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Report from the ACM DRM Workshop
Anonymous Coward writes "There's open skepticism from researchers about the ability of DRM to solve Hollywood's copy protection problems. Read Edward Felten's review here... Papers from the workshop are available online as well."
I just wish they would give it up, its only a matter of time when they come out with some type of copy protection, that someone will come up with a way of defeating it. Meanwhile we (the consumer) suffer because we get things like cd's we can't play in our computer.
If DRM could be implemented without restricting access to memory in my own computer I probably wouldn't mind it so much. The problem is that DRM cannot be implemented without this restriction. Any encrypted file will have to be decrypted, and that means that I can dump memory and get the unencrypted value. DRM will never work without taking away certain things about a computer that make it the extremely useful tool that it is.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
While I agree with one person's comment, that this level of response won't make any difference *policy wise*, it strikes me as an important step that engineers *in the industry* have started saying quite blunty, "this won't work".
;-)
Having a million random geeks say "we can break anything you throw at us" carries little weight - the non-techies coming up with these crackpot schemes just assure themselves that *their* idea will make fools of the collected geeks of the world.
OTOH, having the very geeks PAID to design and implement these ideas say "uh, well, no, it really won't work all that well" means quite a lot more. Obviously, mr. clueless exec's first response would consist of firing any naysayers. After the 10th or 20th person to say "no, really, this won't work, it doesn't matter if you threaten to fire me", they *might* start to get the idea that they have at least a somewhat difficult goal.
This might mark a turning point. Not necessarily for the better, since I expect the next set of ideas to involve a lot of annoying-as-hell hardware-level DRM, but since even that will unavoidably fail, we have taken a step toward the road back to sanity.
I hope. The RIAA and MPAA could always try to get the death penalty for music pirates.
"Whad'ja do, man?"
"Downloaded an MP3 of Brandenberg Concerto #3"
"Uh, I thought that would have gone PD by now"
"Nah, when Disney discovered a 14th century precedent for Mickey, they had copyrights retroactively extended back for a full millenium."
"Bummer"
"Yeah. But at least I only *downloaded* a copy, I just get flogged plus the standard 20 year sentence. A buddy of mine made Mozart's 19th string quartet available on a file sharing network. Poor bastard, they dragged his wife and kids out into the street and shot them all, then at the actual hearing sentenced him to death by impalement in front of RIAA HQ."
It should be noted that the game industry has managed it. Consoles exist to some degree because console games can be made sufficiently difficult to copy that most people can't be bothered. And with some games costing upwards of $10 M to develop this couldn't happen sooner.
The current music industry is another story. They are dead. In 1970 the only way a record could be made and distributed was with a recording studio that cost thousands, perhaps millions, and expensive duplication equipment along with an expensive distribution chain. These days you can by a digital 8 track recorder and a PC for less than a grand and do it all yourself and then distribute it over the net. Mp3s and file sharing will change the economics of music and kill the RIAA but they will never kill it, with films it's different, digital technology offers the possibility of wrecking Hollywood.
Think about it for a sec, before putting up your slashdotisms.
has nothing to do with the machinery, technologies, protocols, etc. It has everything to do with people. Even if the DRM technologies were perfected right now, people would still find a way around it. Why? Because they want to. IMHO we all need to remember that a system isn't just the hardware, software, and logical bits. The system also includes the people; people who create the hardware and software; people who manage and use it; people who create content, etc. People who give it all a purpose. I've never seen any hardware or software that has a purpose by itself; people give it that purpose, and it is reflected in the design. If someone's purpose is to crack DRM schemes, they will probably do so.
C|N>K
I had the opportunity to engage a luminary in the field in friendly discussion at a September DRM luncheon in Prague. He made it clear that despite the feelings of a vocal minority (us), copy protection will be accepted if not welcomed by the general population. Consumers in both Europe and Japan currently purchase such content with minimal complaint, and it seems even more likely in field testing that America will actually desire the copy protection if they are told it will lead to better sound and picture quality.
Granted, he was working within the industry, but the devastating piracy figures in a recent poll conducted among computer users made it clear that DRM will save the industry a lot of money. The poll, performed by blind surveying at three recent trade shows across the U.S., showed a staggering amount of pirated content; broken down by operating system of preference (to see what kind of effect DeCSS has had) apparently Windows users 'only' pirate about a quarter of their movie content, against Linux users' 67% and Macintosh 30%.
In the wake of this information, and the lackluster performance of the music industry in recent years, it is little wonder that they're adopting a 'Chicken Little' approach -- for them, the sky truly is falling. Hopefully, a reasonable compromise between our rights to do with our hardware as we will and the rights of copyright holders to be renumerated for their efforts will be struck; however, I am assured that if one will give, it will be the continuance of Open Source media decoders.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Nonsense. If Hollywood really can't protect it's works the film industry will die. It's an economic question. A reasonably large budgeted feature film costs $100 M to make and involves at a very rough estimate around 100 person years of labour. If the money cannot be recouped reasonably it's all over. No more "Good Burger", "Dude, Where's My Car", "The Cable Guy"... The world would not come to a hault if the $100,000,000.00 (it seems bigger when you type it out) movie became an impossble business decision. Yeah, a lot of actors, cameramen, and production assistants would lose their jobs, but hey, they can all go back to waiting tables, doing a job that society still considers productive enough to merit pay. We don't need to protect industries that have served their purpose in the past, but are now no longer worth what they used to be.
You seem to be assuming that, a priori, the only movies made require Hollywood-level expense and infrastructure... Not so, with the advent of digital video and prosumer level video editing decks. (Is a $1000 video editing card cheap? A $3000 dv cam? $2000 a/v raid? hell no. but they're a damn sight cheaper than the big-studio level stuff.) I think the coming digital age will herald the end of the Hollywood blockbuster and the dawn of a new era of smaller independent filmmaking. Because now not only the tool but the distribution media are in place to make a good movie for less than 50 grand. If you can sell digital downloads of your film for $5 and get 10,000(*) people to look at it, you've broken even. Coupled with a strengthening of film festivals and online movie-consumer websites (think the Amazon book recommendation system applied to indie films), this could turn filmmaking from a hundreds-of-people-and-millions-of-dollars effort to a tens-of-people-and-thousands-of-dollars effort with a real chance of being a profitable enterprise... I think that this would allow a purer artistic vision to shine through in most of the resulting films because with lower financial risk and fewer participants there would be less of a "design by commitee" aspect.
(*)That seems like a lot of folks, but given the scale factor of the internet... (How many of us have laughed at one point or another at the "All Your Base" or "Gonads and Strife" clips?)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Me, for example. I find mp3s from musicians I've never heard of (sometimes I have, doesn't matter), I like them, I go find & buy their CDs. Lather, rinse, repeat.
... I rarely listen to the radio any more ... )
Damn free music is costing me a fortune!
( Funny thing I've noticed tho
I see three specific areas of work that are key adoption blockers today and ripe for further academic and commercial research. The lack of widely-available trustworthy computing devices, robust trust management engines and a general-purpose rights expression/authorization language all hamper industrial development and deployment of DRM systems for digital content.
Translation:
1: For DRM to work, everyone in the content must be running a secure OS (presumably Windows) on specially designed hardware AND
2: A system in place on the client (presumably the .NET CLR trust management engine) must authenticate every executable on the client before execution AND
3: All content providers must use a language (presumably MS's XRML - eXtensible Rights Management Language) to 'encode' documents and executables for number 2, above.
Basically, MS is saying: if you want DRM, OSS and 'general purpose' computing devices must go away. And of course, you must serve your media using Windows.NET Media Server.
You mean like DIVX? We all know how well that worked
Both papers are very sceptical of DRM.
Microsoft may be playing the DRM game for now, but I'm sure it's just a temporary thing... if they convince Hollywood and the record studios that Windows Media Player is the "only secure" format, they will potentially gain a short term advantage over the competition. And in this industry, a short term advantage can be leveraged into a long term industry lead... Profit !
Yeah, in the long run all the schemes will be broken and Microsoft knows it, but they're happy to play the game for now.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Two problems:
1. This stops working when all new components have DRM built into them.
But let's say you save your old equipment and can access the data, then:
2. Just because *you* may be able to come up with a solution, it doesn't mean that the problem goes away. The fact is, if this allows content providers to hinder the ability of law abiding citizens to exercise their fair use rights, then that's a Bad Thing.
Think of DRM circumvention as if it were spam blocking. Which would be better, a) you block your incoming spam, or b) there is no more spam. From your perspective, option a is fine, but spammers don't care. As long as option b doesn't happen, they are happy.
Content providers don't care if a few techies manage to watch their DVDs on Linux boxes or listen to protected music on unapproved devices. If most people are subjected to the imposed constraints, then they're happy. Just because you can avoid the problem doesn't mean the problem isn't there.
We shouldn't focus solely on avoiding the problems, we should be working on making the problems go away (e.g., supporting legislation that returns our fair use rights).