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DRM From the Viewpoint of the Electronic Industry
mike449 writes "The cover story of the Oct.16 issue of EDN magazine is about the recent trends in DRM. It is not just a technical article. The author tries to convey what people who are supposed to design and implement access restriction measures think about their feasibility and associated economic, legal and moral issues. 'Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM'."
D R M only inconveniences those of us who pay for our music. The pirates will go on using uncrippled formats. DRM is precisely as effective for anti-piracy as the Evil Bit is for security.
It's not even about copy protection. It's about keeping us on the "new format treadmill", and locking us in to specific playback hardware/software.
Don't be fooled. Take a stand!
I wonder just how many people actually *do* a cost-benefit analysis these days, or is it just a 'tick-box' item ?
The world might be a better place, if people would actually *think* more, it's not hard... "Actions" => "consequences". "Actions" => "Consequences". Repeat as necessary...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
It is interesting, because when it all comes down to it, the "good guys" are hurt due to restrictions, and the "bad guys" always end up pirating, etc. I am not sure there really is an answer as to how to protect information 100% without it both hurting the consumer and being crackable by a cracker. Of course, the governments can keep passing laws that make reverse engineering illegal, etc, but again, that's just going to scare the average Joe much more than it would scare someone who really wants to crack a DRM transmission. Only time will tell where the DRM issue ends up.
Google Toolbar is SPYWARE!
Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM
It's too bad the corportations don't think that way. "Just think of all the money you'll save by not having to design crippled CDs" or "Just think of all the money you'll save by not hiring people to go after music sharers" or "Just think of how many more people will buy your product instead of downloading it if you lower the price a little".
I think logic is a foreign concept to them.
Take a look at the network traffic of any university. Can you really blame electronics companies for not being trusting of their target market?
Locks only stop honest people....
thats what it all comes down to
How do small content creators cope with DRM? I mean, someone's got to certify that newly created content is original and not a copy of something else, otherwise what's the point of DRM? If there's a fee involved, how steep will it be?
I mean, a small time music producer or a small time comic book creator will have trouble in this environment, especially if they're just doing it because they love the art.
The problem isn't DRM, it's copyrights. DRM is just one of many tools to enforce it, where when used in a way to controll people it would, in a normal world, fall by the wayside like all those other "key" schemes that never worked out.
But when you assert that you have a right to restrict what other people copy, even when the cat's out of the bag, then it takes on a whole new meaning. Like the right to regulate hardware companies who don't participate. The right to monitor other peoples computers for the sake of "enforcement". And the right to pry into peoples private content.
Ahhh, what's not to love about engineers...
I mean, if their opinions are heard and understood, their job at designing and implementing DRM is gone. How many people would stand up for a cause that would put them out of work?
"Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM."
DRM should be thrown out - pirates will still find ways to crack/hack the system. It's just a vicious cycle - one that ultimately hurts the consumer.
Producers should instead look towards more effective means of an honest and easy system of distribution. This would generate much more revenue - and shut down the napster-like systems of today.
I know many people who are now avidly seeking the honest route through the $0.99 title online stores.
DRM itself isn't really the concern. It's just a tool: a lock can be used to keep out burglars, or contain the freedoms of people.
What matters is who is holding the keys at the end of the day.
All that talk on making unbreakable DRM, and not one nod towards the fact that its a free-for-all at the headphone jack. :-)
Sad.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
...it's replete with observations that don't just cover the usual ground (those stale old extremes: "copying is theft" versus "information wants to be free").
Your mileage may vary, but I, for one, had never seen the observation that the chief function of DRM is to "protect the release window" (the short time when content is new and makes most of its money).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Sharing files is absolutely illegal already.
Why doesn't the recoding industry protect their interests the same way as the rest of us? Sue a few of the SOBs and the rest will get the message soon enough.
Oh, that would be "bad" marketing! Tough sh*&, that's the way a free and civilized world works. You have a right to redress in a court of law, not the formation of a police state.
Then the rest humans don't have to live in a world were "automated book burning" is the name of the game.
Recently there was a post here about how Internet makes a poor source for scientific authority. Web pages just up and disappear. Average "life cycle" of "knowledge" on the web? What was it? 100 days.
Today the web, tommorow the world. When Apple gets "tired" of iTunes every copy of your content will simple vanish, without a trace. A world of "books" will burn at the flick of a switch. There will be no place to hide, your backups will burn, copies you use will burn, even if said works should ever into the PD (should Congress EVER remember they govern for the People, rather than the Machine) those works will burn the very day they go PD.
How badly crippled by DRM will the new DVD recorders be? Why would anyone buy one if they can't record anything? DRM is not in the interest of the device makers.
I wonder if DRM and trusted computing technologies can be used to prevent virus, worm, and ddos attacks. If only "trusted" executables would run on a computer, then malware would be much harder to perpetrate. DRM for your harddisk could prevent unauthorized executables from reading your e-mail address book, corrupting crucial system files, copyng your files, or logging the keyboard. DRM for personal and system files would prevent them from being copied or modified except by a trusted executable.
I would invision a scheme in which executables must be registered by the creator with a trustworthy third party in a non-anonymous fashion. Code that has not been registered in a publically traceable way would be denied access to system resources or run only within a tightly controlled sandbox. Once a piece of code has been validated, it would be locked in an execute-only state.
Given that most users are too willing to run any old app that comes over the internet, stronger controls on what can and cannot run may be warranted.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
As a music publisher and promoter, I paid thousands of dollars in royalties to the licensing agencies however, not one artist or songwriter in 7+ years has ever received a solitary zinc penney. Never and none. All the money the RIAA is taking in with their extortion tactics stays within the RIAA and the corporations. Not one cent is being paid out to the artists. Never and none.
So DRM isn't about paying royalties to artists and it isn't about protecting them since they will receive very little, if any benefit from DRM.
Those selling the locks and the keys and those selling the media and the players are the only ones who will receive any financial benefit. So, why even have DRM?
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Microsoft is moving even more slowly than I thought. Only a monopolist could sell an operating system in today's market without support for tcp.
(shakes head in disbelief)
(You heard it here first ... and yes, I do have too much free time. And no, I'm not making a statement pro or con about this area ... this is just a little food for thought. Hah. I made a funny. :-) )
... sometimes more. Only one or two will buy the buffet though. The others just matter-of-factly state they only want a soft drink."
... there's no way someone comes into our restaurant as part of group and only wants a soft drink. You immediately know they're up to no good."
Officials at one of America's largest "all you can eat" restaurants announced today a new method of cost-cutting.
Tuesday, November 25th
For immediate release
Raleigh, NC: Silver Bucket, a nation-wide franchise restaurant chain with over 200 all-you-can-eat restaurants, has just introduced a new technology called Digital Plate Management, or DPM for short. Company executives are said to be excited about this new technology as they expect it will end the ability for unscrupulous customers to share food with non-paying companions.
"We've always faced a certain 'undesirable' component to our clientele," says Bryan Dawkins, CEO of Silver Bucket. He adds, "You can tell who they are as soon as they arrive. They'll arrive in twos or threes
Dawkins adds, "They're lying, of course. We seldom see it happen as they've become such experts at this kind of blatant theft, but come on
The Digital Plate Management technology that is now being deployed at Silver Bucket restaurants will bring an end to all that. The system relies on a high-tech buffet plate that is designed to work only with the person who purchases the buffet menu option. "These plates are going to save our bacon," says Dawkins. "They are just the most fantastic devices we've ever seen." The plates, which cost the company a little over $1300 a piece, are encoded at the time the customer makes their purchase upon entry into the restaurant. From that point on, the plate is designed to maintain its rigidity only when held by the authorized patron. "If someone else picks them up, they go completely flaccid. The plates, that is," adds Dawkins. In other words, the plates will only be useful for the authorized customer.
Digital Plate Management is the results of years of research, combining stunning effort in both materials engineering and biometrics. The plates include integrated sensors that allow them to be encoded with biometric data when the customer is first handed the plate. The plate stores information about the registered user such as fingerprints, skin elasticity, and body temperature. If these values change beyond a certain range of acceptable values, the plate goes limp. That might seem like a problem for restaurant staff, but the plates have been designed to handle encoding for more than one person. "One of the incredible features of these plates is that they can be encoded to allow any of our restaurant employees to handle the plate without having the plate become flaccid," adds Dawkins. This means that, while customers cannot share their plates amongst themselves, restaurant staff will be free to handle the plates when clearing tables and during dish washing. "Oh certainly, in the restaurant business, you never want to annoy your staff with potential hurdles like that," states Dawkins. He continues, "Multiple user encoding was one of the first things they had to solve in the design of these plates."
"Silver Bucket is committed to providing a first class customer experience," explains Dawkins. "Digital Plate Management is an absolutely revolutionary method for maintaining the level of quality our customers expect. These plates will allow us to make sure that only those honest, paying customer will have access to our all-you-can-eat buffet. We will thus be able to ensure a high-quality menu for our guests, and improve the bottom line for our shareholders."
Customer reaction has been mixed. David
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
The only possible problem anyone could have with this is that they want a greater say in the matter than "Joe and Jane Six-Pack" as the typical consumer is usually referred to here.
Except that the Six-Pack family doesn't even notice the war going on (for now), so can't take sides. And by the time they notice, the "wrong" side will have won.
How many people, if they understood the idea that their new media purchase could simply vanish at the whim of companies with less interest in them than Enron had in its employees' retirement funds, would still plop down the same (or more) money as for an unencumbered and semi-permanent product?
Not a whole lot, I'd wager. In my experience, people have NO clue about the implications (or even the presence) of DRM. Just last week, for example, I had to explain to a friend (and not even a tech-illiterate one at that) that all the music on his computer, ripped by him from his own CDs, would no longer work simply because he had used WMP to rip and encode them, and had never turned off WMP's "rights management". Granted, WMP lets you back up your keys for a planned migration, but major crashes rarely bother popping up a dialog warning "This installation of Windows has died, and five minutes from now, will never boot again. Please back up your music library at this time".
So yes, I believe "Joe Sixpack" should have less say in matters such as this, and should listen more to those of us who do understand that "enhanced" and "restricted" do not mean the same thing. But calling that a power-grab strikes me as a rather egregious twisting of the facts. For an analogy, do you believe that fire codes should result from the whims of the market, or from those who've spent thousands of hours studying how fire propagates through your house? Or do you just consider your greatly increased likelyhood of living through each night a power-grab by those in the know on that particular topic?
OK, let's say Itunes is the best DRM crippled format there is. Can it do what normal recorded music can? The objections raised in the article strike at real problems facing any DRM that make the whole concept look like a looser. The inability of more than one person to share music collections in more than one place at a time blows it for most people. Answer these questions about Apple's nice DRM that are typical family issues:
What good is any music that I can't share with other members of my own family? If my wife can't listen to my music in her car, while I listen to our music at home or on my bike, the DRM sytem simply sucks. Sure, I can work around it with tapes and other stuff that will rocket me back to the 1980s. What good is that? I'm happier with my simple oggfiles that I can serve out as I please and put on as many computers as I want. When I bought the music, I had every intention of everyone in my house being able to enjoy it. Anything more complicated than that is simply not going to catch on.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In the 80s with VCRs and tape recorders, people showed that they wanted time- and space-shifting fair use rights, and the law followed. Now the law is swinging back, as the DMCA can make those things technically illegal - consider that if the DMCA and the broadcast bit existed then, VCRs would be illegal now. But the content owners were unable to stop Xerox machines, VCRs, tape dubbers, digital audio extraction, CD-RWs, and portable MP3 players, because people really do want to "own" content.
When you make a sale, both sides get something they want. The RIAA wants money, theoretically so they can pay artists to make music. People want music. Specifically, they want to "own" music, as in, "to have the ability to play it, whenever, wherever." This is where the balance lies - if people could redistribute, artists wouldn't get paid, but if people couldn't "own" (in the sense of sovereignty, not copyright), they wouldn't buy it, and again, the artist starves. DRM tries to do just that - take away "ownership," in return for, nothing but inconvenience. I don't think this would happen in a competitive market. I can only hope it won't happen in the present market.
Litigious bastards
I spent the last day trying to get my doctoral thesis back. So far, I think it's lost for good. I wrote it back in 2017, and the University copyrighted it. Last week, a fire at the University destroyed the key server; about 20,000 volumes were lost.
At first, it was thought that we could restore from tape, but the problem was that the law mandated encrypting all copyrighted works to prevent illegal distribution. Yes, we still have the backups, but they're encrypted; without the key server, useless. Some of my colleagues have wondered aloud about building a decryption utility, until the legal department reminded them that this would be illegal. Since all software is registered with a central repository by the compiler, it would be impossible to keep it a secret. And given that most decryption algorithms are patented, it would surely get tagged by the patent-crawlers.
Yeah, I remember a time before compulsory registration and mandatory networking. You could actually compile your own source code without having it registered with the copyright office. And even 20 years ago, there was no such thing as a patent-crawler; if you infringed on copyright or someone else's patent, they had to take you to court. With automatic enforcement now, it's impossible to copy someone else's bitstream. Even if you want to give it away, you still have to pay for a distribution license.
And the compulsory registration system has had its problems. The computer science department now has a waiver allowing them to run non-networked computers. With automatic copyright registration and enforcement, infringement alerts became increasingly frequent; it seems as if there's only so many correct ways to write "Hello World", or solve the fibonacci sequence. After a few years, the FBI simply ignored infringement alerts from the University, and soon after, we got the waiver.
But some of us are still writing code with a pen. I've seen illegal copies of D'Christy's prime-factoring algorithm passed around on notebook paper. You would never get away with computer file of it, though, because someone would eventually slip and use the disk on a publicly connected workstation.
Well, I think my thesis is lost. Even though I've got a key, I can't risk bringing it forward (last year, private ownership of encryption keys was made illegal). I didn't know I had it - I found it as I was rumaging through some disks, hoping for a legacy copy of my thesis.
A colleague of mine managed to get a copy of the backup on disk. While rumaging through my things, I found an old pre-registration laptop without a network interface. Tonight, we'll see if we can get our words back.
And some poor kid got busted yesterday. He bought some cheap flea-market hardware that had an old unlicensed compiler on it. He would have never gotten caught, either, had he the insight not to connect it to a network.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The **AA have been developing digital media for a long time, and they have absolutely no control over people illegally giving it away.
Most music CDs do not have any sort of DRM. The recording industry has been selling perfect digital copies with no protection whatsoever (until recently, and still only in isolated cases) since 1982. In that time, and even in recent years, there have been lots and lots of platinum albums.
DVDs do have some copy-protection in the CSS encryption. But we all know how weak that is. Still DVDs sell like crazy.
Restrictive DRM only serves to remind the honest consumer that Industry does not trust them. The real "pirates" (Yarrr!) will find ways around DRM and sell illegal copies forever. Practically every DRM scheme released so far has been broken, some using high-tech devices like a Sharpie, or the Shift key.
If you were a media executive, would you waste money developing and marketing a DRM method that will most likely be quickly defeated?
blog
Without DRM, you wouldn't even have the choice to buy it because it wouldn't even be available.
Bull. They can not sell it and make ZERO dollars, or they can sell it and make money. If they want to close up shop and not make any money, fine, someone else will will jump in to make a buck selling a product. The RIAA can yell and screaming that the music industry will vanish all they like, that does not make it true. They made the exact same claims when radio appeared, they made the exact same claims about cassette tapes, and the MPAA made the exact same claims about VCR's. Just because they WANT DRM enforcement and they WANT congress to grant them expanded copyright powers and they WANT to eliminate fair use and they WANT congress to pass laws forcing consumer producted to be crippled does not mean they should get it.
They got congress to pass the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) in 1992 which forced all digital recording devices to be DRM crippled. This law exterminated all progress in these consumer products. It killed Digital Audio Tape, it killed MiniDiscs, and it killed others. No progress for a decade! They demanded this law to "fight piracy". The elimination of all new new media formats meant a drop in sales, they lost the market of people re-buying music they own on new formats. The irony is that they demanded the law to fight piracy, and when the law caused a drop in sales they blamed that drop on piracy.
All current pay services are suffering under FOUR SELF IMPOSED HANDICAPS. #1 They only offer crippled products. #2 They have not been offering their full catalog of music. #3 The prices are inflated - a download is undeniably a far cheaper product than pressing and distributing and retailing a physical product. #4 They are struggling to recover from a FIVE YEAR delayed entry into the download market. They should have started selling downloads as soon as Napster smacked them over the head with the fact that it was possible and that there was a demand for it. By refusing to sell downloads they left a vacuum in the online market. That vacuum was the main force driving the development and explosion of P2P.
Even suffering under those four self inposed handicaps these services are still drawing quite a few customers. They can't do squate about the five year late-start, but if they eliminate the other three handicaps they will attract a hell of alot more business. It is no coincidece that the most sucessfull pay service (iTunes) also hapens to be the one that is most nearly DRM-free.
The only effect of using DRM is to drive away customers. It certainly does nothing to prevent the songs from appearing on P2P.
Once someone buys something they have every right to make fair use of it. They have every right to preform a calculation on that file to play it backwards, they have every right to preform a calculation on that file to play it at double speed, they have every right to preform a calculation on that file to make it sound like random noise, and they have every right to preform the calculation on that file that happens to remove the DRM. The DMCA is just play stupid for trying to say it is a crime to do math. The DMCA is just play stupid for trying to say it is a crime to tell someone math function.
Any circumvention a computer can do can also be done purely mentally by thinking through the exact same steps the computer would do. You can violate the DMCA and commit circumvention crime by sitting motionless staring at a DRM'd E-book and mentally descrambling the data to read the text. You can break the law by sitting motionless and THINKING.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.