anything. Well there partially correct, computers can do anything, but others (programmer, hardware manufactors, etc) can do anything to stop there "anything". Nothing is "unbreakable".
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
The power of the internet is very different than VHS tapes. As bandwidth grows, and storage increases, no technology, with the possible exception of hardware protections (I for one think that widespread use of hardware protection would lead to an underground hardware market), copyright will not be able to survive. Copyright is a concept that only works when the medium and the media can't be separated. You can't separate a book from it's words, or a VHS tape from it's movie. Sure, you can copy it, but only to another medium. We now have a medium that is flexible enough to functionally separate the two.
I don't understand why anyone but the music industry cares if technology has made the business model of the industry unprofitable and unnecessary. I'm' sure the horse and buggy industry was pissed about cars, but I don't hear them still complaining (overused example, I know, sorry). Yet a lot of people actually seem to buy this whining about the death of the recording industry.
The internet is a big leap in human technology, and it's made a lot of our laws unaplicable. That's okay, lots of the laws that the founders of this country thought were a good idea, but we don't have around anymore. Why? Because things change, and the laws have to change with them. Copyright (and eventually the pattent system), are over. Deal with it, and move on hardware manufacturers/music industry/everyone else.
Cheers, Joshua
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
Sure there'll be a way around it. But it will be illegal. The way the system is heading everybody will do illegal things all day long. When you can't watch anything without fear of being arrested or paying a hefty fine, what do you do? When a population becomes subject to arrest at any time, what happens?
Bad laws have the effect of making more people criminals while simultaneously lowering the respect for laws.
See trustedpc.org the "Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, or TCPA, formed by Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft.
It "trusts" the hardware from a special chip on the mainboard, which trusts the BIOS, which trusts the Harddisk bootblock, which trusts the OSloader, which trusts the OS, which trusts the software application, which trusts the stream. This is done through a "privacy certificate agency" that just identifies your pc uniquely (and really, we will not keep records of who you are, those will be destroyed after you've submitted your identity and we have checked it!)
Ofcourse, trust here doesn't mean that YOU can trust your PC, but that THEY can trust YOUR PC.
If this standard makes it, the opensource community has a big problem.
I was in a well-known copying establishment a couple of days ago, watching a small, polite, quiet woman at the counter talking to the attendant:
Woman: "I'd like a copy of this please" (holds out inkjet print of a picture)
Attendant: "I'm sorry, but that picture is copyrighted. I can't copy it."
I was floored. I got really, REALLY angry for a moment, then started thinking: do these people have a neural link to the Library of Congress? How do they know it's copyrighted? What if it's public domain?
The woman was crestfallen. So I said:
"She might be planning to make Fair Use of that picture."
Attendant: "Still can't copy it. It's our policy. It's only Fair Use if it's educational."
To which I replied:
"or journalistic, or non-commercial and limited in other ways, or for criticism, or properly attributed. There are four criteria for Fair Use."
So I asked the lady, "what's it for, school report or something?" and she says yes, that her daughter was going to use it for school. So I turned to the attendant and said
"There you go, black-letter Fair Use."
He just shakes his head, still refusing.
Is this what we're looking forward to? Copyright police behind the counter at copy places? Taking an I.P. attorney's pager number along as well? I really felt bad for this lady. It was late and she looked very tired and the report was probably due the next day. I'm sure whoever made that picture would have filed an immediate Federal injunction to bar this woman's daughter from turning in her report before requesting a licensing fee schedule.
(uh huh). I actually considered going back to the office and making something similar in Bryce for her to use with a signed letter placing my picture in the public domain.
I kind of wished she had brought her daughter along. Imagine the media frenzy/public relations disaster possibilities of a copy place attendant, arms folded, refusing to copy a picture for a crying 5th grader's school report. heh heh heh.
It's sad, and it has absolutely *nothing* to do with the original purpose of copyright law. This needs to be fixed, and soon.
Why is it that Hollywood is so imaginative when it comes to worst case scenarios, but nearly every movie ever made has a sequal? *eyeroll*
Okay, first, they *can't* make every bit of hardware protect their content. They C-A-N-N-O-T. It's, as Ralph Wiggam would say, unpossible. They talked about making routers not send copy-restricted (I refuse to use the term 'copy-protection' here) data through them. But the thing is, if I break apart the data blocks, randomize them, and then have the computer on the other end reassemble them, then the routers won't work. That philosophy likely applies to the rest of the hardware. You'd seriously need sentient hardware to look at the data to know what's up.
Secondly, they can't get every piece of hardware out there to stop it. Sorry. Too late. Btttz. Unable to comply.
Third, it is ridiculous to believe that every single piece of Hollywood content is going to be made accessible on-line. I can imagine more popular shows like Red Dwarf or the Simpsons or Family Guy or whatever to get pretty well captured and made available, but the people who make that available are true fans of their respected shows. I'm not going to be able to find an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond (*gag*) available. You know why? Because I seriously doubt anybody's going to take the time to capture it and make it available. And if they do, I'm not going to waste my time downloading it just to watch it. Stream? Maybe, but not download it.
There's too much content out there! Lets say I build a computer designed to capture a show as it's downloaded, I still would manually have to go in and edit out the commercials. (editing out the commercials is a condition of actually hurting the industry) There's NO WAY I'm going to be able to manually do that for every single show every day of the week! I have a life! Are some people going to do it? Maybe, but not ever on the scale that the industry is afraid of.
Anyway, I have drifted off topic a little bit. Back to my topic "They're fighting the wrong battle...", well Hollywood is taking a really backwards approach here. They think that by stopping piracy they're going to save their revenue. They also think that if they protect their content so it can't be copied that they're going to have a growing market for the rest of time. It won't work! The truth of the matter is that if anybody doesn't watch the show when it's first aired (which is the prime time to see it, if you miss that then you're likely to have some dumb ass friend or radio DJ spoil the ending for you), then the value diminishes. More and more people have less and less time to catch TV shows when they're first aired. That's exactly why VCR's are in every home! If somebody wants the show bad enough, they'll either set it up to get it themselves, or they'll find a way to go get it. If that means that a Napster clone is the way to get it, then the people will go there.
So there's demand here, right? That means there is a market! Instead of fighting the 'piracy', fill the demand! Ever hear of Video on Demand? I wouldn't need to go to Morpheus or Kazaa if I could just go to a website that has the show ready to stream and click play. If they want to insert commercials into it, THAT'S FINE. That works!! I love it! I'll embrace that! But PLEASE give me that opportunity before you claim that piracy will destroy your market! Fighting piracy won't save the market, but filling demand will.
*He who finds it amusing that Hollywood is willing to spend money to stop losses they don't have, but isn't willing to try to make money on demand to watch shows at our leisure.*
"Derp de derp."