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Gilmore On Hardware-Restricted Content
An unnamed reader links to John Gilmore's explanation of just why it's a bad idea to let companies (Intel in particular) cave to industry demands for so-called content protection in hardware. The upshot is that if such measures really are built in, the general-purpose computer may not have long to live.
Isn't that what they are after?
A machine to play your cd's/dvd's, a machine to do mail/web/stuff, a machine to do games..
Hell, it would be a lot easier for them, no OS-es to worry about, no copieing to worry about, and more to sell to everybody!
-=- I heard rumours about an OS called "Social Life", heard of it? Is it stable? -=-
HOw is it an upshot to get rid of the general purpose computer? I kinda like mine. Any way they would have to get all compaines to agree to do it the same way in hardware, if one company decides not to do it then its useless anyway because evryone will use there chips and stuff.
Oops....you'll know what I'm talkin about in a bit.
The upshot is that if such measures really are built in, the general-purpose computer may not have long to live.
What does that quote above have to do with the article? How is that an upshot? In the end of the article it says that if copy prevention is placed into computers what's probably going to happen is that no one will buy these as non-lamed systems will still be more flexible in working with other systems.
Of course this may not be true as many people and companies buy from outfits like Dell, which already makes only Intel, how long before the RIAA gets Dell to sign a license that makes them copy protect every computer they make? No one'll stop buying Dell because its -dell-
Still, I can't see anyone who rolls their own ever going for this. I know that you can't digitally drive speaker elements there must be an analog signal going to the coil inside of each speaker it'd be trivial to cut open the speaker and solder those wires to a standard male plug, plug them into your audio in on the sound card and hit record...
Disclaimer:The "Human" attached to this account is unresponsible for anything unless it wants responsibility.
And who ends up paying for the technology to allow them to restrict content? We do.
Ideas like encrypting audio between playback device and speakers, HDTV copy protection and any other method they come up with will eventually get to market. Ask questions and know before you buy.
Don't buy your own set of shackles.
Prove that those companies that produce the music, videos, whatever actually have lost money. Guess what, you only have access to the number they feed you, so you can only prove what they want to show you.
The music industry losing money? Amazing how many albums are still going platinum, double platinum, etc. even with music pirating. Movies? Spider-Man made $114 million in it's first weekend. How much more will it make before it's done? But, oh wait, those movie studios are losing money. (Among these same movie studios claims is the one that Titanic lost money or barely broke even.)
Okay, diatribe aside, yes, they might actually be losing money. I'll feel bad about it later. Really, I will. The same instant that the music industry stops pushing the pop-crap that seems to be on every station, and the same time the movie studios stop pushing things like a live-action version of Scooby-Doo. (My god, who comes up with these ideas?)
Of course, I play Nethack, so I guess I am not the most unbiased person when it comes to free software/games vs. crap like EQ.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
...and all new hardware required, and implemented horrifically draconian anti-copy-anything protection which both took away the ability to copy for reasonable use, or took away nick the l337 h4X0r's ability to copy 'stuff', ancient second hand hardware, free hardware, is going to become rather desirable. Best start warehousing a few spare boxies.
:D
OK, that's tongue in cheek, but it's one end of an extreme where computers are pushed to being made less and less useful. When I look at it bringing about such strong change like that, it feels it can't happen. Am I being too optimistic?
Besides - if all your old hardware gets too slow - buy a few more and beow.... you get the idea
a grrl and her server
Gilmore's main points:
1) The costs of copy protected systems aren't paid by the "content" holders -- they are paid for by consumers. Essentially, you will end up paying more for a less capable computer, while Disney laughs its way to the bank.
2) For a copy protected computer to work, every peripheral -- from monitors to speakers -- must have copy protection built in. Think you're having trouble getting your Wintel box to behave now? You ain't seen nothing yet.
3) This is all being decided by government, so that no rogue manufacturers can ship non-protected computers. If that weren't the case, Apple might skip imposing copy protection, and we'd see 75% of Wintel users buying Macs so that they could avoid copy protection.
Gilmore seems puzzled by the fact that Intel isn't telling the content companies to cram it. Obviously, Intel must think it's financially in their best interest to side with the content guys. Why they feel this way hasn't been answered.
It seems the pivotal question here is: will the Hollings bills require all manufacturers to build end-to-end protection throughout their computers and peripherals? If not, what degree of protection does the bill require?
A wrinkle in this that nobody has thought of. Suppose end-to-end encryption is required. Each company's protection would be a little different, as we're talking about hundreds of components from various vendors. It might turn out that Apple or AMD sort of messes up their encryption (oops!) -- and by that "mistake" captures 75% of the computer market. After all, would you rather own a machine with rock-solid protection, or one that has a huge chink in the armor?
I know I'd want to buy my computer from the supplier who was most competent at designing machines and least competent at providing 100% protection of content.
Want to start a successful computer company? Just hire designers who don't know or care about ensuring robust protection.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Why are people switching from old videotape to DVD? It's the addons - no degredation of quality over time, extra interviews, a smaller disc, you can play a DVD on your computer, or whatever else it is that Joe Consumer happens to like. Laserdiscs didn't have as nice a "feature set" as DVDs, and we can see how few people actually have laserdisc players...
If the content industry wants people to use rights-management hardware, they have to make the hardware desirable (or pass a law banning everything else...). And if they don't make the hardware SIGNIFICANTLY better than the stuff we all have already - our boxes, our DVD players, etc., then the market is going to drop "rights management" like a hot potato.
And if the content industry actually DOES create a better product, and gets the market, I say more power to them! Then, and only then, are they actually working in a capitalist economy. But I don't see that kind of creativity on the part of the content industry, or whoever else wants "digital rights management."
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
Spare me the crap. Since when are the media businesses failing? I have yet to see a major media outlet come remotely close to bankruptcy _ever_.
Piracy as a term is a joke anyway. There are numerous reasons why it's good.
1. Try before you buy.
2. Equalization of overpricing.
3. And most importantly, free movement of expressions and ideas, the way things should be.
The society in which we live that is, in effect, fairly unchangable by any one person, needs to change. We can not possibly hope to better ourselves as a species while we're squabling over our paychecks.
A money-less society is of course utopian but if we can't go all the way lets at least try to make it some of the way. I'm not saying the people that create music and movies and other forms of entertainment shouldn't be compensated. I'm saying they shouldn't be grossly compensated, as a majority of them are.
And it's only common sense that the industry middlemen are jokes in suits. To those people: stop leeching off of other people's talent and whining when you don't have enough cash to buy that island you want.
To those people that their rebuttal will be: "Stop pirating! You're the leech". I find that comment silly, I profit in no way from any piracy. I may not have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have the artists' (and in some instances, others' like the government) make an impression on me and keeping me from being bored for an hour or two. But face it, if you do pay the outrageous prices they ask, you're part of the problem.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
As it is, I think that time has come. Clearly people no longer thing there's anything to be gained from copyright. I'm inclined to agree. Once, it took a long time to copy a book, and if you 'published' something, copyright was your only protection from other people selling it. But as it is now, the moment you start selling a book, a CD or whatever, you can publish so many copies that there would be no point in others trying to sell the same thing. Once a book is on the store shelves, nobody is going to type up the whole book, lay it out, and print it - there just wouldn't be any point. The person that got their first would be such an advantage due to having a head-start that they'd make tons of money anyway...
This entire paragraph is inconsistent and makes little sense yet the fact that it is currently at +4 insightful just goes to show that any anti-copyright rant no matter how incoherent will be well received on Slashdot. If there was no copyright then the incentive to write books would drop significantly. Currently writing a good book (both fiction and non-fiction) is a significant effort that requires research, perseverance and a large expendition of time.
If after expending n amount of months or years someone can just copy books I author for free then the Opportunity Cost of writring books will become to high for me and I'll find another line of work or write less.
The main problem with rants like yours is that they are throw the baby out with the bath water solutions. Most people agree that life of author + 70 years is an obscene amount of time to hold copyright on an intellectual work and is harmful to society in the long run. Similarly the lengths that content producers are beginning to go to so as to prevent copyright infringement have begun to intrude on the rights of consumers. However saying that intellectual works should be devalued as to where they should be offered no protection is just as harmful to society if not more.
Would you also suggest abolishing the welfare or health systems because there are inefficiencies therein and people who cheat the system? I sincerely hope the answer is no.
Scope
This document sets forth requirements to be imposed on certain products that receive unencrypted digital terrestrial broadcast content to protect such content against unauthorized redistribution [outside of the home or personal digital network environment].2 The document assumes that the requirements will apply in the United States, although it is anticipated that the requirements could be modified, as necessary, for use in other jurisdictions.
Got that? The conspiracy knows that it's going to have to extra-territorialize if its going to acheive its ends, and it's rarin' to go.
I don't agree with piracy (and I think the whole Napster thing was a bigger SETBACK than anyone realizes). BUT, no system is perfect. There are losses and inefficiencies involved in any kind of market conduit, and the digital realm is no exception. That having been said, I think there's a difference between taking measures to minimize piracy, and extracting every possible nickel and dime from your revenue nodes (formerly known as customers). The proposed methods are particularly insidious, because they shackle the vast majority of those who are honest. This has already become more trouble than it's worth for me (which is why I don't buy, rent, or steal CDs, videos, or DVDs), and with any luck, mor people will begin to see the light. There IS life on the other side.
This one IS appropriate for the YRO section. You should have the right to buy any computer, with or without copy protection in hardware. Of course, this is not a right that's very well protected by the Constitution.
... one with virtually no rights and few liberties, and one we are now going to be very hard pressed to change.
It is a right very well protected by the constitution. Any powers not explicitly granted the federal government by the constitution are reserved for the states, for municipalities, or for the people (10th amendment).
The Federal government has been granted no explicit authority by the constitution to regulate the sale or construction of computers.
The problem is that the government hasn't been abiding by the constitution for at least 70 years now, so we really can't expect it to start now.
Instead, for the sake of expediency over constitutional law, the courts routinely misuse the so-called commerce clause to extend the federal government's powers into all kinds of areas it is constitutionally barred from, but are nevertheless popular with the people to regulate anyway (War on Drugs, Child Pornography, etc.). By diluting the power of the constitution with these causes, irrespective of their legitemacy, we are now in a situation where real social and political pressures are coming to bear on our way of government (the Copyright Cartels' attacks on our most basic freedoms, the War on Terrorism and many of the unconstitutional methods being used to wage it domestically, not to mention the recent election debacle), and we no longer have a strong constitutional foundation to fall back on.
We sold it cheap in the name of "the children" to wage our War on Drugs, our War On Pedophiles, now our War on Terrorism and, comming soon to a computer near you, Our War On Copyright Violators.
The future is no longer terribly bright. Indeed, by selling out our most fundamental values for a perceived short term societal gain (who wouldn't want child pornographers jailed?) we've now insured that the future is a dark, bleak, ugly place
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The 'content' companies like Disney etc. are trying to use legislation and technology to stop progress and allow them to keep making profits. This is such a short sighted view.
As a (hypothetical) example, take music CDs. A new CD costs £15 over here, and before I buy it I can hear maybe one song off it on the radio if I'm lucky. That's a big investment for something I might only listen to once. So I don't buy many CDs, and I rip oggs of other peoples' music.
But what if the music companies offered different versions of CDs? A cheap one, with just a paper sleeve and the name on the front for a three or four pounds, and a 'premium' edition with extras, proper case, lyric sheet etc at full price?
The fans will buy the full price disc anyway, and everyone else will buy the cheap one. Thus, more sales, less copying(why bother copying when you it doesn't cost you much to get a proper copy?). Greater listening audience means more fans in the future, leads to more sales of the premium version.
I get the music I want without breaking the law, the music industry gets to make its profits still. Everyone is happy. Or is this a dangerous communist anti-american view that will have FBI agents trying to get me extradited?
if I can see it or hear it then I will have it in a form that is not controlled by them. They cant stop it and they never will short of creating laws that have the death penalty attached to it. Even then I dont see it stopping. Documents,movies,video,music,audio,art. it will exist in open and unrestricted forms in greater numbers and shared rampantly no matter what they do or what they try.
Why? because the general populace will never be stupid enough to believe that when they buy a CD or DVD they didn't buy anything but are only holding a delicate license to view it a limited number of times until the morther company wants to revoke it for any reason. The general public wont put up with it... and we dont.. looking at how "protected cd's" get ripped and on Gnutella,kazza,opennap,etc... minutes after release is proof enough.
Hey Movie companies, recording companies, writers, actors, musicians.. Thanks for the entertainment, but try and tell me how to enjoy it? then you can go straight to hell and
It's time we all stand up and collectivally flip off anyone that is for content control.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's like talking about the value of a James Brown record as art and arguing it can't be art because it's mass-produced. It depends on how you define it, and there is no one 'hand-crafted' record out there from which all the others are prints (a master isn't the final product and can't be played on record players), but even though the James Brown record is a mass-produced object it has use-value that makes it more than a chunk of plastic.
Well, in digital society, the medium is even more worthless than a chunk of plastic- and even transporting the bits around will typically involve making lots of copies of the work. Every time this very sentence goes to one of the half-million Slashdot readers, a copy is made. You're not 'going' anywhere to see it, a copy of the IP is made on your local computer to show you, assembled bit by bit from instructions given by another computer. In fact, a quick traceroute shows my own path to Slashdot as containing more than 20 hops- sprintlink, newyork.cw.net, exodus.net... so we're talking about 10 million copies of the IP made in order to bring the sentence to the eyes of Slashdotters.
Yet these copies are valueless- the only value present is if someone reads it, and goes 'hey!' and decides it's a good, insightful argument on the reality of digital media. Perhaps the reader is a lawyer- and wins a court case by making the points I'm outlining. Suddenly, this IP has value- suddenly it's serving a functional purpose.
Imagine a James Brown record travelling around on the Internet as mp3s. As it goes from server to server, local copies are made and discarded- and have no value. 90% of the time, it ends up on the hard drives of data-hoarders who don't even play it- again, resulting in no value. And then it finds its way to the hard drive of a DJ who works playing music at dances, raves etc: and that DJ sets it aside specially, for times when he needs to make people get up offa that thing! And when he plays it, people dance! THEN it has value, huge value- it can move people who otherwise wouldn't be dancing. Use-value means you look at what it's DOING, not what it IS. It's only a string of bits, when you look at what it IS.
The trouble with copyright is, it's not equipped to make any sense of the digital situation. It focusses solely on what the IP IS, on whether a string of bits is effectively the IP (a 128K and a 256K mp3 are different strings of bits, but can both be the 'same' IP). Copyright cannot comprehend the notion of IP being copied willy-nilly as a normal activity. You don't transport books by lining up a bunch of people with pencils and having them looking over each other's shoulders and copying what they see- yet this is how digital data is transported over networks. In some cases, it's only the 'stream of letters' being carried, and in others the whole work is stored temporarily on the server, such as Usenet posts. It's all copying.
By the same token, copyright cannot distinguish between IP being copied into a totally meaningless, no-value situation, and being copied into a situation where it has the same value a physical item would have. Copying a James Brown record into a James Brown fanatic's collection is the same as buying the record, functionally. Copying the James Brown record to border11.ge3-0-bbnet2.nyc.pynap.net as part of the working of the internet carries NO value- yet both of these copyings are the same to the computer.
Copyright is worthless if it cannot make these distinctions- and actively harmful if it gets in the way of the workings of modern communications networks. And it's not unthinkable to count Napster users (or their current equivalents) as communications networks themselves. Which of them are making use of the IP, and which of them are serving basically as organic components in a titanic data caching scheme?
The future is this: if you can think of a thing, you can see it, read it, listen to it, watch it, within seconds. It's not just the computer networks but the human networks bringing this about. You can get ANYTHING within seconds. Once I was reading a Hunter S. Thompson book, in which he referenced Mencken's famous, brutal obituary of William Jennings Bryan. Half a minute with Google, and I was reading that obituary, like a footnote Thompson hadn't bothered to add. It's possible he didn't have rights to reproduce it- but could he have envisioned a world in which any online reader of his book could go find that reference in seconds? If so, would he have seen it as a dangerous crime, or as a public benefit? Would Mencken have seen this as a crime or a benefit, to so easily place his work before a curious reader- given that Mencken's agenda was to expose Bryan as a dangerous, stupid, destructive fool and buffoon? Mencken wanted to be read and understood. I'm not sure who owns the copyright to his words now...
Copyright IS incompatible with the future- unless we're seeking to bring about a new Dark Ages in which the common people don't have access to education, information- don't have access to IP. Intellectual property is knowledge, information. It's fine to want people to be compensated, but to seriously work to cut off access to knowledge and information means something is wrong.
The thing that is wrong is this: we're heading into a future where nobody ever need be illiterate or uneducated- where we're swimming in an absolute sea of information for all, rather than dying of a drought of it- and we have people wanting to stop that, because they want people to be only as informed and educated as they can afford to be.
Copyright as it's being extended is wrong, and it must be thrown out.
The minute Napster went de-facto belly up, did people stop downloading music? No, they just found other ways to do it. Hell, people will download spyware and install it on their system rather than give up the ability to trade files online.
But that's exactly my point. As long as these companies introduce their nonsense gradually, virtually no one cares. Copyright infringement is illegal. It's illegal for me to trade mp3s over the internet. And even though there are millions of people who are opposed to that law, you don't see any of them fighting against it. Instead they trade on napster, and when they goes down they trade on gnutella, and let the companies install spyware and other nonsense on their systems. The line keeps shifting further and further, until eventually it's almost impossible trade mp3s over the internet.
The problem for Hollywood is that one person will find the way around their protection scheme, and the equivalent of a libcss file will enable a thousand more to write software the average Joe can use to circumvent "CSS-Plus", SDMI, or whatever it will end up being called.
How many people do you know that have satellite receivers in their houses that haven't paid for the service? It's perfectly possible to come up with single-purpose devices which make it extremely difficult to "steal" content. Sure, you might have a few people who still insist on breaking the rules, but once you go into hardware solutions, the masses simply aren't going to go through the trouble of finding black-market retailers.
And the DMCA is right there to make sure that anyone who does come up with those devices and distribute them will be risking jail time.
Okay, let's assume this becomes U.S. law. Now, is the rest of world going
/billion/
to say: Hey, look at this new technology invented by the U.S. government
that will let U.S. industry control our computers and stereos and CD
players to protect the interests of giant U.S. media corporations. Wow!
What a fantastic idea! Let's adopt it!
I think not.
I don't see the Germans buying computers with U.S. mandated content control
chips for their parliament, or Sony putting in U.S. designed chips into the
CD players they sell in Tokyo, or the Russians forcing all tape decks off
their market that haven't been approved by some U.S. media consortium. The
idea that the U.S. can force the rest of the world to implement what will
be immediately seen as a U.S. designed and controlled crypto system into
every machine that blinks, beeps, or boots is so brain dead that you just
know it can only come from a member of the U.S. Congress.
This is the Clipper Chip all over again.
When it comes down to it, the rest of the planet doesn't give a rat's ass
if their citizens aren't cooperating when 20th Century Fox, Microsoft, or
AOL-Time-Warner try to make the next billion Dollars so that these
<I>American</I> companies can get richer, give that money to their <I>American</I>
stockholders and top <I>American</I> executives and maybe even pay <I>American</I>
taxes that help finance <I>American</I> infrastructure, or, to put it bluntly,
the <I>American</I> military machine. They'd rather see their citizens spend
their money on local bratwursts, sushi, or vodka: That way it gets fed back
into the local economy.
their citizens rip, copy, and burn anything out of America they possibly
can. If you are a Chinese CS student, you can either spend money on a
Windows license, which means that your Yuan would join those 40
Dollars that Microsoft is stockpiling to buy Iceland and turn the whole
place into a ski resort for their top executives. Or, you can pirate the
Windows CD, and spend that money on, say, a Chinese book on C programming
at your local Beijing book store and kick those running imperialist
pig-dogs with Red Flag Linux. China is interested in getting their economy
on an information age footage, and they need operating systems for that,
the less expensive, the better. Why should they want machines that prevent
that?
No, what will happen if that law is passed - and remember, we're talking
about the country blissfully that is ignoring the fact that the rest of the
world has basically adopted one common mobile phone standard (not to
mention the metric system), still transfers money by sending slips of paper
in the mail, and who live with a television standard that is aptly named NTSC
- Never The Same Color - is that those people in Taiwan and Korea will
happily produce hobbled computer, CD, radio, TV, DVD and other parts for
the U.S. market, while continuing to ship the free technology to the rest
of the world. Hey, it's a global economy with billions of people hungry
for computers, and only about 270 million Americans who's computer market
is saturated anyway. What would you do?
Now because Content Controlled America is getting specially made parts,
they immediately miss out on the price cutting effects of mass production.
In other words: Hardware and electronics prices in the U.S. skyrocket,
because the other 5.75 billion people on the planet are using the old,
free, trusted, mass produced hardware, while Americans effectively have to
have every chip custom built. What we have after a few years of this is a
/hardware fork/ - the U.S. goes off into one direction, the other countries
in the other.
In the mean time, U.S. customs has started rectal searches of all
long-haired males coming back from Paris, France to make sure they aren't
smuggling free RAM into the country. You can't buy a CD in Britain because
they won't run on your content controlled player - just like the DVD
regional codes, but for real. And your TV station doubles the number of ads
during the next Olympics because they had to pay for those signals to be
transfered into U.S. content controlled format...
Great idea, guys.
What is your problem with allowing people to use CD's/movies they legally own in the way they want to. It's far more convient to me to have all my CD's in Ogg format on my hard drive than have to switch cd's all day.