Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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
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