Slashdot Mirror
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.
There's open skepticism from researchers about the ability of DRM to solve Hollywood's copy protection problems
In May I attended a meeting on amending Canada's copyright laws to include DRM protection.. one of the guys there owns a company that does encryption research.. his statement basically said "the application of encryption technology to prevent copying is fundamentally flawed"
Indeed, someone who makes his living doing what the entertainment industry wants, and he says it can't be done.
I'm glad that researchers are finally speaking up about this.
It worked for this post...
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Gjb, Dhrfgvba Znex, Dhrfgvba Znex, Dhrfgvba Znex
Guerr, Cebsvg Rkpynzngvba Znex, Rkpynzngvba Znex, Rkpynzngvba Znex
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.
The text from the article says:
Proposals for systems involving mandatory watermark detection in rendering devices try to impact the effectiveness of [file sharing systems].... In addition to severe commercial and social problems, these schemes suffer from several technical deficiencies, which, in the presence of an effective [file sharing system], lead to their complete collapse. We conclude that such schemes are doomed to failure.
Note, the article actually says that the watermarking is doomed to failure... not p2p. I've got no idea where on earth you got that text, but its not correct.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
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.
As long as we can get the encoded version (on the disc) and decoded version (out the speaker or monitor) of media (music, movies) then copy protection is doomed.
You misunderstand. RIAA doesn't need to make copying impossible--they just need to raise sufficient barriers so that an equal-copy version is harder to get than walking to the store and buying one.
They don't even have to worry about price right now--they just need to make the most convenient method of getting a copy of re-listenable (as opposed to broadcast) music to get it from them.
(Yeah, and online delivery would be the best way to get it--but that sorta requires DRM at the moment...)
I think the real problem with DRM as Hollywood types are trying to implement it is that they're so unimaginative they can't envision a scenario in which online offerings are accessed with anything besides a general-purpose computer. Basically, it's the same old Hollywood problem all over again: they can't picture anything new themselves, so they keep rehashing existing things ad nauseum.
Instead of trying to wreck or cripple personal computers, why aren't they trying to build a new special-purpose media device with the decryption method in hardware and the case sealed? Doing this would let them implement DRM in any way they chose without interfering with anyone's work, it would give them a new product to sell, and it would probably leave everyone happy. Not just happy; probably delighted.
Some other benefits of such a product would be that they could control what connectors are installed, they could play with the way the screen is painted so it wouldn't appear well on videotape (remember how old CRTs wouldn't show up well on videotape because of how the scan lines were generated?) and they could build in a temporary storage function which would let you time-shift or do any other thing you wanted.
Think about it: this would give them everything they want. They could put A/V content on the web in a proprietary encrypted format, so they wouldn't have to worry about all us Linux guys downloading their precious files, people would have access to the content as part of their cable service, they'd get either a cheapo low-end model free or buy the premium system (the cell phone model)... And, everyone is happy. I can browse the non-DRM web with my Red Hat box, or turn on my content system when I want to do something requiring DRM. It's totally win-win.
Sometimes I think the MPAA and RIAA are asleep at the switch. None of these legal maneuverings are necessary! Build the little custom media system, stop producing videotapes, switch over to encrypted online streams and DVDs, and freakin' relax. Drop the idea that everything has to run on a PC, for Christ's sake.
Of course, this is just my opinion and they're not going to listen. But, wouldn't it be nice if they did?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
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.
I am developing a DRM solution for a major record label. I am a loving slashdot poster and feel the same as all of you. But the client wanted it and I had to oblige or not get the contratc.
.wma files. I had the same opinions of the recording industry as many of you. Like "they are dumb, they should be doing..." What you (and I) don't realize, is that they have access to much more information than we do. They DO know everything. They DO have their reasons for their implementation.s They have thought it out.
I had to implement Windows DRM on Windows Audio files. The Windows DRM server is a mess. With no support, incomplete and documentation that flat out LIES. They LIE repeatedly through the documentation, or they simply make statements in one instance that directly conflict with others. FYI, the windows development community is outstanding. There are tons of free apps and sample code. This is the first time I've ever had to rely soley on MS for support as there is no community for DRM. It was a horrible experience.
With all of that aside, I did get it built. The record companies know how well DRM works, especially on
They don't care if DRM only partially works. That is all it needs to do. With the low costs of distribution, they can model the risk/reward, profit/loss easily. Volume is the key in the recording industry.
Many people WILL buy the albums/songs regardless if the technology can be circumvented. ANY technology on any platform has their open flaws, this is just another. As we all do, they play the %'s.
My $.02, it may not mean much, but I have seen it all in a new light.
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
Digital copy protection schemes are usesless because it only take a good capture of the presentation of the material to defeat. Examples:
analog recording of stereo audio output from a
CD player; video camera in the movie theater. So long as the capture device can reproduce good enough quality of the presentation, it's a moot
point trying to protect the source.
The solution is not to lock up the source, but to
produce new content with quality that far outpaces the ability of capture devices to reproduce/re-transmit it.
Come on! Bring out the HDTV, HD-DVD, SACD, and holographic video and change people's definition
of "good-enough". It's still gonna be years before
the bandwidth is there to mass re-distribute contents of such high quality. If people are accustomed to watching color TV, would they revert to swapping tapes of black and white? The music/movie industries need to invest in their next big thing, and give consumer a reason to spend their money on something of extra value. Their old chicken that lays golden eggs is dead.
Eventually, there will come a point where technology would outpace human's ability to perceive any increase in quality. (Who needs
128bit color depth, when 32bit is more than quite
sufficient?). But it'll be a long time before the average joe gets a holodeck it his livingroom.
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.
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).