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Philips & Sony To Purchase Intertrust DRM Tech
tuxlove writes "Reuters is reporting that Philips and Sony Corp, the parents
of the compact disc, teamed up on Wednesday to buy InterTrust Technologies
for $453 million -- a deal expected to speed up copyright security for
digital media.
The acquisition by Philips Electronics and Sony of the leading U.S.-based
holder of intellectual property in the field of 'digital rights management'
technology is widely seen as a way to prevent Microsoft, which has been
embroiled in a legal battle with InterTrust, from grabbing control of the
potentially lucrative business.
Philips and Sony, the electronics giants who introduced the CD format 20
years ago, said the deal would enable secure distribution of content as more
films and music are sold over the Internet and other media in digital
format."
If their DRM is simply preventing people from illegally sharing or possessing copyrighted works, then I'm somewhat in favor of it.
The slightest breech of my "rights" to make backups and view them on any device I wish ends that feeling.
Why do I get the feeling that this "inovation" will
end up with sony and philips adding css-like access methods to CD's. Goodby mp3 players.
So far, it seems that Philips has been on the side of consumers when it comes to copy-protection on CDs. The big question now is what effect their acquisition will have on their stance.
More specifically, was their earlier stance just posturing until they could lay their hands on some "good" technology of their own, or will they continue to defend the CD standard?
Now, I don't expect Philips to be in the game to befriend the consumers, so it might just be that they want to keep others from doing too much with the CD format before they (and Sony and their other usual bedfellows) can launch their New and Improved(tm) digital media with a DRM system of their own, to secure future income and sew up the market...
Oh well, I pretty much decided to give up on buying music after BMG's announcement the other week. If they're so intent on actively trying to make it hard for me to use the music I pay for, I might as well just save me the money and trouble.
Actually, the collective buying power of us "open source nutjobs" is a mole on the ass of the buying public. Whether we boycott or not, it won't be noticed in the aggregate against the masses buying Britney Spears and N'Sync.
DRM's coming at us no matter what. The first standard to be adopted, good or not, will be what stays with us. I'm glad someone other than Microsoft may be the ones introducing it, as I'm certain that MS would do everything in their power to make it incompatible with rival operating systems. It seems to me that Sony and Philips would be more consumer-friendly with DRM than Microsoft would ever be.
While open source nutjobs might not make up much buying power they can help promote a different point of view and educated others.
widely seen as a way to prevent Microsoft, which has been embroiled in a legal battle with InterTrust, from grabbing control of the potentially lucrative business
Q.) Why exactly would hardware companies spend almost half a BILLION dollars on a company developing technology that makes products less useful to consumers? Why would they go out of their way to conform to Hollywood's interests? A.) To become the new gatekeepers of media of course! Of course it's a "lucrative business.." not a very ethical one... but hell, it's all about the money these days, right?
Hopefully people will boycott this garbage and it'll go the way of the Divxsaurs. At very least we now have the beginnings of a new format war. Maybe competitors will crack each others DRM systems to prove them insecure and "leak" code through 14-year-old kids in northern europe. (:
Strange times we live in. Vote with your dollars folks!!
Even though they cocreated the standard - they do seem to be strange bedfellows in this one. Perhaps they really will reach a middle ground, a scheme where the average person (we all know people who really want to will always crack media encryption) can use their purchased goods as they see fit - up to the point where they want to violate copyright law (sidestepping the issue whether locking down internet music downloads helps the industry).
I have hope in that Philips has been seen as the good guy in this fight, but Sony? Im not too sure what their corporate take on this is.
Still, its funny how these companies are spending all this cash to prevent consumers from stealing music. I have an idea, drop the price. You wont lose revenue because people will buy a lot more music if its fairly priced. Heck, some of my friends and I have been buying movies like crazy at 10 bucks a shot - movies I would never have paid 15 or 20 for. Pretend like there really ARE market forces in the music industry and COMPETE dammit!
That's why I said "who thinks they'll notice". I'm also curious as to how many ACTUAL RETAIL sales of Brittney Spears and N'Sync (amongst others) there are. I'm sure any numbers the RIAA throws at us are doctored a little, not including those extra that retailers had to buy to get any at all... Aw hell, I'm drunk...
Shift happens. Fire it up.
I haven't seen too much of that from Sony, just from Philips, and then only because CDDA on non-Red Book silver disks with music on them would be a trademark violation. Trademarks are "defend it or lose it", unlike other forms of IP.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I hate DRM, and all but ... fuck me, a DRM system designed by someone who knew what they were doing? No wonder it cost the wrong end of half a billion.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
...it'll only play in your CD player, because that's what the authorization says. You can make a copy and give it away, but your friend can't play it in his player...
So not only can't I play music that I paid for in my friends player, but also that I can only listen to it on just one of my players too. That's just plain ridiculous.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
How many repeaters and miles of Cat5 cable will you need to drive around town connected to the internet?
Is all this bullshit really worth listening to N*Sync, or watching the latest Lord Of the Rings? I mean seriously. Was any movie you saw or song you listened to so important to you that you're willing to be bent over repeatedly, downloading licenses and calling 800 numbers with special ID codes, and keying them in on your little chiclet sized remote for your DVD player and all the other complete nonsense you're going to have to do to listen to "Oops, I did it again."? I stopped paying for cable a couple months ago, and I haven't missed it at all. Maybe the upside to all of this is we'll realize the best things in life are indeed free, and they have nothing to do with pop culture teen idols and special fx hamburger seller mega-movies with budgets the size of most small countries.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
"Philips said the companies would start an open licensing program and would encourage content providers to use the technology, which can protect all digital formats, including CDs, MP3 and DVD."
"Some analysts say Microsoft may lose if Philips and Sony are successful at promoting the InterTrust technology throughout the entertainment industry because Microsoft's technology, called "Palladium," would have a tougher time making inroads."
The above says it all. It's all about battling Microsoft's Palladium. Of what I know, Philips and Sony haven't signed up for Palladium, and since they're big time players on the entertainment hardware market, they can afford to develop their own standard without having Microsoft involved in the equation.
"All the major music labels, in particular BMG, Sony Music and Universal Music have been investing heavily in copy-proof technologies to protect their artists."
It's not so much about protecting the artists as it is about protecting their companies. The music industry has been used to having a steady monetary growth each year until P2P was made popular among the general public. Now they won't make as much profit as they used to. What the artists actually gets is peanuts compared to what the record companies gets. The artists sell all their rights to the record companies, and these companies can continue to make money on their music even after the artist has disappeared from the charts. (eg. collection albums)
The ancient PGP client had an "eyes only" mode that did the same thing: it decrypted the data, displayed it, then wiped the memory where the cleartext had been, never writing anything to disk. It would have been impossible to get the cleartext out of PGP without some really intrusive method, like somehow reading the actual memory pages of the PGP process, or trojaning the PGP binary itself.
Actually it's a lot simpler: use a terminal program that allows you to save the output to disk and you've got your perfect copy.
The same thing can be done for any music format that can be played on a computer. Just create a sound device that saves the digital music stream to disk instead of playing it. It has been done and it's pretty easy (see this page).
The only way around this is to handle the decryption of the data in the audio hardware or to make it impossible to use non-official drivers like Microsoft tries to do with Palladium.
It might look like MS walked away clear from the antitrust case, but this is the real damage that was done. The trial dragged up all sorts of things MS had been up to, it has been reported widely - in the techie news, of course - but also in places that the suits read. Now world+dog knows what sort of man billg is to do business with, we all now what he done to the PC market. The vendors are just bill's box-shifters, living on razor-thin margins, while MS exceeds its own earnings expectations - during a recession. This is the reason Passport fell on it's face, this is the reason Nokia and all the others have frozen MS out of the phone market, and this is the reason that Philips and Sony are pre-empting them on DRM.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
The problem is that the only thing that can determine what is and isn't copyright infringment is a federal judge. Unless you can mass-manufacture a box with a federal judge in it, any system for 'digital control' will either be too permissive, or too restrictive.
I highly doubt it'll be too permissive; there are too many fair uses that could require the full decrypted output (legacy hardware, backup on more modern media, etc)
Given that, then there's a legitimate fair use need to break *ANY* encryption or other access controls on controlled media. If this is explicitly made legal, then at that point, there's no point in bothering. There'll be controlled media, but it'll be legal to sell products to break the protection. Those products will be very lucrative and sell extremely well as people won't want controlled and restricted media. (See playstation or other modchips.)
It'll be a pointless war, but a war the controllers can't win. Thats why they'll fight tooth and nail against this.
Except for the following problems:
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It eliminates the fair-use rights (affirmed by the Supreme Court) that encourage creativity and make life fun. You can no longer mix your own music or add sound tracks to your home movies.
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It gives the media companies the power to render local law useless. A country no longer has the ability to decide how they feel about rights management because the technology itself mandates it. Might makes right.
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It gives the media companies the power to micro-control your use of the content. They can "nickle and dime" you to death by making you pay per listen if they want. Your discription even mentions this ability specifically.
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It gives the media industry the ability to influence the futures of other technologies or even other companies by deciding who gets approved to use it and who doesn't. Microsoft anyone?
I admit it's my own little dream world, but I believe that technology is supposed to enhance our lives, not restrict them. Sounds like a huge leap backward to me.Devon
You've still got the huge gaping analog hole, that only 1 person has to employ and then the stuff is on gnutella/kazaa/choose your favorite p2p and insert here. If the music comes out of my speakers and I can hear it I can make a near perfect digital copy. Simply insert line from line-out to line-in on computer sound card, fire up your favorite wav recording utility, record, convert to ogg/mp3 whatever, and wait a second, copy your now copy-protectionless file to your /share directory, and walla the world can benefit from your 5 minutes of work.
This cannot be stopped, unless the music cannot be played on speakers. (same goes for video btw, a little more involved but not a whole hell of alot more)
I think that means they will be releasing a new standard soon.
Philips and Sony both refuse to use Microsoft products whereever humanly possible. it's even strange that the Philips and Sony DVD+R/RW was accepted by Microsoft. maybe it was a reaching out from Microsoft trying to make themselves appear friendly.
As for you folks worried about DRM, i wouldn't worry too much. These companies know that they can never completely stop copying of data. In the case of Philips and Sony, it would even harm their income since they both still make money from recordable CDs.
I think this is more an attempt just to attempt at being overcome by Microsoft when it comes to electronic music. Even, if Philips and Sony do nothing with DRM, they prevent Microsoft from building a market around it and forcing those two companies to license it.
It's worth pointing out that BluRay has already been speced out and the first products are expected to arrive next year sometime so the next big format on the market isn't going to deal with this unless there are last minute big changes which i seriously doubt. it's too late in the game for this format.
It eliminates the fair-use rights (affirmed by the Supreme Court) that encourage creativity and make life fun. You can no longer mix your own music or add sound tracks to your home movies.
;-)
Nope, just the opposite. Intertrust's system is based on the idea of clearly defining rights, in the rights package, and enforcing them. That means you can't do anything that you don't have the right to do, but it also means that you can't be preventing from doing anything that you do have the right to do, either. Because all the rights will be out there in the open for anyone to see, you'll be able to tell at a glance whether a particular piece of media can be "fair used." (Ugh. Sorry.) If a rights package limits your "fair use" rights, you may even have legal recourse. That depends on the courts.
But like I said, Intertrust's key flaw is that it depends on a ubiquitous infrastructure. If you grant that-- for without it, the whole thing is just talking anyway-- then the customer's fair-use rights will be protected just like the provider's granted rights.
Also, this system only protects the encrypted digital content itself. It doesn't care what you do with the media once it's rendered into an analog form. If you want to take the analog audio output from your MP3 player and plug it in to a recording device, that's entirely up to you. Fair-use rights are not inherently infringed here.
It gives the media companies the power to render local law useless.
Huh? This sounds awfully FUDdy to me. The law-- and I mean local and international laws-- gives copyright holders the right to determine how their works can be used by licensees, with limits. Intertrust is simply a system for turning those rights, which are currently nebulous things defined by a fair bit of hand-waving, into algorithms that computers can understand. It's not about overriding the law at all.
It gives the media companies the power to micro-control your use of the content.
They already have that power. They just have no way of using it. This is an inherent side-effect of copyright law, because copyright law (and international treaties on that subject) says that the copyright holder gets to determine how a licensee can use a copyrighted work. This is nothing new.
In point of fact, a system like this could-- and I emphasize "could"-- be good for consumers who participate in the "disposable culture." Remember my example of a song that you really like but that you're sure you'll be sick of in a couple of weeks? The owner of that song can choose to let you buy a really cheap rights package that entitles you to listen to it all you want for a limited time, for a price of around $1. That would be a good thing in a lot of ways, no?
It gives the media industry the ability to influence the futures of other technologies or even other companies by deciding who gets approved to use it and who doesn't.
Welcome to Earth.
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