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Digital Rights Managment Year in Review
zjango writes "DRM Watch is a great source for the ongoing monitoring of Digital Rights Management issues and news. They've put out a useful 2003 year in review for DRM across several categories that Slashdot readers will likely find of interest. It is a
look back at the year's significant trends in DRM technology, along with some predictions for 2004 and beyond."
It looks Linus one *week* to write an application to archive his email?
.NET and C#, Outlook 2003, and SQL Server 2000.
I could do the same thing in a couple hours using
I guess that is a pretty big statement about the power of Linux, and the talent of the people who made it...?
2003 was a terrible year for copy protection for physical media. DVD piracy abounded, thanks to the selection of the weak CSS copy protection scheme, whose primary advantage seems to be low unit cost for the DVD player makers who designed it. Attempts to foment copy protection schemes for audio CDs were mostly laughable.
People break these things because ordinary folks don't want them! I think the music industry should take a hint from their consumers, stop throwing millions of dollars at R&D for Digital "Rights" Management and instead try to work out a sustainable digital media strategy (i.e. ITunes and high-quality downloads etc.). How long (and how much wasted money) before they figure this just isn't going to work out?
The Welkin: Online Music Reviews
What's negative about this ? I think this was the best part of last year.
In related news, P2P file sharing seems to have picked up again ...
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
My Palm Tungsten has a SD/MMC slot, MultiMedia cards are becoming unavailable, SD cards are all over the place, and there are *no* open-source drivers for the restricted SD media.
Naturally, I would *welcome* being wrong. does anyone in the community know of a way to use SD media in a Linux or other open-source OS context? I know the SD protocol seems to be available only under NDA and with some sort of fee structure, but it's possible that a driver exists somewhere.
They are VERY pro-DRM. If you subscribe to their newsletter, you can look forward to getting regularly spammed by them (they seem to ignore unsubscribe requests).
./.
But props to them for sleazing a mention of themselves on
Harken back to the days of laser-drilled holes in floppy diskettes and wierd formats and such - and the backlash of the software users against the producers that in no small part ended up with the engendering of the Open Software movment. It put some vendors out of business because so many of their customers had such troubles getting replacement disks when their machines ate the original and put their own businesses at risk (or affected the game playing time).
The customer is king - and the vendors (including the associations like RIAA) are going to have to get used to the fact that the customer won't put up with any problem that causes them to have to stand in line for a return or wait on hold for hours to get a new key or whatever.
"Anti-piracy" measures don't protect against wholesale piracy - they just piss off the end customer.
"I paid for this CD (DVD, download, whatever) and if I can't listen to the music on it whenever I want, wherever I want, with no hassles, then I'll either get an unlocked copy or I will purchase something else and I'll return this for a full refund and shout at the clerk while I'm doing it." I can just hear the CEO of a major retail store telling his suppliers that he holds them personally responsible for the increase in return rate on DVDs and CDs and the fact that 100% of his frontline people refuse to talk to irate customers anymore.
DRM in the consumer world (not the intra-corporate - different story) will not fly unless and until the purveyors of the content ensure that the consumer not only accepts that what they are purchasing is limited in some way, but that the limiting mechanism never intrudes for the life of the product. This means for example, that it will be fine with most consumers if their copy is personally watermarked such that copies (if any) can be traced back to the original but if the copy is in the posession of the original purchaser there will be no repercussions and if it is in the posession of someone else, the original purchaser will not be impacted (Caveat emptor); and there is no automated way that the publisher or anyone else can know when and where the purchaser plays the work (or watches the video or reads the e-book or...) i.e. no monitoring.
"Quiet enjoyment" is what they need to achieve.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
DRM reminds me of the early Internet. Back in the day, the network was built on trust. Slowly, crackers started to pop-up and destroy the bounds of trust. Now, no one trusts anything on the Internet and the Internet suffers because of that. It's harder to use now because of that.
DRM is the solution to removal of trust. Before, the music and video companies trusted us to follow copyright laws. As time went on, the "crackers" shared the music with each other and the companies slowly began to not trust us. Now, DRM is coming in like encryption, passwords, and firewalls did on the early Internet. Just like with the early Internet, DRM doesn't do anything but hurt the people who want to use the music and video legally.
Stop pirating.
DRM == Denial of Rights Mechanism
gewg_
I think this requires a revisitation to the idea of information and computer ethics. Read some Norbert Wiener (applied ethics) and Albert Borgmann (information theory). That's my plan for the next couple weeks anyway.
At that point another device can be substituted for our eyes/ears and capture a (admittedly slightly inferior) copy and encode it back to digital if necessary.
Only once the eyes and ears are bypassed by feeding direct digital information into our cerebral cortex via teeny-tiny wires will there be a hope of eliminating this "hole" - and even then there is the chance that you could have a bridge put in (anybody got some really tiny roach-clips?)
The analog hole also exists inside the system between the decoder and the display/playback but may not be easily attached to - kind of like the point where your digital cable box now hooks to your TV via coax or s-video and RCP plugs. Until the tuner/decoder and the display unit's video driver circuits are so tightly integrated that there is no single point where the video and audio pass close to where a tech can attach those teeny-tiny roach clips to snag the decoded signal, there will be an analog hole.
The real point of all this is that as usual, the publishing industries are making it far more costly to view their wares for their customers - both in money and in time/frustration (at incompatible formats, licensing hoops to jump through etc.) where the "real" pirates who copy wholesale and actually compete for dollars at the cash register don't get hurt. Making a million duplicates of a DVD is easy - and you don't need CSS decoding to do it - you copy that too! Same thing with "encoded" CDs and anything else that has a retail package worth pirating.
The bottom line is that to the consumer, the DRM stuff is sand in the gears of them getting the "quiet enjoyment" out of what they've paid their bucks for. The analog hole just ensures that there will be copies floating around for those who have had enough with trying to cope with the publishers' roadblocks to enjoyment - even for people who purchase the real thing.
The war on DRM has already been fought - 20 years ago when the software purchasing public told the software vendors, who drilled laser holes and used screwy disk formats, to take a hike. The problem is that the current generation of publishers don't remember - or think that technology is going to help - it won't. The consumer will get their way because they vote with their dollars and just as 20 years ago, new companies will step up to the plate with product that will pull those dollars away from those who put roadblocks up.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
I agree in principle; I should be able to "vote" with my dollars for whichever technological solution I prefer. In fact, I can and do. However, the note of dismay present in my post reflects my resignation to the fact that no amount of voting with dollars is going to prevent DRM from being implemented by the major corporations like Sony and Philips or whoever. Sure, 5 years from now when ever consumer device is DRMed there may still be a handful of independent online or hardware based vendors offering non-DRM products, but it's going to be a rare thing and an uncertain climate for those vendors.
Voting with dollars in the case of DRM hasn't been working so far, and there is no reason to think that it will succeed in stemming the tide of legislation or manufacturer implementations.
One could theorize on the reasons for this, such as the fact that ultimately Capitalism isn't about doing what's "fair", "right", or "best for the consumer" -- it's about doing what makes a company the most money: and so far, companies perceive potential and imagined lost revenue caused by P2P etc. to be far greater than lost revenue resulting from a few idealistic Slashdot readers buying competitors' non-DRMed products or using competitors' non-DRMed services. In the minds of large corporations, those competitors are tiny small fry that can be safely ignored for now, or can be easily purchased or crushed later if they become a threat.
I do not purchase DRM products or use DRM services out of principle, and I will continue not to do so, but I am skeptical of how long such options will exist and whether my "vote" will make any difference at all in the end. My guess is "not long" and "not much", respectively. However, as an idealistic individual, I'll try anyway.
------- "One of the joys of travel is visiting new towns and meeting new people." -- G. KHAN
In a free market, this would never happen, because people are willing to pay a little extra for a non-crippled computer.
Computers with a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) will be marketed to be better, not crippled, because they will supposedly make an end to virusses and spam. Somehow I think the companies selling computers will be reluctant to say it will also make an end to your personal freedom.
All Congress has to do is pass a law requiring "compliance" chips in all new computers. For a while you can probably get around this by importing stuff from other countries, but eventually they may simply ban possession of such equipment.
They might just do that. I even think it was Congress itself asking the industry to develop a DRM system that can't be circumvented that lead to the development of TPM's.
"Hell hath no fury like a hippo with a machine gun."
DRM is nothing but an attempt to make it inconvient for people to know their own key.
Even Microsoft repeatedly states on its website that even Trusted Computing cannot hope to enforce DRM if the owner of the computer feels like altering the hardware. The best solution is to rip open a chip and read out your key. That gives you total control over your computer.
You can't stop the owner of a machine from opening it up and reading out his key. He owns it and he has absolutely every right to do so.
They are perfectly free to use all the DRM they like so long as I have every right to circumvent that DRM for legal purposes, and for me to help other people circumvent DRM for legal purposes.
nobody will actually do anything to stop the widespread adoption of DRM
Mere informing people about it can have a signifigant effect. I have caught multiple projects based on Trusted Computing that have actually been making signifigant effort to hide that fact that thet are connected to Trusted Computing because most people who know about Trusted Computing are rebelling about it. Intel's attempt to put ID numbers inside every CPU a few years ago was killed by public backlash against it.
A good example of a project hiding it's Trusted Computing connection is Cisco's recently announced Network Admission Control routers. Cisco's press release on them touts it an an anti-virus anti-worm system, and several news sites (including Slashdot) ran stories on Cisco "delaring war on worms" and "blocking viruses at the router". However people generally express outrage when they learn that what these routers actually do is to deny you an internet connection unless you submit to Trusted Computing. The router uses Trusted Computing to verify that you are running specific software such as approved anti-virus scanner and firewall (thus the "anti-virus" claims). If you aren't Trusted Computing-compliant then it can simply refuse to let you connect to the internet at all.
Perhaps you don't think "informing people" counts as doing anything. Well I for one am QUITE interested in working on the hardware/software projects required to liberate a computer from Trusted Computing restrictions, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Working out how to rip open a chip to read out the key and programming the software required to emulate the system (and control/override that system).
I think a great way to get such a project (and perhaps business) started would be to first target the law-enforcement market. No one can possibly object to aiding law-enforcment in recovering encrypted data/evidence from computers seized from criminals and to control/override software on computers seized from criminals. Go ahead, lets see someone try to paint such a project as a bunch of "evil hackers", chuckle.
Once you've figured out how to routinely extract keys from chips, and once you've developed the required software to give the owner control over the system then you can sell such services and software to anyone and everyone. It would be a sort of "upgrade service" giving you full control of your computer.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.