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UCB Researchers Critique DRM, Compulsory Licensing
An anonymous reader writes "
In this
paper, Berkeley researchers critique a host of cockamamie DRM schemes, and
they also question the compulsory
licensing approach recently being promoted by the EFF. They get into some
of the practical details about compulsory licensing that no one else seems to
be talking about like technical feasibility, incentives to cheat, monitoring for compliance, efficiency of collection and distribution of funds,
privacy, fair use, feasibility of legal enforcement... Anyway, it's worth
a read and is a useful contribution to the debate, whatever side you're on.
"
the way the RIAA is going now is nothing but a complete circle jerk. "we want more of our money, so lets spend money, attack these people who give out our music for free, thus putting us deeper in debt (legal costs), and then, we'll continue to sell our CD's at $15-$25USD, although our brand new techology will stop them from stealing, since the CD's won't work in half of the cd players on the market..ha ha ha ha"
MY thoughts....no way they are going to stop people from getting music for free. Encode everything anyway you want, someone is going to be bored enough, and have the time enough, to simply run a patch cord from Audio Out from a CD player that works, to Audio In, on sound card...and sit and wait 74 minutes for the CD to be recorded. There is NO way to get around it. What they SHOULD do, is encourage people to BUY their shit. Drop the prices, what the fuck is the point of celling a 25cent piece of plastic for almost 100% more then what it's worth. Ya gotta give people more. Offers, coupons, buy 1 get one, discounts, free clothing...etc etc. People will buy if people get what the money is worth. Pay the damn bands more then 5 cents per CD sold. People are also willing to support these bands. They aren't willing to support some fucking company that takes 95% of the profits, and throws the bands pocket change.
*coughs* okay, i feel better now i think
your sins into me, oh my beautiful one.
No proposed technical protection measures are strong enough to sustain a determined attack. Only in combination with models where the incentives to circumvent are limited, can technical solutions succeed.
Odd how companies are spending so many resources in hopes that they'll score a home run. What I find strange is, that when other technologies which where hip where introduced (eg. cassettes, vhs tapes, etc), I don't recall the same effort as the 400lb gorillas running around with an attache of lawyer goons. Why not just go back to the basics and protest against those technologies, they're still being used... Odd...
What is the feasibility of legal enforcement, both domestically and internationally? It is easy for researchers and market actors to forget that a solution that requires significant government intervention and enforcement is inherently bound to the confines of country boundaries and international treaties.
Comments such as these rather scare me into thinking that at some point companies will come together and force their own private hell with a one world order rule on the net. Sure it would be a difficult task, but money talks, and I'm sure if the top ten companies in every country got together and lobbied for something like this, they might actually get it going.
What are the impacts on user privacy and fair use?
Privacy concerns frequently run counter to desires for economic efficiency. Therefore, any proposed solutions must acknowledge that there is a trade-off to be made. Fair use is important on its social merits alone, however, a broader adoption of fair and private uses will also serve to reduce user incentives to circumvent.
Situations such as these make some purposely circumvent policies and rules. Especially when they're (rules and policies) shoved down someone's throat.
Want Root?
I don't actively boycott them, rather I just actively look for good metal that isn't affiliated with them. Century Media is clean according to the RIAA Radar. They've got lot's of good stuff like Novembre, The Gathering, Lacuna Coil, Lullacry, Strapping Young Lad, Sentenced, Moonspell and some others. If you're into non-metal goth stuff, Projekt seems to be RIAA-clean too.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
First of all, let us observe that it is very rare that hitting your customers with a massive hammer (filing lawsuits against them and treating them as criminals) ends up helping your business. And it's quite uncommon if you make someone's life a living hell (with Microsoft style Palladium DRM) that they are going to buy more product from you, much less have any positive opinion of you.
Secondly, let us look at what is really going on with music today, not what the music industry likes to say is going on.
1. Most people like music.
2. Most people buy music.
3. There is an amazing amout of music available on many labels from many geographic regions.
4. There is no easy way to a consumer to listen via radio to all the music that is available.
5. Outside of radio, the ability to listen to music before purchase in a commercial environment is even more limited. Some few music stores offer listening stations, but many times the equipment is broken or dirty.
6. In reality, most people listen to much of the music they end up purchasing via their friends. In fact, many friendships are made because people have common tastes in music.
7. The music industry's method of retailing is incredibly anti-customer and does not respect local laws and customs (try before buy, returns).
8. The music industry has made very little effort to revamp their sales system.
9. The existing online music stores all require that you register to
DRM often being overly restrictive, easily bypassed, or otherwise inneficient does not mean that there should not be some _Rasonable_ system in place that prevents misuse, and only mis-use.
I would like to point you to this article and follow up by submitting that what you ask is either not possible or so impractical that we should not waste our energies on such a project.
To summarize the article, it basically states that because of the complexities of society, only humans should be allowed to decide the implication of the law in a case by case basis. Such decisions are not for the cold logic of a computer unless a sophisticated AI is created for DRM, which is the impractical part I was referring to earlier.
The key word in the article is "leeway", something that machines are completely incapable of.
Look at it this way, do you really want your computer telling you what you can and can't do? Now you can say that this is important for security and to prevent damage to the machine (e.g. Don't allow other users to access the machine, don't allow users to delete system files), but those are simply bad analogies and I encourage you to avoid them since they will only hinder this discussion.
Bullshit. Perhaps you mean to say DRM is unbeneficial in its current form to consumers? Even then bullshit.
DRM has benefits right now, ask Apple, they seem to be making a few million dollar benefits out of a system which includes a form of DRM.
Want to stop users running as root or deleting your files on a shared system? That's a form of DRM, which has benefits?
Want to stop recruitment agencies chopping your CV into pieces, editing it around and submitting it for jobs for which you are unsuited and wasting your time? Produce your CV as a PDF which stops that. There's a benefit for you.
Want to produce a game for the PS/2, the XBox or any other console? Want to make sure that people buy it and you actually make some money from your effort? DRM again, woah, profit as a benefit? How unlike slashdot.
Just because something annoys you does not make it unbenefical to everyone, nor does making blanket statements of your political beliefs as fact provide any benefit to an arguement.
"...The problem is that there is no adequate system in place that allows music lovers access to their favorite music while compensating artists and copyright holders. It's time to start addressing this problem head on. In the past, we've used a system called "compulsory licensing" to reconcile copyright law with the benefits of new technologies like cable television and webcasting. This approach has drawbacks, but it's certainly better than the direction that the recording industry is taking us today.
Many innovative payment models have been proposed (with or without a compulsory license), and we have highlighted some of them here,..." (emphasis added)
Fred's April article (which according to the EFF "explores a possible alternative": this doesn't read like strong support by the EFF to me) is talking about how to compensate artists. Fred writes that there are many ways to compensate them, of which one could be compulsory licensing, and that one way to do c.l. is ISP fees. Again, this doesn't read like a policy endorsement but instead an exploration of alternatives: ISP fees/modem taxes are a subset of a subset of ways to compensate artists. And talking about it != endorsing it.
I think there's an alternative to DRM, compulsory licensing or the tip jar, neither of which is particularly attractive.
I think it's possible to keep a free market. Not for released information-only products, but for non-released products. A scheme where popular artists earn more, where expensive productions remain possible, but without having to put any restrictions on use or redistribution of the material once it's published.
How, you say?
The starting point is that you can only demand a certain sum of money before you publish.
But that's not necessarily problematic. In order to make a living of your creative work, you could run an auction on the web. A band with a good reputation would say, "we ask $750,000 for our next album. The ending term for this is in 3 months. If we haven't received the total sum of money by then, we'll either decide to go ahead anyway, or pay everyone back what he payed, minus 10 % to offer auction expenses and living costs. Bank such-and-such is the trusted party for this transaction."
Of course, you need some technical and financial infrastructure to implement this, but running that would be a lovely new job for the poor record company execs. I'm definitely sure the artists will be more than happy to pay for the work of handling the auctions in a good and efficient manner, and for making sure there is an excellent search mechanism that allows people to find the artists they're looking for.
A lovely thing about it is that the investment doesn't come anymore from financial institutions that are only seeking a high return on investment, which encourages the riskless, prefab artists and mass marketing you see and here every day; here you have people investing who have an actual interest in the end product.
It surprises me that such a scheme hasn't been considered in the paper, which is otherwise quite comprehensive. Is there any reason why it would promote arts and sciences any less than the current copyrights?
I've been toying with this idea for a while, but so far the only drawback I've been able to find is that as an artist, you can never make more money than you've bargained for, except with your next production, where you can cash in on your improved reputation. In other words, surprise hits will no longer make unexpected amounts of money, because the multiplier effect is gone.
That will no doubt discourage some artists, but I think it's likely that as an artist you'll likely be completely satisfied if you're are able to make a decent living of your art. Personally, I would say that interesting artists don't create for the surprise effect that has a one in a million chance of happening. They create because they find that the best way to spend their lives, if only they could earn a reasonable living with it.
There's just two requirements. Artists mustn't whine if they can't win the lottery anymore except by buying a lottery ticket, the people in the audience mustn't whine if they get the art they payed for, while others are getting it for free.
But is that really too much to ask?
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
I've said this often enough that I'm competing with RMS for trotting out tired old lines, but it never stopped him, so I'll say it again:
/dev/dsp simply by hacking the module which implements it.
/dev/dsp, you can still grab the data being sent to the sound card over the bus {ISA, PCI or USB}. You can buy prototyping kits from specialist electronics suppliers with some of the hardware ready made {basically a PCB to fit the slot with some TTL or a gate array for address decoding and the rest composed of breadboard-style copper strips}. The source for the sound card driver will give you all you need to know about how to interpret the data as it comes through. You can then repackage it how you like - wav, mp3 or ogg vorbis.
ANY ATTEMPT TO COPY-PROTECT MUSIC IS FATALLY FLAWED.
First, you can hijack
Secondly, even if you can't hijack
Thirdly, even if you can't grab the data from the bus, you can grab the analogue signal coming out of the jack socket on the back of the sound card and convert that back to digital. You will have to do some filtering and, to avoid creating artefacts, it will have to be done in the analogue domain. Processing through analogue also should destroy any inaudible "watermarking".
Fourthly, even if someone has permanently soldered a steel-armoured cable feeding a pair of headphones directly to the sound card, which has been potted in several layers of chemically-different resins with sharp springy bits that will fly out and cut you to ribbons if you try to interfere with it, you can still point a mic at each of the headphones and get a signal that way. This is the least pretty option, but nothing can ever make it go away.
The success of any analogue ripping scheme is dependent upon the equipment used and widely-available consumer tat is possibly going to pollute the filesharing market with inferior copies of songs. This may well be what the RIAA wants - effectively, in terms of reproduction quality, a return to the tape days. On the other hand, there will always be a group of people who are fastidious about quality, and all the necessary equipment already exists. So who knows? Maybed we'll see a new elite audiophile network. The only thing I don't like is the word "audiophile", which sounds too much like the sort of thing News of the World readers might not like.
The RIAA's methods are never going to work because they are trying to achieve a fundamental impossibility along the lines of perpetual motion or lead-into-gold. Either they will realise they have to give up, or they will kill themselves with the effort. What the RIAA should ask themselves is this: if photocopiers, scanners and printers are so cheap and readily available, then why do people buy newspapers and magazines instead of just making photocopies of them or scanning them and uploading them onto the internet?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Ever heard of PGPDisk (part of the PGP suite)?
Encrypts a file which then mounts as a drive letter when decrypted. Pretty handy! All my sensitive files goes in there (mounts as drive s:\ ) and it stays mounted until I unmounted.
All DRM is unbeneficial to the consumer. It limits our rights as citizens. Sure, it protects content rights holders, but they already have number of protections that we have ceded to them.
DRM should have the name- Digital Restrictions Management. I do not want further restriction on my stuff. The Doomsday project in England would be completely dead instead of resurected if DRM had been in place then.
We let DRM happen and we are going to forget the past.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I dunno why I'm posting this seeing as I've missed the "prime time" for this story as it were, but arguing that DRM is inherently evil is a bit like arguing that DSL inherently sucks because your IP is dynamic and you pay by the megabyte (ok I have an enlightened provider where neither is true but then I'm a Brit) -- just because the current implementation is greedy doesn't mean the idea itself is useless.
I see a future that works along these sorts of lines: Firstly, record companies will be a lot smaller and less wealthy. This is of course the real reason why they oppose internet distribution but I think we all realise that however hard they fight this will eventually be the case. Secondly, I see them providing a two-level service from their website. A modest, flat subscription fee lets you download your favourite music from their own well connected server network, in whatever format (OGG, FLAC, MP3, AAC...) you want, capped at, say, 1GB of downloads per month. I've got a dedicated server where I get 200GB for $100/mo, so a $10/mo subscription fee would cut them a handsome profit of about $9.50, by that pricing scale. These files would be encrypted.
The second layer service is free to all comers; no email address required, no ad profiling information, just a username and password registration. This level doesn't supply any music, just keys for each song. You go on Kazaa or whatever, download whatever form is available (keys are issued on a per-song basis, not per-encoding), then decrypt it with a key that your player acquires by means of a web service API.
This depends on copyright law being made more sane; specifically, that it is illegal to redistribute copyrighted content FOR PROFIT. Also, the other big problem is that most of the record companies' revenue comes from teenagers, and you have to be over 18 to have a credit card and hence participate in transactions over the internet (I'm not quite 18 yet and I can attest that running said dedicated server is a real pain in the ass at present). Though if it's a subscription service I suppose they could get their parents to pay for it, the important thing is this has to be straightforward and easy to pay for above all else.
Given this scenario though, I think that artists and labels could continue to turn quite a handsome profit. People resent being bullied and ripped off, so music companies probably are losing out on a lot of revenue to the filesharing networks at the moment. However, stack these two options against each other. What would you rather have; an unreliable, hard to use filesharing network with its associated boat load of scumware? Or a clean ad-free page where you can download an entire album in just the format you like it at the click of a button and at maximum speed? Heck I'd pay more than $10/mo for that. I still buy CDs because I like stuff in 64kbit OGG (I'm not an audiophile and I can cram an immense amount of stuff onto my 128MB P800 mobile phone at that bitrate)
Or, if you do want to download something off Kazaa, then the act of getting a song key tells the record company that someone is listening to this song, and that will help them reimburse the artists accordingly. Yes of course this DRM can be broken, and yes some people will break it by stream hijacking or whatever but then _there is no point in doing so anymore_. The downloader contacts a record company server to get the key and by doing so they establish that this is the correct file, that it is of good quality and that the artist benefits from their download, and the recording company can build a good profile of just who's popular at the moment, and maybe the media player can discreetly ask where you got the file from so they can see which distribution channels work best. Go up to a friend of yours, tell them about this great new band you just heard and give them a crypted disk of some of their best tracks. Legal and beneficial to all, same spirit as the open source systems everyone's so enamoured of over here.
And, if you acknowledge that pe