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Interview With The MPEG Committee's Founder
JasonFleischer points out this "interview with Leonardo Chiariglione, digital video pioneer and founder of the MPEG standards committee, is available on the public access section Scientific American's website. In the interview Chiariglione explains the motivations and hopes for his new Digital Media Project -- an attempt to integrate existing technologies to create a transparent, universal, non-proprietary system for digital rights management. Of particular interest to some /.ers may be his old article from Linux Journal that talks about the relationship between Open Source and MPEG standards."
From the interview;
For example, you could play a specific title until a certain date, or you could buy a subscription allowing you to play anything you want for a given period.
That's what he is working on. I'm sure the RIAA loves the idea of "rental" music.
Apple not only has a more solid model of music ownership with itunes, they will have done it first. Luckily this project is going to show up late to the party when they unveil it two years from now.
Nothing new here. Move on.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Yeah? Try decrypting PGP when you don't have the right key.
Besides, the question's irrelevant. DRM via encryption to a subscriber's key? Whatever. If the subscriber can generate a listenable stream (which is, duh, kinda the point), then it's possible to turn that stream into a non-DRMed file. Anyone with legitimate access can create illegitimate access if they're so inclined and have the technical skill to do it. And, if the readership (postership) of /. is any indication, there's no shortage of people who are so inclined.
Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like you're in the shower. Fuck like you're being filmed.
Any "standard" which you need a patent licence for is not a good standard.
Any standards body worth dealing with should insist that patent holders licence the patents such as is necessary to implement the standard with no royalties.
Wrong. The point of DRM is to prevent the adversary (the customer) from circumventing the copyright protection and distributing the work unprotected.
The iTunes crack does exactly that.
I have yet to see the uncrackable DRM scheme, and no reason to assume one can ever exist.
Lets be even more to the point: It is physically impossible for there to exist a non-proprietary DRM scheme. DRM, by very nature, is security through obscurity -- hiding the secret key *somewhere* on the users' own machine. DRM is incompatible with the concept of general purpose computing and most certainly with Open Source software. As an analogy, think of those old pay-TV decoder boxes that were filled with epoxy or tar to prevent tampering.. Is that what you want your computer to become? Just say no to DRM-laden hardware, software, and content! And do support independent media!
1) Windows Mediaplayer doesn't come with it.
2) For Joe Blow MP3 is a synonymous for all digital music.
3) Joe Blow doesn't care about patent issues as long as he gets to listen to music on his Windows.
The owls are not what they seem
I find it interesting that the guy says that they don't want to tackle piracy. They want to manage copyright. It would seem to me that both are two sides of the same coin. If you violate copyright, you're pirating, right? As an aside - I have always wondered how to interpret the act of listening itself in this regard. If I listen to a piece of music a couple of times, I am generally capable of replaying it in my mind. Have I then violated someone's copyright?
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Granted MPEG is not broadcast / archival quality (correct me if I am wrong), but regardless there will be a lot of material that exists only in MPEG. Long term preservation and access need to be addressed, and are hobbled by kludges like DRM and vendor lock-in.
If you don't have the technology to render the file, then it's as good as gone. Even physical safes, lock boxes and fire boxes only slow down an intruder, and are rated at the estimated number of minutes needed to circumvent. Electronic restrictions yesterday are laughable with today's computing power and today's will be laughable with tomorrow's. Even passively, there is a difference: you have to expend effort (and probably money) to dispose of a heavy safe that you don't feel like opening. Whereas electronic documents can be erased with the active motion of only a few fingers or through neglect by letting the physical medium deteriorate or letting the specs vanish.
Authenticity is not possible either so electronic sources can not be used for authoritative research or testimony. Physical artifacts contain intentional and unitentional combinations of materials and these in turn have specific ratios isotopes which, if lucky, may provide enough data points to evaluate the origin of the artifact. Authenticity would be a much more useful issue to solve rather than pursuing the DRM pipe dream.
Digital copyright management is not the missing piece that we need. I think Leonardo Chiariglione may have (willfully) missed the implications of networked technologies, and that reform of copyright is needed rather than fighting against the very nature of computing. Earlier leaders and governements fought the printing press, but eventually learned to work with it. He's right though, about P2P and Gnutella like services not being monsters, but effort should be spent finding ways to exploit the strengths of these technologies, not fight them. It would be a long, expensive loss.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Any band, big or small, that goes on tour has it's own CDs, I've even seen buskers in the subway with their own CDs.
Old and young people are compiling playlists from CDs they've bought or been given and playing them on the stereo or via a jukebox on their computer.
Amateur films and short films have been made very easy. No need to book time weeks in advance on equipment costing hundreds or millions. Go see a short film or youth film festival these days.
Home films and photography have taken off. Even retired people are sending around digital images, raw or touched up, of family and friends. I know people pushing 70 that edit and burn their holiday videos to DVD. Try that with 8mm or Super8.
Many musical instruments now have MIDI ports -- and they're being used.
There are more and more Zines on every subject imaginable. 15 years ago these were made with effort, but now there are many tools like Quark, Illustrator, PageMaker, etc.
Plain old books are being written and published like never before.
So, yes, maybe industry has missed the boat like he says, but let's not forget that industry is the result of customer demand not the other way around. If no one is buying buggy whips, then stop selling them, look around and sell what people are buying. The end users are enjoying new kinds of experiences as predicted, but some of the former players in industry have ignored or fought the new opportunities for business. Why should they be subsidized with our effort if they cannot find a profitable business model that suits the times and technology?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Although it seems at first glance to be the answer to the 'problem' of people sharing music files, the practice of putting powerful copy-prevention technology on recordings is not a good approach to dealing with the new distribution technology for recorded audio product.
Assuming that the DRM actually works and prevents anyone from making a quick and clear copy of an audio recording, DRM technology encourages the RIAA companies (soon to be one company with the extensive mergers in this industry) to raise the prices on their products. Since one of the primary reasons that people are sharing files is the perception that the product is already overpriced, this will encourage present RIAA consumers to explore alternatives. Since we're talking the ultimate 'soft' product; music; which can be created by anyone, anywhere, at anytime, and be copied and distributed with even more ease, it is likely that a sizable percentage of the present consumers of prerecorded audio will switch to home-grown or non-commercial alternatives to buying RIAA product.
Eventually the non-RIAA music scene will develop into the perceived quality level as the corporate RIAA product, but without the legal risk of imprisonment or asset confiscation that follows unauthorized RIAA product consumption. Considering that the non-RIAA music will be significatly cheaper, it seems unlikely that music consumers who switch from the RIAA will ever switch back to consuming high priced RIAA product.
Therefore the RIAA is dependent of an ever-growing number on young, new consumers. This is not an unreasonable expectation given that the world's population is exploding and 2/3rds of the people on Earth are less than 25 years old.
However it is unclear how the RIAA will attract new artists to their ranks when the standard contract offered to artists does not offer significantly more compensation over the arrangements that will be developed between artists and audience on the non-RIAA sector. (Except for RIAA superstars).
The only long-term solution to making DRM work is the make all non-RIAA recordings illegal. Then they will call on their legal staff and law-enforcement authorities to routinely and aribtrarily select random members of the non-RIAA audience for systematic long-term incarceration and asset-confiscation from their families in order to scare the remaining non-RIAA audience into compliance with their dictates.
Which appears to be only realistic explanation of their current business strategy.
Jeez, these people are weird and sick.