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Microsoft's Janus DRM Software Officially Unveiled
hype7 writes "News.com.com is reporting the official unveiling of Microsoft's new DRM system, internally dubbed 'Janus'. Interestingly enough, a wide variety of companies including AOL, Dell, Disney, Napster and Freescale, a subsidiary of Motorola, have all signed on to the technology. Whilst some content providers and producers are keen, it remains to be seen what consumers will think - 'the new digital rights management tools include features that would protect content that is streamed around a home network, or even block data pathways potentially deemed 'unsafe,' such as the traditional analog outputs on a high-definition TV set. That's a feature that has been sought by movie studios in advance of the move to digital television.' I love the quotes from the MS rep - 'This release of technology really enables all kinds of new scenarios that are emerging now,' said Jason Reindorp, a group manager in Microsoft's Windows digital media unit. 'We're taking quite a holistic view.' It's good to see Microsoft taking a holistic view of preventing the consumer doing what they want with their paid for content, and protecting us from unsafe data pathways."
We are getting closer and closer to the day when NOTHING will work on any electronic device without a conglomerate corporation's device allowing it to go through. We are allowing for a bad precedent to be set here.
Notice the names that are interested: AOL, Dell, Disney. Interesting that these companies not only offer what we traditionally thought they did but they are now also offering TV and music related content along with many other items they shouldn't have been allowed to control.
So here it comes... Dell is going to slowly get into DRM. You are going to see it as a benefit. You can now download a large catalogue of music easily and legally to your computer and portable MP3 playing devices. Woo! Just wait till you want to copy your old collections of CDs to your Dell computer with DRM'd BIOS and OS and then onto your portable. Can you do that? Nope. That's illegal! You aren't proving that you own that CD. What if it was burned and didn't come from the manufacturer. Ok, so let's try the old analog inputs. It's an MP3 afterall and we don't care much about quality...
Error: We notice you are trying to use inputs which are attempting to allow something to pass through our DRM system. We are now blocking access to the ports via hardware.
If you think that by running Linux you are somehow going to escape this you're wrong. The possibilities that computer HARDWARE will only work with DRM enabled BIOS's is coming. Nevermind the fact that if you want to be connected to the rest of the world you will have to have a DRM'd computer with a DRM'd BIOS in order to do so.
"Welcome to hell boys!"
Also read Rory Blyth trying to buy an eBook. The stuff sounds made up except that I ad exact same experience with buying an eBook off Amazon for my Dell Axim, which ran Microsoft Reader. The book was DRMed and that was the last eBook I bought off Amazon, and wrote them roughly what Rory described in the complaint message.
HDTV tuners and sets are already in the market, and they know nothing about this Janus technology. If a broadcaster were to use this technology to "protect" its content, these older devices won't know how to make heads or tails of the restrictions, and therefore are going to have to be considered "untrusted" and not allowed to have the content.
That's just not going to fly in the marketplace. HDTV early adopters will just ignore the content that their units can't play back, and broadcasters aren't going to want to limit their potential audience by ruling out everybody but those who have bought certain models of HDTV hardware.
This platform will need a killer app, and I doubt Hollywood can come up with one...
If any human can create it, any human can break it.
DRM for the most part (I think) just doesn't work, being militaristic about media just sours the public opinion.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Why are companies always trying to push this shit on to the consumer? People need to learn if you don't like DRM then don't buy products that use them. This includes MP3 players, online music stores, DVDs, CDs, and Tvs. Other then DVDs I have been religious about boycotting anything that uses DRM. If more people did this then consumers will have more rights in the end. Just using their new formats only encourages companies to abuse their consumers more and more.
The Analog Hole will never die. If content is to be displayed to humans, it's going to have to go get to light waves and sound waves somehow, and content can always be captured by kinescopes and acustic couplers. Sure, there's going to be some quality loss by resorting to those technologies, but there's no way to defeat them from making a copy, and those copies can then be encoded into digital format. There's always going to be a point of demarcation where the digitally encrypted stream must become a plaintext analog signal in order for the monitor or speakers to function, and anything that copies the signals at that point will have a pretty good looking copy as well. Unless the digital demarc point is installed after our eyes and ears on the way to the brain, I just don't see how this is going to work...
It "enables" us to pay for things in a format that, at present, they dare not sell to us because we're a bunch of dirty thieves. If they sold us a movie over the internet NOW we might think that we should be allowed to watch it a second time for FREE.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Buzz! Wrong, but thanks for playing! It's in the interest of companies to avoid pissing off consumers so much that they bother to remember the company's name. There's a big difference.
All's true that is mistrusted
Ah, the subject that cost me Karma when I jokingly said "sounds like anus. As in ripped or torn..." Got tagged as a troll; some ppl can't take a joke.
But to my point:
I work in the entertainment industry (not music) and you might find it interesting MS's heavy push to position itself as the troll under the bridge.
The movie industry is struggling (for many reasons that none of us are going to solve because they're not technical) with digital distribution of assets. Microsoft is positioning itself to have at a minimum some part of that industry.
I've never worked outside the IT industry till now, and I can speak with certainty that it is indeed interesting to watch this going on.
See this: MS Digital Cinema
As the predominate software vendor in the world, Microsoft is in the unique and enviable position of defining everyone's digital rights.
Should a "monopoly" be allowed to wield this power? What oversight group is going to ensure that the People's rights are included in DRM?
As the majority market owner, does a technology company have an obligation to open up proprietary software that directly affects a consumers ability to manage / safeguard digital solutions they quiet literally own?
It's one thing with your Quicken database, you can print it out. But it's a completely different thing when you buy a song you have a legal right to copy or backup, but may not be able to because of a third parties technology solution.
There are some areas, IMHO, where some standards body has got to step up.
Best regards...
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
> Is it more important to protect your right to
> make a backup of content or the content
> provider's right to get paid for creating the
> content?
That's perfectly true.
But a better question is, which is it better to do: to try and innovate DRM which offers fair rights to the consumer, or to carry on spending huge amounts of money and dollars technically preventing (or trying to render illegal) the consumer's natural response to being denied those rights?
As far as I'm aware, [i]no[/i] company is even attempting to work on DRM that will nonetheless permit fair use. And that fact can entirely be blamed on the DeCSS court decision - why should they try to keep fair use if it's been legally established that they can get away with denying it?
- Every CD/DVD player
- Every TV
- Every audio amplifier
- Every audio cable
- Every pair of headphones
- Every pair of speakers
In short, the average consumer will not be able to afford a system that can play media with restrictions on analog output. The few who are that rich will not be able to prop up the movie/music industry, and if they go down this path, they will utterly collapse under the force of their own greed and stupidity.Meanwhile, the independent studios will grown during the downturn, in part because they will choose to adapt to technology rather than trying to naively strong-arm technology to bend to their will.
In other words, don't worry. This is just a case of corporate Darwinism. Let a few movie companies commit career suicide and everything will just work itself out naturally.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Not anymore. Copyrights have been granted a 25 year extension just about every 25 years. At the rate we've been going, the Disney copyrights will be permanent.
I know this won't be a popular argument on Slashdot, but I can think of one scenario where DRM is potentially enabling.
Take, for example, the fact that you can't download The Lion King on the Internet right now (I mean from Disney, not BitTorrent). I'd guess that this is because Disney can't afford to put such valuable IP on the Internet without being able to control its distribution...yeah, yeah, information wants to be free and whatever, but can you REALLY blame Disney for not liberating something that DESERVEDLY makes them money?
The only way we're going to see experimentation with content distribution is with DRM like this. It's better to boycott Disney's draconian DRM and have them loosen it than to not have any DRM and content distribution at all.
And to those of you who will say "but Apple got music distributors to accept DRM that doesn't include analog out screening!": in my opinion, this may be a slightly different beast. Today's music industry is pop hit obsessed -- the business model is based on short-term success. With movies, it's a little different. Even though rentals occur most frequently soon after a movie's release, I'd think the tail stretches out much farther.
Well you see, as society came to rely more and more on industrial technology - a skilled and mobile workforce became essential. This was a disaster to the plantation system that relied on just the opposite to uphold slavery.
At first the southern states tried to react to it by imposing harsher and harsher laws, to where you couldn't even legally teach a black person how to read, and slavery was made to last forever and for every generation. Then they tried to micro-regulate the industrial northern states, who eventually completely got fed up and went gung-ho anti slavery. Then they tried to react to it by fencing themselves off from the northern states and forming a seperate country, at that point all hell broke loose.
Well now we are in the information age which demands the uninhibited flow of open information. Is it a disaster for those who rely on the copyright monopoly system. At first they tried to extend copyrights to forever, and impose insane punishments. Then they tried to microregulate everybody with the DMCA. Now they are trying to fence themselves off from the rest of the world by using DRM.
Brace for impact, all hell is almost certainly about to break loose.
This is the whole point of an effective antitrust system (which we certainly do not have) versus what comes close to laissez-faire economics. If there were another platform with an even remotely significant percentage of the user base, no customer in their right mind would swallow Janus; they would gravitate toward the inevitable alternative. In this real world, however, there is not going to be any other alternative that runs on Windows -- Microsoft can make sure of that. Sadly, in a monopolistic world, our rights diminish every day. *This* is the reason why we need open standards and, apparently, open source.