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Hollywood's DRM Agenda Moving Forward
risingphoenix writes "The New York Times has a story about the progress Hollywood has made putting Digtal Rights Management in the marketplace. The story focuses on what technology is currently in place; what the next moves, technically and legally, are for the industry and how consumers are being affected by Hollywoods power grab."
"We need to put in speed bumps to keep people honest," said Jack Valenti
Personally, I think Jack Valenti needs a few speed bumps on his head to knock some sense into him.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w$ c=142;$ t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=(1 1,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])$t^=(72, @z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%162 :0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if ((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h@ b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$ h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$| (ord$b[4])>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^ $d>>4^^ $q>=8)+= $f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/p ack+/g;eval
# 531-byte qrpff-fast, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz
# MPEG 2 PS VOB file on stdin -> descrambled output on stdout
# arguments: title key bytes in least to most-significant order
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;
$m=(11,10,116,100,
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?1
=5;$_=unxb24,join"",
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256
$d^$d/8))>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8
From A Cave Somewhere In Amerika,
W00t
So what, Hollywood makes shit anyway. Turn off your TV, stop the flow of bullshit that will only numb your brain and not entertain you. Learn something new, build something, tell someone you love them, evolve from the dumb mass-market consumer that we are.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
made me wonder what they're actually offering us in exchange for what's being taken away - that is basically, easy to tape television and easy to copy movies. Is the picture going to get much better on DVDs? Will large, widescreen/wall TVs get cheaper? Will there a be a point where first run movies are released simultaneously in theaters and Best Buy? Or submitted directly to our homes via a set top box for 7 bucks (for each person in the room, of course)? Will Jack Valenti live to be an unholy 300 years old? Just thinking.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: If I can watch it, I can capture it and digitize it. After that I can encode it any way I want.
They cannot escape from this undeniable truth. Real mass piracy will never go away for this reason. This DRM technology only serves to take away consumers fair use and increases corporations control.
Either way, this won't ever become mainstream. People will demand the rights to use their media any way they want to. That means being able to make and burn mp3s for portable players in their car etc. As soon as people figure this out the hardware simply won't sell.
Why else do you think macrovision disabled region free DVD players out sell normal players?
- PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
The only address I could find is letters@nytimes.com which will be directed to the letters editor (duh) but perhaps one could try amy.harmon@nytimes.com or a.harmon@nytimes.com or some other variation.
If anyone *does* find her direct address, pls post.
It's easy to see what they're trying. They're going to come up with a draconian, unworkable model that everyone hates. Then they back off to something that we (that being the technically savvy users) still find offensive but that the normal schmoe thinks is a good deal.
After the media companies spin it into Hollywood backing off because they're good Americans and want people to have the right to watch TV (just like it says in the Constitution) the average guy is going to say "Hey, this is a reasonable tradeoff to get The Sopranos in high definition goodness! I sure am glad they didn't stick with that first plan. It would have been awful! Sure, I can't record it, but that would be piracy!"
Time and again, the informed people screwed by the ignorant ones. Same story here.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
I wish the evil ones would just hurry up and bring all of this out. Put the DRM tech in whatever they want. Then try to sell it. The sooner they just do it the sooner I can go on and not buy a damn bit of it. They can stack all of that crap right there with all those copy protected CD's I'm not buying any longer. Or as Clint Eastwood might say, "Go ahead, make my Millenium."
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Hollywood and the music labels DO have a piracy problem and it IS growing. Napster, CD burners, and the like simply didn't exist a few years ago. Moreover, we're going in circles, this same essential battle has been fought before, over cassette tapes andf DAT (remember that? :) and the VCR. It's just a question of degree.
My question is that if you object to DRM because of the way its is done, what should be done? Please don't say "lower prices" because that's just a rationalization that they're somehow forcing pirates to do it. A boycott is a well-proven means of protext.
If you're against intellectual property in general, just skip this, because the industry is never going to work for free, nor accept your suggestion, nor IMHO should they. Folks who create intangibles are as entitled to compensation as people who build bridges.
In an age when it is orders of magnitude easier to copy, what should the rights holders do to protect their work? Think positive! Frankly, I don't know.
While the economy and stock markets struggled, 2002 was a golden year for the silver screen. Thanks to blockbuster hits such as Spider-Man, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings, ticket sales hit $9.3 billion worldwide, a remarkable 13% rise over 2001's then-record receipts. So much for claims that piracy threatens Hollywood's livelihood.
decently done article, not toooooo long
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Entertainment could end up being another utility like water or power. Screw that - between income tax and sales tax I'm already losing over half my income a year, if everything we do requires constant usage fees, we end up as a kind of vassal caste for these people.
While the MPAA has a "piracy" problem, I would like to know how much of that is due to commercial efforts especially in the developing areas of the world. Personally, I think that the "solution" is to aggressively pursue those making profits off their efforts and ignore the people who trade the grainy previews. Instead of DRM, why not commit to a common digital signature format. Player software would detect the signature, and _WARN_ if it is not present. Have a bounty for reporting illegally applied signatures, and a clearing house which allows the measuring of actual profits for any signature. The presumption is that in general, people do recognize that they should pay for entertainment, as long as they can do WHAT they want with their copies. The existence of unlabelled, hard to transfer content should be a competitor to the otherwise monopolistic scenario. Is the price and terms so onerous that your customers spend the time to get it elsewhere? And the ones that will copy, will copy. But maybe when they grow up, they'll want the "platinum memorial edition" of the titles they used to watch.
(if they're still around)
becuase they are licensing a product, to quote the story: "Instead of a product, consumers will essentially purchase licenses to use digital movies or music under certain circumstances"
A man brings up a copy of Ghostbusters VII (remember Hollywood hates taking risk, so they began to just make sequals to ancient hits) and begins to check it out.
The guy at the checkout counter asks "How many people will be viewing this?"
The man answers "None of you business"
"Well, sir, we need to know that so we can charge you a per person viewing license"
"What the fu**?
"Well, sir, remember, everytime a unlicensed viewer views a copy, they are viewing it with bin laden."
--if you don't find it funny, don't waste your points modding me down. Use your mod points to promote world peace, or something...
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
Why? Because digital video production is getting pretty cheap these days. Music production is even cheaper. The more Hollywood cracks down, the more opportunities there will be for grassroots art produced for love instead of money, or for tipping and Street Performer systems.
If Hollywood wants to abandon the most effective marketing system ever invented, I say let them!
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
That evil box sitting on your TV and "media consolidation" are the keys to making every place as unserved by culture as North West Alaska in 1910. Media consolidation assures the current broadcasters that no on else will be able to provide content. MP3.com will die sooner or later under it's lawsuit loads, and all the others that would do likewise know better than to throw good money after bad. That evil box on your TV will makes sure no one else can create content that your TV will play. An equivalent box in the local movie theater already prescribes what content will apear on the screen and when - without a physical copy ever entering the building. Wanna try to get your movie distributed in a theater like that? Good luck trying to own the satilite, and escaping the FBI if you try. The theater owner can't help you even if they wanted to.
The only solution is to create a peer maintained independent wireless network. All the wires are owned by people who think they can screw you all day long.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Pay per use is untenable in a competitive market. Just look at cell phone minutes which are rapidly moving toward an (almost) unlimited use model.
Why is pay-per-use untenable in a competitive market? People do not like it, so it suppresses demand for the pay-per-use service. In a competitive market where suppliers are trying to meet and create demand, this generates an opportunity to undercut the pay-per-use provider. Suppliers almost always emerge who will take that competitive opportunity.
Pay-per-use does however frequently does make sense in a non-competitive or ologopolistic environment where consumers must purchase the service. This situation existed for some time with hub-and-spoke in the airline industry. The commodity being metered was seat miles purchased at particular times. Here the supplier was able to charge to the hilt for demand that was inelastic (i.e., people have to pay because they have no other option).
Well, does inelastic demand like this exist for entertainment? Likely not. As we have seen with the rise of minor league baseball, web journalism, independent films, cd sales, and even blogs, people can find quick substitutes for the over-charged items.
I don't think regulatory relief will be quick (look at microsoft). We'll have to rely on the hacker community and all of the competitors who are seeking to create demand.
Of course these business models can be as irritating, restrictive, and coercive as all get out.
I can't help but notice that the entertainment industry (including sports), is all about getting more and more money for giving you essentially the same thing. Commodities of all other types become cheaper to purchase, higher in quality, and packed with more functionality. The reason the entertainment industry gets away with this outrageous behavior (other than their huge lobbying efforts in congress) is that by definition entertainment is perceived of as a luxury. If manufacturers of the necessities of life treated consumers this way they would be hauled before congress, and made to explain themselves.
Cable companies tend to be local monopolies and act accordingly. Our local cable is structured such that you can get a 10 dollar basic cable rate, but this only gives you the same channels you can get with a rabbit ear antenna, and at not much higher quality, the next "tier" is over 4 times more expensive. Throwing in a load of crap you probably don't want and making the next bump up to HBO and Showtime seem much more sensible (hell it's only 10 dollars more...). Do you know of any other products that go from entry level to more than 4x plus luxury model with no other steps between? Even with the full service, some ad-supported channels are scrambled. I have paid for "The Sci-Fi" channel, but I can't set my VCR to tape it directly, I have to be sure and leave the Sci-Fi channel on, and record it from my cable box (there is some user unfriendly way to program your cable box for a timed recording, so now you have two things to program, and multiple points of failure possible).
Of course the more money the entertainment industry can make, the more money that can be collected in taxes. Thus the government has the same addiction to increasing entertainment revenues, the same way they are now addicted to increasing gambling and lotto revenues, whether their citizenry spending a disproportionate percentage their income on these things is a good thing or not.
Worst of all is the disdain the industry has for its customers. We have all seen the FBI warning at the beginning of a VCR tape, and accordingly fast-forwarded through. Now comes DVD, and you must sit patently sit through this thing every time (which has been timed for slow readers), and if you try to skip forward, I think in some cases it resets the time out clock. Of late I also get to sit through this warning in two other languages as well. Some DVDs even force you sit through commercials for related projects. I bought this DVD, I own it, it shouldn't lock me out of controlling my DVD player. It also shouldn't surreptitiously put software on my computer if I choose to view it there, nor coerce me into installing special software to view. Guess what, that improved DVD viewer they offer you is likely to break your sound drivers, and if it's your mom or dad, being good citizens by following the DVD instructions, well then they are just screwed, since the DVD distributors really don't have any legitimate reason to be mucking around with your computer's settings, and now every thing is horribly broken (I still have trouble explaining to my dad why the play button on the DVD remote won't play the DVD, and he has to "select" play from the entry screen with the select button).
So now we want to give the over the air broadcasters the power to be just as manipulative and coercive as cable and DVD? Ironic that I took my digital rights for granted until everyone suddenly wants to manage them for me.
Letter To Iran
"That's what digital rights management does: it enables business models."
so does slavery.
Unfortunately the entertainment industry's DRM drive is as much about driving out competitors as it is about protecting their ip.
One will expect that the next DRM enabled devices will be made in a way that would allow fewer and fewer companies to create content for them. And if those devices become popular, than independant producers will have to beg one of the big companies to release their movies/music for them.
Not a good prospect.