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Buzzword du Jour: DRM
mattmcal writes "Though the RSA Conference in San Francisco and Bill Gates' keynote were expected to stir up several headlines on 'security' today, the news coming from 3GSM in Cannes seemed to deliver more tangible results. From Qualcomm's new DRM chipsets to NDS' mobile VideoGuard, several interesting 'DRM (digital rights management)' announcements raise the bar for distribution-shy media companies who may have increasing opportunities for driving content to mobile devices. But Intel's Barrett knows this is only the beginning of a complicated standards problem."
Just my 2e-2 $
Bite my shiny metal... oops... Nevermind!
On a side note:
I just got back from seeing Bill Gates speak on "the future of computing" and how he got so damn rich. Apparently microsoft hires more people from my school than any other in the world (or maybe just in the nation?) What an honor!! It was actually pretty good in my opinion; he's a smart guy. The second question in the Q and A part of the presentation was "What your/microsofts opinion of the open source movement and why do you have a bad attitude about it" or something to that extent. Bill gave a good response pointing to evidence saying that many "GPL zealots" don't believe his business model should exist and that at least he respects open source as a software development method among many. The speech might have been a bit rehearsed, I do believe he gets that question a lot. Either way, you've got to ask your self: Am I a GPL zealot?
Not to mention his proposed changes to DNS
(And lets not forget that a good deal of DNS goes through BIND, which is Open Source)
So here Bill is trying to stick a patented design into DNS, which he could leverage with his Windows monopoly and therefore forcing Open Sourced BIND to pay a licence to implement it now that Windows' "Trustworthy computing" won't accept anything else.
Hence breaking BIND's GPL....
I don't think it will really work out that way, but the possibility crossed my mind.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
6. I leave this country and never come back.
I don't want to hate America as a country, but I can't help but hate a government that would be so easily manipulated as to sanction forced implementation of something so draconian-indeed, Orwellian-upon its citizens.
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I have to wonder, though, what impact this would have on more *ahem* sensible companies like Apple. Apple centers its entire marketing strategy on digital media and the freedom to create, edit, and share personal media projects. Where is this going to leave them? They're smaller than Microsoft, but still a force to be reckoned with...it surely can't be so simple as "Microsoft pays off politicians, gets its way, game over." ...Can it?
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
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Bzzzt. Wrong! DRM serves as an anchor for legal enforcement. You are right in that it certainly won't work without hardware support. However, that's not the point. The whole point is to make you, or anyone who does manufacture devices without DRM support in their hardware, look like a villain -- a "hacker", a thief, a criminal.
An example: German news site Heise reports that the music industry here started to go after people who sell software able to copy music CDs. So this is what does happen:
It does not matter what works and what doesn't from a technical point of view. What matters is that the legal system accepts claim No. 1, and is sufficiently forgetful to not notice the loop when they return to claim No. 1 for the next iteration.
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
with microsoft as behind the drm as they are it's going to be near impossible to locate equipment manufacturers that won't put this in due to microsoft's stranglehold on the pc product. some have said before that it's a dollars thing and they're right. they just have to make it tough enough, and terrorize the rest. it must have come up sometime before but it's worth saying again that drm will remove the backdoor some makers put in. like the chinese dvd player that could be easily unlocked to use all countrycodes just by pushing a few buttons on the remote control. now, if you tried to do that with a drm system and because you didn't read the license your computer would send requests to verify your ability to watch a dvd. windows player 9 already includes regular phone homes to "check things". some spyware/adware products pick them up, but then the media player won't work anymore. anyway this just smacks of a grab as much as we can get and see if they notice. if basic playback must have an active internet connection, even at a registration phase to verify through ip etc basic identity then phones home ocassionally to update not only the dvd but any bits of "other " media, downloaded clips, music whatever. right now, it's microsoft. what about when others are forced to join in because the hardware now demands it? and then there's the "not personally attached" database being generated in all this...
I'm not concerned about software-based DRM because so far it seems to be limited to Windows. What REALLY concerns me is the large number of news items I've seen lately about hardware based on "Trusted Computing".
TCG TPM is the standard settled upon for trusted computing. An interesting EETimes article is about TPM chips going into systems (costs & chipsets, etc). Described as "low-cost silicon safes for a digital key" the article states, "IBM plans to put the current version 1.1b TPM parts in all but its lowest cost notebook computers by the end of the year." As well as the inclusion of these chips in Gb Ethernet, storage, memory, and I/O buses. The TPM v1.2 standard is worth a look over to see what the future holds.
Much of the software that goes into DRM is moving up the chain (especially seeing how effective DeCSS was for DVD decoding) and into silicon. I do not quite see how Trusted Computing is really that different from a full-fledged DRM hardware system. It seems to be an easy step to make those buses and storage devices scanning for 'trusted keys' to be applied to digital finger prints of unauthorized DRM-licensed media moving around on your motherboard.
I'm with ya there. I'm a long term asian resident.
We've had VCDs, which are still just as common as DVD here since ages before the earliest DVD-Roms even hit the market. The only reason I gave up was that broadband was so cheap and fast I switched to downloading off P2P because it was more convenient.
I got an MP3 capable CD-R player in 1999 for less than forty bucks when they were unheard of in the States.
I can get free cable satellite from the air including free hardcore porn twenty four hours a day. Or, I can just tap the single cable connection that all my neighbors share. The cable company doesn't even bother to hassle us.
But since my DSL is only twenty bucks a month I just do everything off the Net.
Everything digitial in Asia is based on open standards and the assumption that consumers have the right to exchange content and do what they want with it. The irony is that the US tries to call itself the vanguard of the free market when they're incredibly closed and restrictive compared to a dozen asian countries. I guess they call is double-ya-speak.
Digital Rigths Management is eSlavery. The customer will lose rights to use his technology and hhackers will be punished.
Your approach is not only dishonest, it would ruin the reputation of whoever implemented it. Who wants to use software written by someone who has been known to intentionally write security flaws in their code? Open source or not, it's a risk I wouldn't take.
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Yes, media companies will fight to own all distribution of old content. But watch out for the hardware companies. They're already trying to own all distribution of new content. It's slick. Just visit their online store, download the content, and it only runs on your phone/PDA/laptop/whatever. Until it breaks, that is.
As an artist, you'd think I'd just love this scheme. Hah! The problem is, once a company thinks it owns your distribution, it thinks it owns you! When I fell for DRM and the lure of easy money, all of a sudden I was spending months fighting to retain designs and customer relationships that had taken years to refine. All this fussing cut into my productivity, and my fans noticed.
For the record, when I dropped copy protection completely, sales doubled almost immediately.
So don't be fooled by the current battle between the media and hardware companies. They're just fighting for who gets to own the artists and milk their audience. I'm not falling for it again, and I hope you won't, either.
But DRM simply can't work without relying on legislation that makes circumvention illegal.
I absolutely do not accept the ethical basis of any legislation that can prohibit me from reverse-engineering hardware or software in my posession.
People don't currently go to jail for disassembling physical products they've bought, nor should they ever. You may void your warranty, but that's an entirely different issue.
And Microsoft is well aware of this. DRM for them is a great way to continue the monopoly on the personal desktop.
It will not be long before we start seeing PC's (or more likely laptops) that have hardware measures that restrict it to being able to run only a specific operating system (nothing new, I believe the xbox does it already). This will all be done under the auspices of DRM, but the real intent of Microsoft will be to leave the consumer no choice but to pay for the Windows license.
Now I don't think the average geek has anything to worry about as far as this hardware goes - the standard PC's capable of running any OS are not going anywhere, so you can still run your Linux or FreeBSD.
Playing media legally on Linux and *BSD might be a different story though....
DRM in the context of the RSA conference & Microsoft is probably geared towards securing corporate data rather than consumer goods. Losing a song to piracy is one thing; having your sales projections for the next fiscal year (or internal memos & documents a la Diebold) is quite another.
Up to a point, employees can also be mandated to use DRM software, while consumers can reject it. Corporate DRM will take off before consumer DRM.
During the 1850's there were those who believed that the entire purpose and meaning of the industrial revolution was to leverage new technology (like the cotton gin) to make their slaves more efficient and expand their plantations for unlimited profit. Of course what this ment was that it was required to have tight controll over the labor force. However at the same time, to prosper, the factories in the north relied on a mobile and specialized workforce - the anti-thesis of the plantation philosophy. Eventually the tension became so bad, that the south decided to try and fence themselves off and become a seperate union.
Long behold, 150 years later, and psycologically little has changed. Rather than deal with the information age, Microsoft, the MPAA, and the RIAA are trying to fence themselves off from the rest of the real world, and like the southern states they're gonna get their ass kicked. I wish they would "get it", it would save us all alot of headaches.