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."

Comments

DRM is wrong.

[reub2000]

20 years from Sony vs. Universal, fair use is going the way of the dodo.

My prediction

[FrostedWheat]

DRM will increasingly cause problems for normal users. For those who copy the content nothing will change. Normal users will then begin to copy a lot more content.

A few nasty laws will undoubtably be made when the govern ... er.. corporations realise DRM isn't working to keep there high prices.

Re:My prediction

[rcpitt]

Hmmm... you stole my topic :)

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.

"Dominated by Microsoft"?

[Have Blue]

How could they possibly discuss online music and DRM in 2003 and not mention Apple and the ITMS? This may be the most significant product in the growth of legal online music yet released. It's far more popular than any of its competitors, and much more friendly to its users, and yet the online music scene is "dominated by Microsoft". I can't decide if they deliberately left it off because they hate Apple or if they're just stupid/uninformed.

Just a thought, not a lecture

[ten000hzlegend]

I'm all for DRM in '04 maturing into say... half a dozen vendors such as Apple and even Microsoft, all with relatively different filetypes for distribution and end-user benefits

I am worried about Microsoft though *No, not flaming*

Windows Media is a robust system for music and video quality, being a Mac user myself, I use it regularly alongside AAC but the fact Microsoft in the last few months have used the Windows format as basically an excuse to try and monopolize on key aspects of the up and coming DRM race is distressing, Apple were the first company to introduce a fair play DRM, the first to provide a quality end user service, Microsoft for one are pushing vendors into Windows Media Format, making it integral to Longhorn and beyond, this not only encompasses the OS but any app ran on it, for me... I excuse that I'm not the most privvy to reading up more closely on DRM, but I do feel Microsoft are up their old tricks again regarding DRM

Re:Just a thought, not a lecture

[wfberg]

Windows Media is a robust system for music and video quality

In what way exactly? Its audio codecs add positively nothing to what's out there, its video codecs may be slightly ahead of the curve compared to standards-based mpeg 4, but nothing to sneeze at compared to DivX or any of the other high quality lowbitrate codecs. The default settings in their encoders encourage producing crappy "streaming" video files which don't allow for fastforwarding or reversing (unless you re-encode them), I haven't had much luck with the container formats (ASF and WMV files always end up giving me trouble somehow, even if it's just getting the right player to open them).. And don't get me started on streaming stuff on webpages which won't open in a separate player, way too much UI going on, again no ffwd/rwd - all other streaming video gear (yes, QT, winamp, and even real) are much better (though real has even more stupid ads embedded in it).

It's no wonder that most films on kazaa end up as divx encoded .avi files (and the kazaahounds have the widest possible choice of codecs since they don't even pay any license fees), (S)VCD being number two (for interoperability with DVD players)..

I can go for days of intensively downloading "funny movies" from weblogs without seeing a single good quality ASF/WMV, but see hundreds of just fine MPEG, AVI(typically DIVX) and MOV (yes, apple quicktime, usually sorensen) files.

If anyone knows what's so good about windows media files, please tell me.. Seriously..

DRM for all!

[WebTurtle]

Well, it seems like this issue is definitely not going away, despite what many might wish. Naturally, it will be implemented and at first some people will whine about the annoyances, but nobody will actually do anything to stop the widespread adoption of DRM (who could possibly succeed?).

Looks like Sony and Philips will bring the noise with their InterTrust acquisition. What technology was InterTrust developing? How might it be implemented in electronics? Are we going to see some sort of digital signature type of authentication or encryption occuring between devices (e.g., a DVD player and a computer)? Or between a HDTV and a DVD recorder or PVR?

I prefer to call it...

[kirun]

I don't like the name DRM, it's misleading. If all it involved was proper management of rights, no problem. However, it's a little one-sided.

I think the name Capability Removal by the Author of Media Products, or CRAMP is much more accurate. Want to CRAMP your PC? I didn't think so.

When are people going to wake up?

[xyxy]

In the float-up-the-DRM-balloon phase, most average people aren't likely to react. And that's fine. Right now, all it does is enable the use/play of protected content. And, as noted many times in this discussion thread and in the article itself, it's an add-on to the OS. Don't want it? Don't use it. However, we've seen many instances of MS rolling an add-on into a service pack and then requiring that the service pack be installed for any future updates. It's then possible to enable the DRM package to restrict the legitimate use of non-protected content and/or software because the end-user won't have any other choice. MS will be holding all the cards. But I think that this will be their undoing. If an unwitting user was able to use unprotected content both with and without the patch, then can't after MS sends the kill-code to the DRM package, most people will simply say that their computer is broken. They won't know that the DRM software is to blame unless someone tells them. And if a user's computer is "broken" due to some patch that was installed for them by MS, you can bet that those people will start looking for alternatives. Add all of that to the bad publicity MS will get about being "Big Brother", and more and more users will start to think of alternatives to MS software. (Ok, they've already started getting that reputation on their own with the Product Activation snafu, but it certainly doesn't help their situation.) The first likely route an affected customer will go is to buy a Mac, assuming that there's $1500 or more to spend in the family budget. Another option may or may not be Linux. It very much depends on how much it has progressed in terms of instant usability (can the family make the transition with little- to no difficulty?), and whether or not money is an issue. But I bet that Apple might step in at some point and start offering it's own OS to upset owners of "broken" PCs as an alternative. That is, of course, assuming that they even want to release it for the ix86 chipset to begin with. My fingers are crossed.