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BPDG Not Much Of A Threat?
DigForFiles writes "It seems that the media companies and the tech companies may be near an agreement concerning fair use of digital broadcasts. Apparently the basic plan is FOX's and is to have broadcast programs be digitally flagged by the media guys and the tech guys are responsible for building all home digital recorders so that they recognize the flags. Consumers would be able to record the broadcasts for home use and data transfers within their local LAN but the flags would prohibit the transfer of recorded data outside the household. Thus they hope to prevent P2P networks from trading the broadcasts online while allowing fair use within the household. Some of the presentation material can be found here. The guys in charge, Copy Protection Technical Working Group, meet on 5 June for further discussions. A list of attendees can be found here (it's in Excel format)."
I can copy a digital signal for use inside my household, but not usable outside the local LAN? How is THAT accomplised? First, almost everyone's local lan is in a 192.168 block or 10. block. But besides that, I cap my TV shows on my computer, edit out commercials (oh oh...) and burn to VCD and watch in living room. Once on VCD, what then? It melts if it wanders out of my home, like a holodeck character walking out of the holodeck? (Unless he has one of those devices on his arm of course...)
Didn't they learn anything from the Sony's mistake? You can spend millions, but someone will always be able to defeat the technology. Ah, well, I guess they have to do something to protect their assets...
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...if they didn't waste so much time and money trying to prevent copyright infringement they'd be so wealthy the could just rely on the honor system.
Can I bum a sig?
When are people going to learn that these kind of restrictions only hurt people who would not pirate anyway? Its only going to inconvience the vast majority of people who do not steal/pirate.
I don't understand why hollywood does NOT want their shows rebroadcast. Any exposure is good exposure for them, and will only increase the following of their so called entertainment programs.
Also, I will not buy any device that restricts me in any way. I only bought a DVD player because I was able to get one of those Apex machines.
In any case, its going to be cracked, and the digital copies will be on p2p anyway. Too bad...
This could be a good sign, but I'm not sure.
Failure to reach consensus in the industry group may be all the reason our good "friends" in Congress (are you listening, Fritz Hollings and Diane Feinstein?) need to impose some really wretchedly awful solution.
Things may be better now.
The tech companies may have learned a thing or three about lobbying Congress.
The Bush administration may be more receptive to tech companies than the Clinton administration was.
Maybe.
Here's what I know for sure:
The last time that the entertainment industry went head-to-head with the tech industry over intellectual property protection, we got the DMCA.
That's reason enough to get worried and stay worried.
And then some.
As long as they don't take away my ReplayTV I dont care what they do.
Boy, I bet those babys will be a joy to design. And market. And dirt cheap, to boot!
Of course, it's possible that we'll all be mandated by law to switch to TCP-DRM/IP-DRM and UDP-DRM/IP-DRM and all other protocols will be outlawed. Patent lawyers, start your engines!
Meanwhile, I'll be programming in the Cayman Islands.
The studios have to have figured out that anything that allows fair use allows swapping on Kazaa. For that matter, without fundamentally crippling the hardware, anything that allows VIEWING allows swapping on Kazaa, and I think the CBDTPA makes clear that they understand that, as well, at least some of them.
They're in a much better position to demand some kind of legislation if they can't get an agreement out of the tech industry.
So, they WANT these meetings to end in failure so they can get legislation b/c the tech industry is refusing to self regulate. The tech industry isn't going to agree to anything that hurts their bottom line, and that means content on demand (in some form) is here to stay. Only legislation can save the studio's sorry business model from widespread civil disobedience. So, either one side or another gets fooled (who thinks the Disney people can get the better of AMD in technobabble armwrestling? I know who I'd bet on.) or nobody gets fooled and it's settled as legislation.
If they could find a compromise where all the corporations make out like bandits and all the consumers get screwed, they would have made it already!
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Can't stnad most conservatives?
By most measures, everyone on your list (with the possible exception of Franklin) would be considered conservatives by today's standards.
That's reason enough to get worried and stay worried.
I think that's reason enough to get involved. Getting worried gives you an ulcer, getting involved might do nothing, but it also might solve the problem.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
before modinf me down, read further.
the largest producer of movies is India. France AFAIK has restrictions in importing intelectual production from overseas, worlds largest potential consumer market (china) has also restrictions on these subject.
so let the american studios byte theyr own tail. if they start pushing to much control crap over the consumer, the level of rejection against their products will grow in other countries too, then 2 things can happen:
1- media produced in US will end up restricted to a niche market (US itself) OR;
2- The media industry in US (studios, recording companies, etc.) will end up losing money and learning what other industries already know: The consumer is KING. do what the consumer wants. give the consumer liberty and they'll respond buying your products.
What ? Me, worry ?
It's sad to see powerful corporations sinking billions of dollars and trillions of man-hours into a project that is literally a wild goose chase.
It has been demonstrated by mathematicians at Princeton that this kind of copy protection or digital watermarking is mathematically impossible. While "where there's a will, there's a way" sounds flippant and trite, the mathematical principle of seperability essentially states that content can always be extracted from its protected form.
These guys are chasing the elusive pot o' gold that's over the rainbow. Best of luck to them, but oh, what a waste of effort.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
When I read the NYTimes articles, I get the feeling that it's not that the studios want to block the sending of the recorded programs, but to make sure that the digitial content is strongly encrypted as possible to even require a hidden unique device ID as part of the key for decoding. Thus, while you could send the encrypted programs left and right, the receivers couldn't do anything with the data. This is a much more technologically feasible way to doing things, and would take the question out of how to avoid problems of blocking older computer hardware. However, as the article does point out, this would mean that if/when DVD-R are used as a recording medium for digital TVs, current DVD models won't be able to play them due to strong encryption.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Same sh*t, different day. The solution is still to admit that copy protection is fubar and offer a viable business model as an alternative to piracy. That business model is the retail of CDs. That model differs from B&M retail only in that consumers pay less for an inferior product: a burned CD with a inkjet printed slip is only worth $5. Otherwise, they are identical. One application to bring them and in the darkness bind them - click the 'buy' button and download+burn+print is all automated. This is the solution to 95% of piracy - the baby boomers and 14 year old Britney fans who would be happy fork over the dough for high file audio quality, fast downloads, and complete selection rather than spend hours scouring P2P and getting none of the above.
Obvious, and has been for 5 years.
"because they apparently can't agree on anything"
I'm willing to bet that there is one thing they can agree on - to fsck the common consumer. It's just a question of how now.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Why not emulate the current VCR technology, and just degrade the data slightly - perhaps as a side effect of repeated compressions and decompressions - each time the program is copied? I bet you could come up with an algorithm that would look OK after 1-2 copies, but would get progressively worse.
It seems to me that this would emulate the current system, which we all know and love. Yes, it wouldn't prevent piracy, but most consumers would have essentially no incentive to hack the system, and it would strongly deter P2P sharing among strangers, which is exactly what the copyright holders are worried about.
Hollywood will simply buy the distribution rights for non-native sales. Not that Bollywod films sell much outside of India anyway.
You already see this happening in Hong Kong. Used to be 3-4 distributors releasing DVDs region free. People would import these into the US for sale. Recently these distributors went down to 1 or 2 and have begun restricting distribution. It is alleged Disney is behind this as a means to control distribution outside of Asia. They certainly clamped down on online stores in the US that sold the region free DVD versions of Shaolin Soccer and Warriors of Zu, both films that Miramax (Disney subsidiary) bought the North American rights to.
No doubt when Disney deigns to release these on DVD in North America they will be region 1 only, have edits from the original and be crippled in other ways. This despite the fact that the Region Free versions are available outside the US.
"I don't understand why hollywood does NOT want their shows rebroadcast. Any exposure is good exposure for them, and will only increase the following of their so called entertainment programs. "
They don't want their shows rebroadcasted because of several reasons:
1) they don't get paid. If no one actually sits infront of the tv, the broadcasters won't pay them with the money they recieve with their advertsing income.
2) Hurts syndication rights which also hurts actors too. Actors can get paid residuals for when shows go into syndication (unless they were on the show giligans island and missed out on a ton of money http://www.gilligansisle.com/court.html)If everyone buys the dvd it hurts the value of syndication rights. Thats why you have to wait so long before tv shows go to tape or dvd.
3) Hurts dvd sales. why buy it when you can download it. Granted their is a quality issue, but this is moot when you have a replaytv or filesharing tivo.
Do most people pirate. No, it takes too much time and effort. Besides, at least in my experience most pirating college students wind up buying most of their media/software after they get money in the jobmarket.
Does the media need to change its business model? yes. the easiest way i see doing this is to bring back sponsorship to programs. For example, the reason soap operas are called that is because they were sponsored by soap manufacturers.
Remember with PVR technology, primetime isn't an issue, you can broadcast any content you want 24 hours a day, people will just watch it when they want. Besides, if you include 1-2 short sponsorship messages ala pbs before each program (i.e. 5-10 seconds) the time you save is not worth skipping. This basically means you can offer more content to your viewers since they don't have to be there to view it at a set time. A somepoint someone will catch on to this, probably once there is suffiecent dvr market penatratoin.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
In 20 years we'll look back on this phase and call it the "Digital Logjam." We'll note that the various competing interests tussled to preserve their interests and marvel how it seemed that *none* of them noticed that this fight slowed down the very revolution they were all looking forward to: the adoption of the digital TV and the high bandwidth internet.
A few logs in the jam:
1. The bandwidth providers overbuilt, hoping for lots of video sloshing around the Internet, but it never materialized. Then they all went bankrupt.
2. The copyright holders put the brakes on digitization as they evaluated their options. They alone were on no hurry.
3. The hardware and software companies refused to agree on any standards that the copyright holders liked, instead preferring to compete with their own technologies.
4. The consumer advocacy groups took the opportunity to try to move the bar, which only served to raise the hackles of the copyright holders.
5. The media companies took the opportunity to try to move the bar, which only served to raise the hackles of the copyright holders.
6. And the techies threw gasoline on the fire by gleefully promising to break any system they didn't like on the basis of an ethic that doesn't distinguish between good and bad. (Heck, they had lots of time on their hands because they were unemployed waiting for the logjam to free up.)
mod chips.
If I understand corectly part of the protection systems recording/studios companies are proposing is based on hardware right ?
and IIRC there's mod chips in the market that allow game consoles (Xbox, PS2, GC, etc) to play DVD from any area, boot copied disks and stuff.
now I ask you, how hard it'll be for a mod chip maker to produce a dirty cheap component that defeats the studios/recorders stupidity ?
the question is serious. how hard it is ? can it be done in a short time frame (like a couple of months) ? and how hard such a chip would be to install ?
and as a last question: what'll prevent overseas manufacturers such as brasilian companies Gradiente and CCE from selling devices that can be unblocked via RC ?
What ? Me, worry ?
I remember when I worked for a company that provided trial-version DRM. We had a customer who said "I want this technology to allow me to track down the little @#$#er so I can take him out back and shoot him!"
I believe he was from Texas...
As a fellow patriotic American I'd like to politely suggest that assuming all the important decisions about media are made by the US Congress might not be accurate.
We've recently seen China and Taiwan discussing a separate DVD standard despite the fact that this appears to be totally illegal to many American observers. Now Taiwan is following in Mainland China's footsteps by insisting on free as in both beer and speech software in the government and schools.
People in the US often talk about controlling the media in ways that might not be practical no matter what kind of rhetoric is used to justify the measures. Fox's plan is fine. They've been putting watermarks on their shows for years now and so do many broadcast affiliates. But so what? Assuming that the US walks the entire digital media world around on a chain is a feel good proposition, but certainly not a realistic description of how things work in this day and age.
And as other posters have mentioned, we --here we being all Americans-- are the government. If restrictive measures are passed that result in higher costs for products that have to be customized to suit the restrictive US market, it's going to be seen as a hidden tax and that's not gonna fly too far.
These companies would be so much better off putting up their archives on the net right now and taking just enough to keep the operation profitable while they've still got the option. Sadly it looks like many of them would rather "kill every motherfucking last one of you." It's too bad they take that approach, but if that's what they want then they get what they deserve.
With the increasing amount of crap we have to put up with to watch anything, and with the decreasing creativity of the media conglomerates, they will eventually push me right out the door because I won't care enough to watch. Throw in the increasing prices of cable and/or satellite, and that's one more step closer to the door.
I guess that the majority of the US public won't really care and will continue to watch "When Animals Attack Survivors in Extreme Celebrity Cop Chases Part 4" (that might actually be interesting), but I've found myself reading books and re-watching my DVDs a lot more than TV. I even (gasp!) went for a walk yesterday.
The harder these fools push their crappier fluff the more people will just give up on it. It will be a rather shallow curve, but I think it is inevitable.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Right now these groups command the attention of pooly informed but nevertheless powerful Senators and Representatives. Even if they do not agree on everything they do agree that the provisions of the CBDTA and the DMCA should be enacted/strengthened. They are serious about plugging the analog hole.
In some sense this may be worse news. If they could agree on provisions then they would draft a single, oppressive but consistent piece of legislation. If they cannot agree then we are likely to get some hideously general bill that is so vague and unspecified that only the rich can afford to do anything. Either way its not good.
See here for a nice asessment of the BPDG and the CPTWG. See here for more info.
Here is the Washington Post article. No registration necessary.
The only way that I can see this working is with a new standard for gateway digital devices that will pass content only to other devices of the same class, and (I suspect) over a proprietary, non-IP network. Then (whatever actual encoding is used) there's going to be an identifying watermark that the receiving device must look for. It will either be a simple identifier (so that you can copy from one PVR to another if you plug them together) or a "copy never" bit so that you can stream it to another PVR, but this second PVR will not make a copy, it will only stream on to a display. Technically, there might be a "copy once" bit, but only on the original broadcast, so once it hits your PVR, it's "copy never". If it's the former case, and you can make copies by plugging two PVR's together, I think that's fair enough, because I can take my PVR round to my brother's house and make a copy of Buffy for him. That's raising the bar far enough, as it effectively restores the situation that case law has decided is fair use: making a few copies explicitely for known friends and family. However, that theory is replete with flaws. For one, it doesn't match the way the industry has been going. It's far more likely (I suggest) that it will be a "copy never" bit, and only local streaming will be allowed. For another, there's still that bloody great gaping hole at the tail in either case: sending to a display. Because unless the display also has to be one of these new devices, you just stream to a video capture card, then it's straight onto the internet with the content, and people will download it and stream it to their own non-compliant display devices. That's the sting. It has to cover display devices (TV's, monitors) and it has to be mandatory. Don't think this will stop with PVR's. For it to have even a hope in hell of making a difference, every display device sold will have to be compliant, and it will have to refuse to show content without the watermark. That means that PC video cards will also have to watermark their content. You see where this is going? It snowballs pretty rapidly. But unless they get everything, there's little point in them pushing ahead with it. To support this rather alarmist attitude, ask yourself this: if this is truly an industry consensus, why does it need to be legislated?. I suggest that the answer is that for it to work, it has to be mandatory, and it has to be across the board: every channel, every cable decoder, every PVR, every TV, every monitor, every video card, every DVD player, every VCR. Everything. Wake up, the coffee is brewing. This is Son of SSSCA, yet again. They're just hoping nobody notices this time until it's too late. Please, please, get out that pen and paper, and ask your elected representatives to have a good, long, hard look at this, because it has the potential to be as bad as you can possibly imagine, and then a whole lot worse.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Consumers have the final say. Don't like what's being offered? Don't buy it (and don't steal it).
Indeed, but from the little I know about them is that they seemed to be ahead of their times.
Hollings and others want industries to agree so they can back up the agreement with force of law.
Hollings said this in the Commerce Committe hearing on March 14th. He mentioned Macrovision as something the industry came up with that Congress then required in all VCRs.
He claims to not want to have to write the technical standards that would become law but to only be using that threat to drive industries to agree.
You might or might not believe him, but Orrin Hatch who is much calmer on this issue and seems a lot more relucant to write a tech. standard seems to believe in backing a "private" agreement.
The problem is that this isn't an agreement based on mutual compromise. It's everyone caving to the MPAA.
-M
Most DRM solution I know of, rely on cryptography, where each chip authenticates itself to another. Just like certain smart cards authenticate to their terminals and vice versa. Every command and every reply sent to a device would have a cryptographic signature and the data transferred would be encrypted using a session key the chips negotiated during authentication.
If you think it's easy to extract the authentication keys from the chips, then think again.
Secure microcontrollers store sensitive data such as authentication keys deep inside the chip where it is difficult or next to impossible to probe at. Chips like that have tamper protection sensors for example to measure the electrical capacity between chip layers or even whether the chip is being exposed to light. A number of oscillators would be on the chip to disparage attacks that attempt to derive information from the chip from it's electromagnetic radiation, Bus scrambling like in the ATMEL secure flash microcontrollers would make probing the chips signals even more difficult, if connecting to the chip's internal signals were possible due to very miniature scale of chip structures. I might also add that there is always a way to extract the data on any chip, no matter how secure. All you need is in the neighborhood of $1,500,000 in equipment and chip specialists.
System-wide keys (right after cheap and insecure microcontrollers) are the reason most Pay-TV schemes have so far failed miserably *. I could envision a system where each group of devices that are supposed to talk to each other are loaded with an mutual set of authentication and encryption keys during on-board testing that is totally random from the set of keys the next box on the assembly line will receive. So now, even though you've extracted the keys from your set of chips and can use that to get at the copy protected data, you still don't have a mod-chip solution that anyone could solder onto their own circuit board. What you could do is upload the unencypted media to the net, but the way things are developing right now, maybe there wont be any playback devices around that play unencrypted data, so you'd have to extract the keys from individual box to re-encrypt the data so it will play on that box.
Mod-chips are possible today because apparently not much effort goes into securing consumer devices. CSS was defeated because they were dumb enough to embed a player key in PC-software, the Irdeto ACS1.2 pay-tv cards only checked the first two byte of the 40-bit signature field for each command and Irdeto had many other bugs such as not checking field lengths on certain instructions that update or read the card's eeprom, same thing essentially goes for American pay-TV schemes like the H-Card.
* Broadcast systems such as digital television, however do have the inherent disadvantage that make it necessary to revert back to keys common to more than one set-top box, because as the number of subscribers rises, so does the computational load increase for calculating subscribers' decryption keys.
the MFDRF is against JJDO as well as ICANS-ERSD. This act (IO/S-2001/A), is nothing more than a repetition of older GIGK UUEDS legislation against KKDJ people.
... are we repeating ourselves a little bit.
It is elementary!
Please
Sure, Alchemists were not able to turn various metals into gold, but today, using nuclear physics, we can turn lead into gold and by semi-simple means, carbon into diamonds.
However, I agree with your comment that If DRM can be done at all, it will take a whole lot more money than the entertainment industry is prepared to spend. Yes, gold can now be produced by nuclear reactions, it is just plain easier to go out and dig the stuff up. The entertainment industry will find, eventually, that it CAN be done to manage digital rights, but at such a cost that it just isn't worth it. Hopefully, that day will come long before we all get thrown in jail for letting our friends borrow a digitally true copy of seinfeld that we recorded last week on our PVR. I don't know about anybody else, but I honestly have paid for software, music, videos, etc.. that I want to support those that have created it.
The big problem is that people today aren't creating things that are truly part of themselves. If they were, it wouldn't matter how much money they did or didn't get. The attitude of "yeah, I could do that, but what would I get for it?" is what is keeping the United States of America (and many other good nations) from becoming the best they/we could become. At some point, people have to discern what is important to them and do it ONLY for that reason, because it is important to them. I think if you (and I mean anyone here, not just the one post I'm replying to) look into the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard you will see that his philosophy strikes at why the world wars were fought and why so many people are so disillusioned today.
Eh, just my .02 (inflation adjusted, currency exchange rates, taxes and tariffs may increase or decrease value).
Andrew 'Mickey Knox' Gearhart
Gouge everyone's eyes out, and break their cochleas. That'll teach you stealing scumbags.
[insert witty comment here]
In all this ruction, what gets me is that broadcasters don't use the p2p distribution network to sell their ads. All they have to do is produce a mid-quality version (lower than broadcast quality so folks watch the local version and local ads too) of their show, convince some transnat like, say, tobacco companies (how can you legislate against people choosing to download tobacco related advertising?) to sponsor and pay for advertising space (spliced into the show at super-duper quality levels) and distribute that. Keep the ads not too long and intrusive (more entertaining too might be an idea) and folks will think it's too much bother to cut them out, and anyway the ad-enabled version will be the one most prevelant on the network, because its the original.
The broadcasters will be doing exactly what they want to do: make money by broadcasting. Punters will be happy because this gives them what they want: more better stuff for free. Also, bonuses for broadcasters they don't need to maintain a big cable network, or pay for RF bandwidth for this revenue stream. Shit, we pay for the internet. This way they co-opt us into paying for the distribution.
And if you really want to be tricksy you can do a deal with Microsoft to check hashes on the files over the internet and, for amended (or unrecognised) files, flag up a warning that says: "Possible corruption or malicious content in video file. This video file may contain content which would render the possessor liable to prosecution in their jurisdiction and attempted playback may cause damage to your computer. Proceed? (Yes/No/Delete the Smelly Bastard)". Hard-core anti-fudmeisters will laugh heartily and disregard this (and probably won't be using Microsoft Media Player anyway), but Joe Pubic on his wintel will be hitting the Panic button and ridding the world of one more ad-disabled version of the video.
It's not a perfect model (and with tobacco ads and FUD thrown in, possibly Satanically unholy) but it's still a damn-sight less costly and more profitable than pitting your wits against every cracker in the world.
This is not rocket science. A bit of compromise and only a smidgen of innovation could have serious benefits for all parties. And it's not being helped by people that reckon they should get gratification for free. Jeez, watch the ads.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato