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"Squishy" DRM?
lhouk281 writes "There's an article on
Wired about squishy DRM. Apparently some companies are trying to find a happy medium in implementing DRM between the consumer and the RIAA. Good luck..."
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I'm glad that a company is thinking of the customer at all. Its about time.
What needs to be done is more people seriously thinking of DRM models that are good but flexable on a Personal level.
Its going to come, one way or another, so the best course of action is to attempt to develope one that is "Fair". If it means that you cant send your DVD you ripped over the net, Fine, you cant do it, but maybe it can be written so that you can Fairly RIP your DVD to a Video Disk that you can view on your LAPtop that for some reason doesnt have a DVD player.
Are there any Open Source projects thinking about DRM? I dont know how it would work but it must be possible. Plus, with so many companies looking towards Linux for embedded players and such, if an Open Source alternative for DRM came out that at least satisfied whatever stupid laws may eventually get passed, then its just another victory for community software evolution and a loss to Microsoft's plans rule the media future
How do these numbers keep floating around with no evidence whatsoever? I'm sure I'm like most people, if I download a song/movie, it's because it's there, i'm not going to buy it othwerwise.
Trying is the first step towards failure.
There ARE other ways to stop piracy, like prosecuting those who break the laws.
This "squishy DRM" system, which puts a unique identifier in each record ("record" in copyright law refers to a copy of a recording) but doesn't restrict fair uses, allows copyright holders to identify those who break the laws so that prosecution can begin. I find it an appropriate compromise, as long as there's a way for any individual copyright owner to mark a record for free redistribution.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Is probably the most fair method, so long as it in no way impacts audio quality. It won't be effective (once known, removing, or at least making a watermark uselsess through distortion is likely trivial), but if it was, it would have the potential to be most fair.
I mean, nothing stops a user from doing anything with the music. You can play and copy as much as you like.
As companies scan P2P networks and use the watermarks to identify huge distributers, those would be cracked down on.
This is the ideal, but the reality probably wouldn't work within those bounds.
Of course, there are privacy concerns, but if it is distributed, the law is broken. However, the music industries would likely use this as a foot in the door, producing players that required that Watermarks match the current system. If lack of the correct watermark becomes 'wrong', then the system loses the fairness...
Ultimately, there is no practical and fair solution. Nothing will be bullet proof. Somehow books have gotten by without strange measures to protect them from scanning.... Amazing, isn't it?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Good luck?
When are we going to realize that we are most definitely a minority. Call us nerds, geeks, techno-savvy, educated...call us whatever you want, but the general public, en masse has no idea about any of this.
Ask you average AOL using grandma/grandpa to define DRM, DMCA, GPL, OSS, etc., and all you'll get is a puzzled look of bewilderment. These people have no idea what's brewing beneath the shiny exterior of their favorite programs. All they know, and all they care about is the latest, greates features in those programs. Do you really think grandma is going to read that EULA, start to finish, and understand the implications involved in it? In fact, I'm willing to bet that grandma doesn't even know what an EULA is, so you can add that to the list of acronyms above.
So you see, there will most likely not be any luck involved in this at all. The developers just have to give the users the features they want, and the users will buy into it. Nobody is going to hear us, the minority screaming about fair use, privacy, or any of that.
I'm not saying that we're wrong, just that luck is hardly a factor when the average computer user has no idea why this type of stuff is bad.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
The RIAA comes out and demands outrageous things. They get maybe 10% of what they ask for, but once they get that, those rights will be gone forever.
Next time Congress meets, or next time industry works out a new spec for standardizations, they'll demand outrageous things once again. Maybe they'll get another 10%, maybe 1%, maybe nothing. But they'll just keep coming back, again and again, until they've whittled away free use rights down to nothing. Eventually they get what they want, it just takes them a while.
Don't give them anything. They're not entitled to anything, so don't give them anything. Appeasement is a slippery slope to defeat.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
No matter how much you pad a wall, people still stop when they run into it. Consumer backlash against these products hasn't hit full force yet, but it will.
Consumers define a market, not the other way around. When people start getting crippled hardware that doesn't do what they want it to, companies will pay the price.
Moreover, once media companies lose legislative support for DRM enforcement (and this will happen, although it may take the judicial system a while), tech companies won't have any more reason to implement this sort of consumer-unfriendly crap.
We need to remember that the judicial branch of the government is always slow to react, but that it does react -- and more often than not, it will favor the rights of the consumer over the rights of industry. A very convincing argument could be made (and will be, in the next couple years) to the Supreme Court challenging something as unconstitutional as the DMCA, or mandatory DRM. When Hollywood does get slapped in the face by the courts -- and I'm confident they will -- all of this nonsense will fade into the past, and a new wave of technological innovation will be allowed to continue.
This sort of situation has come up in the past, and the American system has resolved it. If this weren't the case, we would have no VCRs, no cassette tapes, and certainly no MP3 players. But we do. It's only a matter of time before we can continue the developmental trend uninhibited.
The real problem with the whole DRM debate is that people steal music. The words download or p2p and the phrase fair use have no place in the same breath.
Actually.. there are a number of arguments for them existing quite nicely together. First, and strongest, the provisions assuring personal digital copies under the Audio Home Recording Act. There are a few other as well, may favorite being a neat corner that hasn't been explored much. If a copyright holder wields their copyrights in an anti-competative manor they lose the monoply distrobution right that copyright law grants (i.e. you get a monopoly on the item, if you turn that into an industry monopoly, we step on you). Given that the record industry has been slapped by the FTC for price fixing at least twice in the past ten years or so, it could be said that they really don't have right to copyright protection currently.
These types of arguments do make a reasonable argument for consumer rights and advocacy, but are still stealing and don't fall under the purview of fair use.
Until we can argue against DRM without bringing up these types of arguments, redefining fair use to what we'd like it to be, then we as a downloading, file sharing community will have a hard time being taken seriously, let alone winning the argument.
VCRs can be used to infringe as can cassete tapes. I can kill you with a butter knife, a fork, a pencil, or a rock. You can quickly bypass the ignition key on quite a few models of car using a skate key. A photocopier has potential infringement in it's very name. Yet none of these things are outlawed. Why? Because they have uses that are legal. I feel fairly safe in guessing that the amount of legal p2p activity is in the same ballpark as the amount of legal use of the copy function in a dual-deck GoVideo vcr. The courts have already said that these facts do not warrent a ban on VCRs so why am I still having to defend my ability to make copies of my music?
jello.
aka aron.
"If the MP3 file that Brad King encodes shows up on a system, we will know where it comes from. We call it lightweight DRM, but it won't prevent you from doing anything." And then what? If one of my MP3's shows up on somebody else's system, is sombody going to make me justify the exchange? Err... No officer I never gave cooldude76 any MP3 files, he must've stolen it!
Moreover, this system will have to have a way of collecting information, and storing it as part of the DRMP3 (Suggestion for an acronym for SuperMP3's). Do they think that no one is going to figure out how to modify them to change the owner? So suddenly someone who dislikes me manufactures a bunch of Britney Spears DRMP3's with my name attached and dumps them on the web. Now, not only do I have to prove that I'm not the one releasing them, worse, I have to try and prove that I really never bought one of her CDs, to the world at large, to rebuild my little bit of reputation.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Its a WATERMARK. I like this.
The other DRM solutions had bits of code deciding I could do X, Y but not Z.
This one says, I can do X, Y AND Z, but if Z turns out to be illegal, I can be punished.
Fine - thats innocent until proven guilty. Exactly the principle what these new RIAA and MPAA rules forget.
Now give me all that nice digital media, in this unprotected digital format, to use how I wish and I promise not to distribute it.
If I do, it will have a watermark that can track it to my account.
Fine. There's no code managing my rights, if I do something illegal, I get to argue my case infront of a human.
However when copyright infringement is so obviously present (and rampant) it will only convince them that they are losing money because of MP3's and such, not because of dissatisfied customers.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
My question is this: If I am an independent artist and I directly create MP3's on my own, do I have to pay some corporate entity somewhere for a watermark? Does this turn into a domain name kind of thing where a corporate entity doles out certificates? Regardless... I don't mind watermarking in principle. We all know its going to get hacked with the tech equivalent of a $0.99 marking pen, but in principle, I'm okay with this. It may even be desirable for some people to get music straight from the source instead of from Joe Napster's hard drive.
This space for rent.