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UK Government Advised to Promote and Adopt DRM
aking137 writes "From ZDNet, the UK Broadband Stakeholders Group (BSG) are recommending '...actively promoting the development and spread of global DRM-related standards' on the grounds that 'The UK's broadband boom is likely to falter unless more progress is made towards combating digital piracy'. Also in the article: 'The massive popularity of peer-to-peer networks also needs to be urgently addressed, the BSG said.'" The report (pdf) is online.
The fact that DRM doesn't actually solve anything doesn't seem to phase these people?
Sure you can make *your* software DRM but free open source multimedia applications already exist. The cat is out of the bag [so to speak].
If there are any psych majors in the crowd could you please explain to me the appeal of seeking out the "latest 3 letter fad" regardless of any the predictable outcomes [e.g. DRM techniques always fail because the problem has no solution].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Fast downloads of MP3s are why people sign up for the first place. Stopping that would discourage my John Thomas from signing up for broadband. How can they say that "digital piracy" slows adoption of broadband? That just makes out with me.
why is DRM an "issue" only MPAA and RIAA sees it as an issue everyone else sees it as them trying to make more money.
....and downloading Free Software.
Is this a sneaky way of preventing the wholesale adoption of Free and Open Source software?
Stick Men
I don't understand their position. Oh wait. Unless they are getting pressure from the entertainment industry to take this stance. Now it makes sense. I know this is a UK issue, so maybe things are different over there. But I just don't understand how online piracy is preventing the spread of broadband services.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This is probably true. I work in an organisation that requires content from the people that Slashdot love and then hate on an almost daily basis.
They have made it abundantly clear that if we don't support DRM, they will not give us any content. There is no room for negotiation.
As much as I hate DRM and some of the ideas behind it, I realise that when companies make that kind of demand there is nothing we can do about it. Sure, we could say "push off, we don't want you" but then that would be a monumentally dumb move and in the end, if we kept that stance up, we'd have nothing to sell. Plus, before you start - we are a big company. This is not a case of us verses the big guys.
When every single company you work with is starting to make those demands, you have no chance but to comply.
So in that sense, I think they're probably right. If content providers see that the UK is making no effort towards adopting DRM, then they simply won't sell there. Again, there is no room for negotiation - like it, or lump it.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Broadband what?
Large parts of the UK can't get broadband and these clowns are coming up with DRM recommendations?
Piracy is a problem, but with all the factors put together is it any wonder people are saving money copying music? house prices are very high (£125,000 average UK house price), council taxes have soared, NI contributions have gone up, fuel prices are slightly higher. The average UK citizen has between £2000 and £3000 worth of credit debt.
The widespread use of cars didn't occur until after the national highway system was built. From early on, it seems people insisted wasting the resource by driving around just for fun or whenever and however they felt.
On a related note, the highway system was paid for (and is still being financed) by the government through taxes.
--> insert right-wing-knee-jerk-reaction here
'The massive popularity of peer-to-peer networks also needs to be urgently addressed, the BSG said.'
I'm sure what they mean is to try their darndest to shut down p2p networks, but in the words of Hugh Grant, "that's just silly." Why do they have to be addressed this way? Why don't we address the broken IP and copyright legal system instead? Why don't we address the VERY broken entertainment and recording industry?
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
I think the point is that broadband could do with more killer apps. Currently companies are unwilling to let their content loose on the net due to piracy concerns, whereas if there was a pervasive, fairly reliable DRM system, a lot more companies would make use of broadband, which in turn would make people more likely to buy it.
Sure, you may say, why would people pay for what they can get *now* for free?
a) It's still not that easy to get. Sure, you can use kazaa, but it's not really reliable or quick
b) Legal systems would get marketed. I'm sure this makes a lot of difference. If people were getting ads on TV all the time advertising on-demand movies, streaming music etc, they'd be a lot more tempted to get broadband.
Well, the big issue is that DRM is usually very limiting. For example, with most online music services using DRM, you can't burn to CD, you are FORCED to use Windows+Windows Media Player (I have a Windows machine, Linux machine and DOS machine and I can listen to my MP3s on all of them), you can't listen to it on more than one of your computers... it's very limiting. Not to mention the uncertainty of 'phone-home' style DRM, which could either be a privacy issue or cause your entire collection to stop working if the service shut down...
Apple's service is a step in the right direction.. but I think that it is nearly impossible to implement DRM without it being an inconvenience. Either one of two things will happen: a) DRM will get the heave-ho, or b) People will just learn to accept it.
DRM means that I can't watch DVDs in a way I want. It means I can't use a player with innovative new features, because various American companies disagree with it. I can't have a DVD player that automatically edits the film, or has multiple bookmarks, or allows me to overlay my own information, etc.
(Obviously, some DVD players will have limited versions of some of these features, but I want them all).
I don't want to have to use quicktime player, or some crap Windows DVD player. I don't want to use an unintuitive and expensive and crap piece of software when somebody else can do a better job. Hell, when I could do a better job.
The BSG is the Broadband Stakeholder Group. Fortunately, they do provide a list of members.
But more than likely, it's NTL who are pushing for this, ever since the bad publicity they received over the broadband cap they tried to impose.
Many unsigned and independent musicians provide free downloads of their music on their websites as a way to attract more fans. Here's some from my friend Oliver Brown for example. Many such musicians, while relatively unknown, are as good as any major label band and certainly an improvement over the pablum they serve up on ClearChannel.
You can find many more examples in my new article:
- Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads
The article also explores some of the historical and legal issues behind copyright, and suggests steps the file traders can take to make file sharing legal.If you're a musician who offers downloads of your music, I can link to your band's website from the article if you give my article a reciprocal link. Please follow the instructions given here
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Depends, I guess. Don't most cars still have governors in them? The Chevy Cavalier I owned had a speedometer that measured up to 120 mph, but I could only take it as high as 104 or so before it kicked itself down to a slower speed.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
One of the recurring themes with Media providers is that they need a way to make more money of the sam variety of product with each new inovation.
Examples from the RIAA include the fact that a lp record would cost $8, and a casette tape of the same recording would be sold for $9. When CD's came out they upped the price immediately to $10, then over the next 15 years ramped it up to $15 per album. As they realized they could add features onto the CD, such as data tracks with atrax compressed editions of the music, and possibly video clips in mpeg format, they bumped the prices up to $18-$20 for an Album. (More if they could find a way to make it multi-disk.)
Similarly going from vhs, (which I realize the movie industry did not want to use at all initially) where a movie would cost between $5.99 and $20, (at a time when the same movie was shown 6 or more months previously in theaters for $4.00, $2.50 Matinee) to DVD, the Movie industry generally bumped the price up to between $9 and $29 depending upon the features they decided to include, and their take on the potential market for that movie.
Broadband is their next target. They want to sell you the option of watching any of most of their library of videos. However they do not trust the existing platform because it is altogether too easy to pirate the videos that they would like to provide for you to watch.
Yes the current boom is largely due to piracy of one sort or another. Whether it is MP3 audio, or Divix video, is only peripherally important. They believe that there is a much larger market for them if they can get to the vast majority of customers who will not pirate their material.
If they can charge $4.99 to ppv a movie they released last year, and $2.99 for a movie from 5 years or more ago, or $.50 to p4p an audio track from the last year, and $.25 for more than 5 years ago, they think that they could be making significantly more money. They may even be willing to sell you a copy of the same movie for 3 times the ppv, or an audio track for 4 times the p4p cost.
The disadvantage for them is that they need an even larger potential customer base than they can get from the current broadband customers. They realize that they are not going to be able to charge those prices to people who can get copies of their material free for the download from some pirate site or network.
Since they believe that their ability to provide content is what will continue the boom in sales of broadband, they think that they have a serious voice when it comes to what the users of that network should be restricted to attaching to the network.
I am not saying I agree with them. Just giving the logic behind it. I happen to think that there is a sufficient market for broadband without video or audio on demand from the members of the MPAA and RIAA, and their equivalents in other countries.
Then again, I have been known to be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
Ok, IMNSHO, this is a cultural market... much like selling French champagne, Italian pasta etc.
You don't force people. Instead, you have to make sure your quality is undisputed.
What good is having DRM, if your receipts are among the worst? Your music can be ok but, really, don't you think India can speak English, too? Or, for that matter, any other country?
And about cinema, one word: anime.
Isn't that DRM thing a little like painting oneself into a corner? Imagine all these companies some time into the future paying large ads to announce they don't use DRM!
File sharing technologies which facilitate the direct infringement of copyright have the potential to destroy important areas of creative, cultural activity: shrinking rosters of creative talent in the music industry bear compelling witness to this fact.
Notice that last line there: shrinking rosters of creative talent in the music industry bear compelling witness to this fact. - This is the only 'fact' it seems in the document which isn't backed up by various statistics. Its worrying how government documents can make hard statements like this with no presented evidence (I'll be contacting them on Monday to ask for some).
Notable the evidence involving statistics is geared up to attack the file-sharing networks ie: Kazaa currently running at 2.5m downloads/week.
I believe that the BSG is a Government advisory group started by Patricia Hewitt, I'm worndering, being as they 'advise', what gives this group so much expertise in the matter?
The report is Authored by Nick Garnett of the Simkins Partnership (Media&Entertainment Lawyers) - He reveales few if any sources of information in the document so we have to assume that he is the oracle of all things P2P and Internet.
I dislike the way our govenment tries to 'Blind with statistics' especially when only the statistics of convenience are shown. Clearly the government is attempting to scare the UK broadband stakeholders into co-operation.
They have scheduled September 2003 for initial talks; I'm yet to discover if any discussions will be public. I would suggest that if there are public talks, members of the general UK IT community should be in attendance before we get our legs cut out from under us by DRM side-effects.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
P2P is pretty heavily demonised. "Filesharers don't [...] pay for the infrastructure they use", is the old argument that just because you were sold a 1Mbit connection doesn't mean that you should expect to use it. This is absurd, because the only way that you could pay for the infrastructure would be to buy content from your ISP. That relegates "broadband" to being just another way to pay-per-view. Excuse me, but I can already do that. Don't expect me to pay you extra for some of bits that turn left at my cable splitter rather than right.
They also make the (seperate) point that large scale copyright violation will lead to less money going to content producers, which means that less content will be available. Yes, yes, the economy will collapse, we'll waste our money on things like mortgages and food instead, cats and dogs living together... There's no acknowledgement that if the incumbents die off because they won't change, then maybe, just maybe, something might spring up to take their place and supply the demand under the new conditions. Yes, you can't "compete with free", but why the presumption that content is only created in order to make money? Instead they propose DRM [sic] as a mechanism to prop up the incumbents, again repeating the fallacy that copy rights are designed to protect profits rather than to put work in the public domain. Look, chumps, it doesn't matter how it gets there, or how much money changes hands in the process, as long as someone is prepared to make and distribute it.
I'd go on, but it's just repeating itself from this point. Bear in mind that they assert that "The DVD Video format [is] still relatively secure." Judge from that whether this report is worth your time.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If you want to know what the problem with DRM is then you should read this story by one of the leading minds of the GPL/GNU, Richard Stallman:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It's an article in which reading is outlawed, made possible by Microsoft's DRM, and corporations' ideas of what copyright should be.
He also has many other essays too.
But he might be right.
The people behind the BSG are not the ISPs but intellectuk (according to the contact email addresses).
IntellectUK are an IT industry body backed by Microsoft who told the government not to buy GPL
Okay, probably not the internet, but MSNet (or something similar). This will be like the internet but more business friendly and it will be cheap for users, probably free with new computer and console purchases. Companies will pay to be on MSNet because all machines must be DRM-enabled AND consumers will want it because the speed will be measured in gigabits and be able to access the latest music, movies, etc. Of course, for a consumer to be on MSNet, you need an MSBank account that allows for simple and quick purchases.
Once MSNet is up, the internet will go back to the geeks and the universities and MSNet will be the choice for consumers and media companies!
Come join MSNet, Secure, fast surfing without the geeks :)
It's coming, as soon as the DRM hardware is available - look for an announcement by 2005.
Ok, I know it's counter intuitive, but bear with me. I think DRM could possibly make music, movies, books etc, MORE readily available for free.
I've layed out my idea in my blog. I could be wrong but I think it works. The only barrier I can see here in the states is possible DMCA issues resulting from decrypting DVD's or some future encrypted audio format.
DRM can be used to subvert fair use, or protect it depending on whose hands it's in.