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Cory Doctorow on Digital Rights Management
VerdeRana writes "I just heard the EFF's Cory Doctorow give this fantastic argument critiquing DRM. He makes a great case for why DRM is bad for society, business, and artists, why it simply don't work, and why Microsoft (the audience for this talk) should not invest in it. Broadcast this far and wide, and maybe someone will listen."
The problem with DRM is that it's got a name that people might consider making it the only right-management-related concept, now, DRM is not alone in its category and there'll be other to take care about, like DVD region locking, etc...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Companies dealing in intellectual property have never before faced this level of onslaught of piracy and infringement. This isn't something that happened overnight - it's been building up for years (although in recent years, it has accelerated greatly). While a lot of people criticise the methods they're employing to try and protect their assets, few can offer insightful solutions that have solid financial reasoning behind them. We all just seem to assume that if you offered your property for $1/track, that piracy would vanish. Well, they took us up on that challenge, and piracy hasn't vanished.
These people/companies are getting desperate. Sure, I don't think DRM is a silver bullet either, but it is at least slowing the problem until they can figure out a better, long-term solution.
The real thing we should be worrying about in all this is the laws they're passing in the meantime, like the DMCA. While the companies themselves will evolve through this, the rights-stripping provisions enshrined in legislation will be much, much harder to phase out. Laws are rarely repealed, and THAT is what should concern us.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Actually, it seems to be a re-hash of eveything we have known that is evil about DRM for the last few years, just all prettied up and in the same place. I despair that these arguments have much worth, particularly when you are talking to a corporate entity that has twice been convicted of monopolistic practices. It seems naive to me to even expect to be able to make such a difference. Since I live in the U$A, I know, no matter what the rhetoric, that it all comes down to money in the end. They will take a buck from anyone and anywhere that they can, and of course genetically they subliminally support the monopolistic practices of others. Computing literacy will be the next dividing line between rich and poor......
How many people want to make a copy of anything?
To protect your Toy Story Disc from damage by children, you put it in a a safe place, and make them ask you for it before they watch it.
If the blind wanbt to read a book, then, yes there may be a problem with anticircumvention technology. I agree this is somethign that should be addressed, but how many of you would be happy if there was an exception in the DMCA solley for circumventing copy protection to allow the disabled to access a work? Would this make it a good law?
People keep bringing up the case of Jon Johansen, and Dmitri Skryalov. They neglect to mention that both of them were found totally innocent, and in the makers of the garage door openers lost their case. Okay, so the law is badly worded to allow these actions in the first place, but we now have soem case law that explicitely spells out the exceptions.
Then there are the limits on audio copying. Well, yes, there are limits, but you are able to copy a CD to a cassette for the car, copy iTunes onto a CD, and on a number of other machines, and that is more than adequate for most people.
And just about nobody wants to build their own TV or DVD player!
The fact is, DRM and the DMCA rarely prevent people from doing anything they actually want to do. If you tyhink they're bad, then you need to come up with some reasons that are more convincing than these.
No, DRM will stop 14 year old girls from sharing CD collections with their friends so they will all get copies from Kazaa, instead of one person in the group buying each one and then sharing with their friends. I've had problems in the past where copy protection has prevented me from exercising my rights to a product (even installing a piece of software I've bought, because I took the disk with me when I and my laptop left the house, but didn't pick up the manual which had the CD key on the back). My response? To bypass the copy protection. This often wastes a lot of my time, and in the future I avoid products from manufacturers who have wasted my time in the past.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The government states that it is illegal to copy copyrighted materials for other than some particular purposes. The copyright owner has absolutely no right to stop you from doing anything at all other than the rights anyone has.
I am going to state a counterpoint purely from a technical stance (my stance on DRM is not pro- or anti- as I still have a lot to learn). It is possible for the key to remain a secret, even if it is in the hands of the consumer. Right now apps such as iTunes have it in software. You can generate keypairs and store keys in a medium analogous to that used in smart-cards, in the player hardware such that if it is ever tampered with to get the key, the key itself is destroyed. The hardware would probably be the sound-card or the speaker system if it is digital where the decoding of the compressed audio would take place. Yes this is not available now, but there's a good chance of such systems coming into operation.
Also like somebody in the MPEG committee recently said, the job of such DRM systems is not to put off the super clever guy who can break the system anyway... most systems are breakable. The plan is to put off the average consumer who may drag himself/herself into investigating the use of copyrighted content illegally if software and tools are available to *easily* circumvent such content-distrbution-restriction systems.
Right now, to crack iTunes songs using a software program is super-easy because of easy availability of easily-usable software. Hardware systems will likely be much harder to crack if implemented properly (every tried cracking an iButton?). The key-pair can be generated by the hardware in question and can be used only by that hardware and the user will have no access to the private key. Tampering with the hardware will destroy the key.
Unlike cracking the firmware (example: DVD firmware is 'patched' before update to play multi-region DVDs) the device may require the firmeware to be cryptographically signed by the vendor before it accepts it, hence voiding the ability to tamper with it.
Of course, we have a long way to go before such hardware is designed and adopted.
Banu
Articles like this one follow a familiar pattern:
1) The history of copyright, complete with exhaustive descriptions of the piano roll and the Monarchy.
2) A sob story about some poor honest member of the global audience who can't watch the latest Hollywood crap-fest because they don't have eight copies of it arranged so they are never more than 10 yards from at least two of them.
3) Ringing, strident statements about how Anything can be copied(tm) do you hear me??!?! WELL, DO YOU??!?!?!?!?!!?!
4) The argument then swerves into the ever-popular "in the future, the Internet will make copyright obsolete and artists will all live in a Utopian paradise where everything is free, free, free like the book they spent 4,000 hours writing which is at this very minute available on 4,000 warezzzzzzz sites for your convenience"
5) This is usually followed by the standard "books are worthless, music is pointless, art is disposable, inspiration is a commodity" argument which offers the idea that because something can be cheaply copied, it has somehow become worthless.
Throughout each of these discussions, there is always support for "well, we'll just copy it anyway" which is why this argument has long since lost even the remotest shred of credibility.
There is only one question that needs to be answered. Is there any set of conditions under which the "copy every last fucking bit on Earth" people will just pay for the fucking movie/book/CD/whatever?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
The copyright owner does.
The copyright owner has only limited rights on his creation. The moment he publishes the work he can not control further trade in the copies that he made. (And who gets to read/see/enjoy the work.)
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
No. But you could of made the same argument for CDs just a few years back.
Eventually, people are going to want video at their fingertips not unlike music/mp3s is now. People want to make copies, not for the sake of having copies, but for ease of use.
See, its easier to have a remote-device that selects "spiderman," "cowboy bebop," "return of the king," or "big breasted asian honeys 4" then it is to get up off your chair, walk to the dvd shelf, find the disk, and swap out the dvd currently in your drive.
Before you call me lasy, remind yourself again of what is happening to CDs.
I think DRM is stupid, as it simply has never worked. Why bother wasting the money on something that has been demonstrated time and time again as a faulty non-working system that _always_ has workarounds. They should spend their money on something profitable.
Yeesh.
no
Microsoft wants a single encryption key as the secret.
It wants that key protected inside the CPU.
It wants OEM's to pre-register the computer with Microsoft and the key exchange will be done at that time to avoid man in the middle attacks.
Your PC will have an encrypted channel, done via private key encryption between your CPU and Microsoft.
So now all DRM keys for all encryption flow down this channel, direct into the CPU's store.
You DON'T give the attacker the key in this instance, you give the COMPUTER the key. The COMPUTER works against the customer to protect the copyright holders wishes.
It's still a breakable scheme , but the EFF guy didn't give them full credit for the scope of the scheme. Palladium & DRM are ONE AND THE SAME strategy.
Without MS you can't send your DRM key securely, so any DRM seller has to be pay MS even if it doesn't use MS's DRM.
I wonder though if governments will stand idly by and let Microsoft create a private encryption channel between everyone's computer and Microsoft.
I strongly doubt it.
iTunes is simply too new for the problem to have hit home to non-ubergeeks who don't buy a new laptop every 10 months. Yet.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
CD's aren't going out of style anytime soon
Vinyl isn't going out of style any time soon.
Customers have choices. And that isn't going out of style anytime soon
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
He whines about how he hit the 3 CPU limit of iTunes DRM, because he forgot to decertify one of his Powerbooks before he sent it back to Apple for repair, and that he already used up his other two authorizations on his other machine, and his mom's machine
Okay, lets compare this with DRM free audio tapes or CDs.
Skipping over the apparent violation of the terms of the DRM by using one auth for his mom in another household,
If it was a violation of the terms of the DRM, then the DRM should have prevented it. Of course, traditional media allows you to make copies for friends. This is legal in most countries.
he failed to mention several points, like how you can call Apple and they will remove the dead auth for the dead machine
Oooh, how kind. If you ask nicely, then Apple may, at their sole discretion, give you permission to listen to music that you paid for. If my CD player breaks, I can play all my CDs on a replacement.
and that Apple extended the limit to 5 CPUs.
Yes, but they hadn't at the time.
But that doesn't even account for the fact that Cory was just a damn idiot that didn't deauth his machine before sending it in for service. Still, Cory whined and ranted about this problem on BB, rather than placing the blame on himself for making a stupid error.
Why should he have had to do this? DRM should be transparent. Deauthorising is not transparency.
The ultimate point of his lecture is where he rants about how nobody's calling up manufacturers and begging them for features that restrict rights, therefore there is no market demand for DRM. But he overlooks the obvious fact there are whole markets that would not exist if not for DRM.
They would if the media cartels would let them. It would only need someone to take the risk of releasing without DRM, and you'd see how succesful that is.
Actually, I think what Cory was trying to convince them of is that they're being suckered into defending a business model they're not invested in -- namely, the Hollywood/RIAA model. (And, as a side note, that given the option between defending a dying business model and developing a new one, the new one is almost always the better bet.)
His point is that Microsoft, like Sony with VCR, has no incentive to make a less capable tool.
DRM should be seen, from Microsoft's perspective, as a Linux/free software incentive program: if you build deliberately crippled tooks, you give your users reason to walk away from them.
And Microsoft has (or should have) far more interest in retaining the userbase than it does in
receiving micropayments every time somebody plays a song on a DRM'd system.
It also bears pointing out, of course, that there is a version of events in which DRM is a winner for Microsoft -- it's the version where we posit strict legal enforcement of restrictions on the right to create new digital technology and innovation is never allowed to outstrip DRM. Setting aside for the moment the moral arguments against that, Cory points out that history suggests that betting on the 1984 vision of DRM and computers is pretty long odds.
Companies like Microsoft steer like old Buicks, and this issue has a lot of forward momentum that will be hard to soak up without driving the engine block back into the driver's compartment.
really ads much to his argument or is likely to MS to dump DRM or anything. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for papers written in a readable manner, but this guy just seems a bit off the mark.
I imagined I was sitting in a room full of smart-but-skeptical Microsoft employees and it sounded just fine to me. These are employees who probably can feel that Buick momentum as software development cycles -- such as for Longhorn with its entirely relevant NGSCB (or whatever it's called now) -- seem to drift from years into decades. The metaphor was as straightforward and legitimate of a criticism as I could imagine.
It's called trustbuilding, and Cory Doctorow seems to be doing it about as well as I'd imagine anyone would in that situation. I think he walks the light-but-incisive line pretty well.
A lot of us would like to protect material from damage or destruction, or would prefer not to keep subjecting our originals to constant exposure to use. (This was more of an issue with tape because of friction.) Or maybe I don't want to have to buy two copies of the same disk or tape because I don't want to have to keep a copy upstairs and a copy downstairs in order to watch it. I can afford to buy duplicate 50c-$1 used books; buying, say, 500 duplicate DVDs at 15-30 bucks a pop is out of the question. My sister has a DVD player in her room that holds 300 discs. It also has a system to allow you to type in the names of every disc. You can use the remote (if you're masochistic or a lunatic) or you can (much closer to sanity) plug in a keyboard. But if you remove a disc from the machine, you lose the stored data. (If you take it out and put it back without doing anything else, you're okay, but once you watch any other disc it will lose the stored info. I can't watch any of the disks from her machine without losing the stored disc info unless she does not use the machine at all for anything. Would be simpler for me to make a copy and watch the copy upstairs than to go downstairs, remove the disc, watch it up there, take it back downstairs, then re-enter the stored data for that disc when she's not using her machine. If I was using DVD-RW, I could simply copy the disc, make a copy, watch it, then erase the copy and use the DVD-RW for watching a temporary copy of a different disc. But I can't do that because of anti-copying protections.
One time I was copying the master CD of an application we make and by accident I dropped it, which scratched it so badly it would no longer work. And I'm careful.
There are lots of legitimate reasons for making copies of things, none of which has anything to do with piracy.
I've never been a parent but I have the suspicion you've never been either. Do you really expect to keep kids out of any place you can think of to hide things? And it doesn't matter even if you do make them ask; kids can damage things unintentionally in unbelievable ways. And not just kids, either. My sister has a friend whose child comes by to visit. I have to remind this little girl on a constant basis not to slam the door on the car I'm driving. (I have also had to remind my brother, who is over 50 and older than me, not to do the same thing, so it isn't just kids that have problems (he's broken the side mirror on two of the cars I've owned)). This little lady did something to the Windows Me computer we have that completely destroyed the ability for it to boot-up normally; windows kept saying there was a protection error and would not boot. Would come up in safe mode but not otherwise. Reinstall from the CD would not fix the problem. I ended up having to wipe the hard drive and reinstall on bare metal. I'll tell you this: I have been doing programming for over 20 years and I'll be damned if I can figure out how she did it. I'd even be willing to redo the reinstallation of everything if I could see and find out how she did it.
After spending time in jail and thousands of dollars in legal fees to have to prove they were innocent.
After spending thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove their actions were non-infringing.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
DRM may be bad for those artists who recycle bits of others' works, but it's not bad for the creators of those original works.
How is the DRM going to "know" what is and isn't original. e.g. could it be used to ensure that the "artist" has control over what a publisher does with their work?
Believe it or not, most serious artists actually want to retain the hope of selling their work and making a living,
The vast majority of those aiming to "make it big" never do so in the first place. There are also plenty of people who don't rely on their music/writing/etc to be their primary/only source of income in the first place.
Wrong. The copyright law makes it clear that once you sell a work you have no right to control its future distribution and that the purchaser of a work has every right to the normal use, enjoyment and even resale of that work. See Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus , 210 U.S. 339 (1908) where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that once the copyright holder sells a work they lose control of that copy and may not prevent transfer or future resale. If a copyright proprietor has no right to stop resale, it certainly should have no right to determine how or under what conditions you read or use a work as long as you aren't making copies for others.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Last weekend I went to the Fanzilla Fan Film Convention to see the absolutely brilliant Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. For anyone who doesn't know, this movie was the work of three junior high kids back in the 1980's, that were so moved by seeing the actual film, that they decided to remake it shot-for-shot.
At the screening, they informed us that security guards would be monitoring the audience to make sure none of us were taping the film to distribute it across the net, since it is a reproduction of the original film. As I was watching the grainy film of a 13 year old adventurer mock fighting 13 year olds wearing turbins in the streets of Gulfport, MS, a security guard walked up the aisle scanning with a night vision scope to make sure nobody had any naughty cameras.
The whole situation just seemed so ludicrous. Nobody was going to mistake this film for the actual Raiders. The point of watching this film was not to be entertained by the movie's plot (though it does hold up well in the re-telling), but in seeing how these kids with limited resources managed to pull off outrageous stunts and ingeniuously improvise set pieces to make a film that actually held together.
They succeeded bigger and better than you would think. But Industrial Light and Magic doesn't have to worry about their jobs. I still bought the Indiana Jones Trilogy DVD set. In fact, I watched the real Raiders that night when I got home because the kids did such a good job that I felt like seeing the original.
That fan film may not be creative in the sense of creating a new work from whole cloth. But it was extremely creative in execution, and inspired a few of the kids involved to become a part of the movie business. Ironically, one of them works for a DVD production house.
I wish more people could see this film; it is truly inspirational. I felt like running out and making my own movie. Why can't it be out there on the 'Net if nobody is going to make money from it? Would it really cut into LucasFilm's profits if someone did make some money on it?
One of the producers of the film introduced it at the festival and said that they occasionally show it for educational purposes. What kind of message does it send to show kids this film, and then tell them that there are these bizarre boundaries on their creativity? Do they send security to those screenings? I've heard a lot of complaints on this site and others that kids don't do these kinds of ambitious projects anymore. Why do you think that is?
======
In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
One point you fail to address is that competition and innovation are good, in the end, for the artists. When VHS machines came out, the MPAA screamed that it was the end of the universe and they were going to take their marbles and go home if congress didn't stop it. Well, lo and behold, an entire industry was created for renting and selling videos which not only added to the MPAA's bottom line, but in some cases actually surpassed box office sales. The very industry screaming for ARM (analog rights management) actually ended up benefiting greatly from the thing they were trying to control, because they lacked the vision to see what it would do for them.
I'm not going to sit here and pick apart your strawman, you seem pretty proud of it. I'll just say that where it even resembles the very insightful speech Cory gave, it's too simplistic to be considered anything other than a (*cough*) troll.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
DRM IS NOT the same as censorship: it is the control of intellectual property.
However, controlling "intellecutal property" is an excellent form of censorship.
There is no market demand for this "feature." None of your customers want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology failures.
They know this and they don't care. They are going to, once again, leverage their monopoly to try and change the market.
And sadly, even if their customers are so unforgiving it is a long strech to see joe-sixpack and sally-homemaker deciding to break with everything they know and install Linux or makeing a whole new investment in a Mac.
At the end of the day they will grumble and bitch but swallow that bitter pill and reinstall Windows and deal. MS knows this and so does its partners.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
What iTunes, et al, do with DRM is actually very lenient in light of what the 5 majors want (and are actively seeking). They have appeased the RIAA and brethren by perpetuating the illusion that digital material can be fully protected. In reality, all that these DRM schemes have done is place a bump in the road... and a pretty insignificant bump at that. However, that is the price that they (as retailer) must pay to allow major label content to you (the consumer).
There is a bit of a solution though. Companies like mine, AudioLunchbox, Magnatune, and a few others, are skirting the entire DRM issue by offering indie and quasi-major label material (eg, a compilation put out by an indie that contains tracks by major label artists).
As time goes on, I sincerely believe that DRM will become *less* of an issue, as the majors begin to realize that while they need to aggressively protect their copyrights, they also need to make sales to the consumer. In the interim, please support those of us who are working to bring you quality music unfettered by DRM.
The only reason DRM exists is that the record companies are scared (as they should be) that they are eventually going to be out of the loop. One of the major reasons artists sign with record companies is that they have a distribution network that will get their music in stores so they can make money on the sales of said music. With the internet and digital music formats, the artists don't need the record companies anymore and can go direct to the consumer. What's to stop major artists uniting (a la United Artists in the 20's) and cutting out the middleman. The record companies are running scared and if they don't stop alienating their customers by charging high prices and coming up with copy protection schemes they will go the way of the piano-roll makers.
The music and movie studios rant and rave about how piracy is their target with this whole DRM push. Fine -- DRM the movie reels, the review disks, the portions of the chain that are never held by a paying customer, the portions that have in fact have been repeatedly shown to be the source for piracy, and drop those restrictions at the end of the supply chain.
DRM your business lines boys, not the end product. That way we know you're fighting the pirates -- after all, if you only DRM the end product, somebody might get the mistaken idea you're fighting the customer!Do you like Japanese imports?
well amazingly enough, he put the entire text of his article up there into the public domain so you can easily correct it and post a correct version. I'm sure he would also welcome corrections being submitted from his readers as well, as he gets other stuff of his proofread by his reading public.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
What I got from this article is that throughout history people who try to make money from the old media try to fight people who try to make money from the new media. Artists make only a small amount of money from either. The only advantage the artist has is that the new media plays to a larger audience and the artist, because he gets a smaller slice from a larger pie tend to do OK. The media companies, old and new do OK also but that's besides the point...
:)
The lawyers always get paid.
They get paid by the old companies to fight the new companies and they get paid by the new companies to defend against the old companies and they get paid by the artists to make sure they get their cut.
History teaches us that it doesn't pay to be a creative artist, inventor or even business man.
Kids, be a lawyer and get all the others coming and going.
Free Software cannot seriously implement DRM. (Any that does, will just get forked.) The most it can do is work around it, like libdvdcss does. But that's against the law (DMCA) so that keeps interoperable Free Software products underground.
It's in Microsoft's interest that all content be DRMed so that they only have to compete with other proprietary vendors. And more specifically, only the proprietary vendors that are big enough that they can pay DRM licensing fees. This helps to keep the lighter, more nimble competition out, so that MS only has to compete with large companies.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
'Rights management' sounds neutral, benign even. Not something to get fired up about. Start calling it 'digital restrictions mechanism' and perceptions change. There are enough of us that if we all do this when talking to family, friends, the press, etc. we can get the meaning of the term changed.
He does propose a solution: Microsoft should a) grow a pair of balls, and b) tell the RIAA to fuck off. Building a "record player that can play anything" (his phrase) is the first step.
The problem is Microsoft sees DRM not just as a way to protect music and video; it's a way to protect Microsoft software. This is Microsoft's real motivation and, unfortunately, the reason this won't just go away soon.
Worst case scenario (which happens to be the best case scenario for Microsoft, and also for Disney and Dell and the rest, which is why it may happen): You're running Linux (or Windows XP) and using Thunderbird and OOo (or Office XP), and someone (your brother, your boss, whoever) emails you a document. You try to read it, but it's a Word 18 (or whatever version) document, and it's got DRM enabled (by default) so your softwear can't read it. So you email the sender and ask that they bother to save a copy without DRM. Except you don't use Outlook 23 (or whatever), so you don't send a DRM-enabled email, so their Outlook 23 rejects it as spam and they never get your email.
Here's the weird part. By switching to Longhorn and the whole DRM-enabled Office suite, that person has effectively cut themselves off from the rest of the world, yet they will frame the debate in terms that paint the rest of the world (including you) as spam-enabling, copyright-infringing luddites. That spam-enabling copyright-infringing arguement (plus a few billion in campaign contributions) will buy legislation that mandates DRM for all internet transactions, including email and simple file transfers. Just because you own the copyright on that letter to Aunt Millie doesn't give you the right to send it in plaintext! If you're really the copyright holder you should have no problem producing a DRM-enabled copy that can be legally sent to Aunt Millie, and she should have no problem with the idea of buying a new Dell just so she can run Longhorn, which is required for Office 34, simply to read your email.
Hey, I did say "worst-case scenario." But it could happen. Open source code could become illegal in the USA, simply because open source code can't deliver DRM and meet the DMCA at the same time, and the richest, most powerful company in the world is trying to make this happen, with the help of a lot of their Fortune 500 friends. In this scenario, Apple will be lucky to be allowed to use the DRM required by law. (IANAL, but I believe if the law requires you to infringe a patent then you must either negotiate a pantent royalty or get out of that business, and you'd better believe Microsoft's DRM will have patent protection, much to Apple's dismay)
Cory doesn't get it -- Microsoft is counting on DRM to drive Longhorn sales, because without DRM there's no reason for anyone to move from XP to Longhorn. I doubt anyone with the authority to change this policy was in that room. You'll note that Microsoft has repeatedly said their DRM-enabled applications will only run on Longhorn and will not be back-ported to XP.
I rest my case, and I pray I'm wrong.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.