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Chained Melodies
NoData writes: "Salon is running an elegant article that covers the current state of the copy protection and circumvention debate. The article touches on the DMCA and the SSSCA, with input from Touretzky, Lessig, and others. It offers a dystopic vision of a future where geeks battle increasingly complex copy protection schemes until ultimately, any consumer control over media is outlawed outright. Refreshingly, the article is not a "Salon Premium" feature."
Can't you see the superbowl ads now?
"Today I went to the movies, went to the grocery store, downloaded an mp3, and helped evil hackers steal money from the hands of starving musicians."
stipe42
Quite simple really, and one both the music and movie industries appear to be implementing..
Just make all the content so dull that noone would ever bother copying any of it.
Quite why they bother protecting the latest Britney album is beyond me. Who the hell would want to duplicate that?
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I know we're going to get a lot of posts, as usual, from Geeks saying:
If it's ones and zeros, I can copy it.
Now let me offer the following well-thought out response: "stfu, troll."
I've responded to most of the last few articles Slashdot ran on this issue, but the trolls just seem to keep coming. Here is my definitive answer. I will merely link to it in the future.
Big, Definitive Answer
There has been a running assumption on Slashdot that because our current hardware/software is a combination that is open to external, or user-provided changes, hardware/software combinations by their nature necessarily are, and only outlawing these user-introduced changes can prevent them. ie there is no technology, only the law, to stop us.
This is a false assumption.
It is false in much the same way that it is false to say "Any lock that works with a key can be opened without it by a skilled enough lockpick using skilled enough tools. Therefore, it is only by hiding behind laws that we can expect to lock anything."
Now, I'm not well-versed in the history of locksmithing, so I'll provide a software analogy: RSA.
Now, this is a somewhat unsuitable analogy, because there is no mathematics, precisely none, that assures us there is any "one-way" discrete algorithm. But, for all intents and purposes, those who read slashdot know that by sending email run through GnuPG to a 1024 bit public key whose fingerprint has been privately verified with the receiving party, we can be assured that the party receives it and that no one else can look at the email, even if there is no law in the world preventing our ISP, and all mailhops along the way, from reading our information!
This applies directly to the hardware/software "rights management" issue. A content corporation can be assured, based solely on technology, without a law in the world protecting it, that when it sells a license to person x to listen to music y, z number of times under conditions foobar, x cannot share y with anyone else, x cannot listen to y more than z number of times, and x cannot listen to y under any conditions other than foobar, no matter how hard it tries.
In the past, trolls have said "if I can hear it, I can record it", and so today I will introduce you to a hardware/software combination that can never be overcome, and I will explain why not.
Meet Tim.
He is from the future, but don't let that bother you. Rather, be bothered by the fact that he is an eight foot tall hunk of gleaming metal looming
over you, three tons of pure android-molded badness. Let me tell you about Tim.
Tim is a Rights Management Solution. He is very smart. He recognizes people, situations, better than even you or I can, because he has more electrons whizzing around in his brain, and a greater experience database, than all human neurons that have ever existed combined. In fact he is, to the closest approximation, human. He gets paid. He has feelings. All that good stuff that comes from being based on a very human neural net. Now let me tell you about Tim's Job.
His Job is to loom over you and extend to you two fingers. If you put your head closer, he'll stick these fingers into your ear. But first he'll make sure that there isn't anything fishy on you. he'll run you through a metal detector and x-ray you. If you pass, you can now have the pleasure of having Tim's fingers rammed into your ears, and you can listen to whatever y music you've paid for, unless you've passed a z number of listenings already. Tim is very good at making sure you meet condition foobar.
Now let me tell you why Tim can't be disassembled, reverse engineered, or otherwise made a fool of. It's not because of laws protecting him. It's because he lives inside a Faraday cage (yep, that is, in part, what the eight feet of badass metal consists of), and he has been designed from the ground up to operate completely symmetrically. You cannot know what processing goes on by measuring any voltage within his body, and you cannot change the processing by changing any voltage. But you couldn't even if you tried: the moment the second layer of Tim's skin is penetrated, you will hear a screaming hiss and popping noise, which will be an indication of the chemical reaction that has just eaten all of Tim's internals. It doesn't matter, he doesn't mind: He'll get imaged onto a new body tonight from backup, and they'll just say: "Hi, it's 12 hours later than when you stepped into the imaging tube "just now", and it's because you died today. Sorry about that. The body you have now is new. Try to be more careful tomorrow."
Anyway, that's the short story.
I'll leave the readers to try to come up with a way of bypassing Tim's Rights Management Directive, but he's smarter than almost any of us, so it won't be easy. Easier is, I think, just paying for the goddamn music you want to listen to, and gettnig to a rent a Tim of your own for it.
I can see it now. The war on terroism as the FBI searches out the last remnant of the "GPL Conspirators"...[sigh]
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
10000% markup on crappy music: $20
Two hour movie for the familty: $50
Senator to protect an obsolete distribution channel: priceless? No, $264,534
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
It seems the only way to get "heard" nowadays is with money.
American public = 300,000,000
* 50% on net = 150,000,000
* 75% used mp3 = 112,500,000
Assume that once in their lives each of these people will save $15 dollars, buy listening to an mp3 and realizing they don't want the album.
These people have saved almost 1.7 billion dollars. If we used only 5% of those savings to "donate" to campains, that would be 84 million dollars worth of "speach" that would be heard.
So in conclusion, send this money to me, and I'll get right to work.
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