Slashdot Mirror
Disney Suggests Mandating DRM On All Media
Ethan Butterfield writes "Cory Doctorow posted this on his blog this morning. Essentially, Disney wants the FCC to regulate all devices capable of recording from any audio broadcasting medium or from the Internet."
That's the ultimate goal from all these 'media conglomerates', has been for some time.. I don't know why people haven't seen it coming...
Once its *all* digital, they have extra weight behind them both in the legal/government and technological arenas. Even helps squash competition by charging exurbanite fees to join the 'official drm bandwagon' and have your media playable...
That final day IS coming....And it will be the last day I will be considered a 'media consumer'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Because despite what he says in his blog FM radio is _not_ covered by what Disney asking for. Is it still too much? IMHO. XM Radio and Sirius both already have DRM, if I recall correctly, though you can still make an analog recording (and always will be able to). I could be wrong though, because I only have XM in my car, so it doesn't have any kind of tape outputs or anything. As far as internet radio, they should give up hope of regulating it all. As always, there is the fact that the internet is international. Also, there's nothing stopping you from setting up your own internet radio station, without DRM (other than maybe a couple of FCC regulations if Disney gets their way). Not that they would be able to find you without expending a tremendous amount of resources anyway.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Essentially, Disney wants the FCC to regulate all devices capable of recording from any audio broadcasting medium or from the Internet.
The real question is, what are they going to do when people publish plans to build "unencumbered" devices themselves on the net? Not straight circumvention devices, but devices that don't care about corporate idiocies, "to play free music" say. What will they do? go after the people who made the plans? go after the sites harboring proposing said plans for download? I can see that happen, given how hard it is to find decss.c these days <sarcasm>.
Seriously, these corporate dinosaurs really need to reinvent themselves with regard to revenue models. All these copyright laws, DRM chips, strong-arming and scare tactics,... from them make me think of a falling man grasping on straws. They may eventually bring file-sharing under control, but it'll be a triumph of corporate will against natural human behaviours.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I've been following this for a while, and until now I haven't said much, instead I've had the thought that since they own the copyright, it's their right to ask the FCC to do this. Until now.
The FCC and other regulatory commissions are there to two do things, the first being make sure that the public interest is taken care of (since they are a by-product of a democratic republic), and the second is otherwise regulate until #1 is met. In this end, they regulate the airwaves, but they've never regulated the technology, only what it can do. For example, you can't make a remote control that operates on the same frequency as other products, and you can't show a nipple on television. What you are allowed to do, however, is to record music and television shows for private use (not public use). Where Disney and other companies miss the mark is that they believe that their customers are inherently bad, and to that end, they should prevent people from taking away from their business venue, and they sincerely believe that they are right by asking the FCC to stop allowing devices to record broadcasts. Disney and other companies must work within the established guidelines set out by the FCC, and what we are witnessing is their attempts to change that landscape to maximize their profits, and minimize piracy. Unfortunatly when they do that, they minimize fair use rights.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
I'd be willing to bet that when the copyright is up for expiration Disney will lobby for yet another extension (say 100 years) and Congress will be well paid off to approve it. It will undoubtedly be challenged, but when it hits the Supreme Court, the Supreme Idiots In Robes will say its all ok as the time renewal is still finite (which seems to have been the reason they approved the last extension). Of course, Disney should really lobby for a 100,000 year extension on copyright as that too would still be finite and thus ok.
+1 Funny?
More like +4 informative
I find it hard to believe that this will happen but maybe I'm just being naive. Can anyone explain to me how the FCC is going to regulate the entire world? Heck the RIAA (or Canadian version) hasn't stopped file sharing in Canada and its unclear whether or not it is illegal to so in Canada. Won't other countries continue to make devices that can record audio broadcasts and/or from the Internet? Sure they can make feeds that require a special player to play but there is nothing stopping a person from recording the sound played through their speakers and circulating that around. Also, last time I checked, I can tune into my local radio station and record it either on a cassette tape or onto my computer very easily and distribute it in other formats on servers located in other countries. Am I missing something here?
Dog for sale: eats anything and is fond of children
Deregulation seems to only work one way, in favor of the major corporate interests that the FCC is supposed to protect us from. Instead, in this environment of deregulation, which allows more and more power to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, we see who is going to be regulated: the consumer!
Thank you, my fellow Republicans, for blindly following ideology as if it were holy writ.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Actually, if you're going to invest in anything solely because of this news (not recommended), repair service business is it. Old-school non-DRM equipment will become gold if a doomsday scenarios plays out.
I mean, I don't want to be on Disney's bad side, and since the scope so easily records waveforms, I guess I'm going to need a firmware upgrade or something.
There are three main approaches to implementing DRM:
* Disable use on systems after a leak and redistribution. Generally done with some kind of watermarking scheme. Never going to happen. Watermarking is a cute research idea, but it turns out that efficient compression (eliminating data that isn't visually/aurally important) eliminates the same set of data that watermarks need to play with. There are a host of other problems as well -- generally, if someone can detect a watermark, they can remove it. Caught a bit of interest early on, pretty much went away.
* Stop redistribution after a leak. The RIAA/MPAA are still working on this, but it's ultimately a doomeed effort. Computers and networks were made to copy data.
* Try to prevent the inital copy from leaking. Never going to happen. There are too many places for an initial leak to come from with any kind of widely-distributed data. There's a hybrid approach using this and watermarks to identify initial leaks followed by legal action against the source of the leak. This doesn't even work against small-scale distribution systems like screener DVDs -- it will *not* work for a large-scale system.
That's not so bad. It just means that the econonmy of our society is changing once again. Attempts to keep the rules from shifting and the econonmy from adjusting are as useless as the feudal lords trying to keep merchants from becoming the new powerful class.
May we never see th
Good to see someone gets it.
The key thing that needs to be realized is that the current situation CANNOT continue. The "piracy" of filesharing is not the basis for an economy of information which is what we need. (DRM is not a basis for it either).
Check out the Creative Commons for an attempt to make things like fair use an explicit right rather than an implicit one under current law. Ultimately we will need some sort of change.
This also has some really far reaching consequnces. I am involved in Web archiving - these DRM laws may prevent us as a culture from archiving our history. Which quite simply means we will not exist in history. I don't know about you but one of the things that motivates me is that I am contributing to something bigger than myself or my peers (or at least attempting to)
DRM requires network. Otherwise it loses all its strength (if it can be done just by local hardware, it can be done by local (my) software.)
Does it mean all DVD players, home cinemas, tape recorders, walkmans, discmans, pocket MP3 players and all that is supposed to be networked? And what about computers, say I pay for modem, do I have to pay for 1.5h long distance call if I want to view 1.5h DVD movie?
Either they are very stupid or VERY greedy.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
That's what the government mandated copyright awareness education is for. Brainwash the gullible while children, and even the non-gullible will feel nervous, guilty and alone when failing to be good little sheepsumers.
Just yesterday on slashdot, some ijit was telling me how I can't simply have my own morals, but that morality comes from the laws themselves! WTF? I mean, he was serious, non-trolling, and suggested I was obligated to follow that law until overturned.
If congress passed a law that no one was allowed to feed babies, would he let his kid wither away, while fervently trying to get the law overturned? I'm sure he would ignore something *that* absurd. But take something that's only slightly less absurd, remove the "life-or-death" consequences (well, not entirely... IP prevents poor african nations from making cheap generic anti-AIDS drugs) and people act like God handed the damn law to Moses on a stone tablet. Fuck that. With the "No Feeding Babies Act" not only would you ignore it, you'd not even bother to try to get it overturned. Working in a system so corrupt and devoid of reason, there'd be no point, right?
Someone explain to me why that is different from the situation we're now in?
The question then is wether investing money in prison stock will increase the number of people getting thrown in jail.
:-), that a lot of money gets invested in prison stock. The Company invests this money in building prisons in a part of the state were there is a lot of unemployment, and promesses nice jobs with benefits. Now, unless there is an increase in the number of people getting thrown into jail, the investors will loose there money, the people around the jails will not get there jobs and the CEO will get fired. Are you sure that the prison companies will not start pushing for harder prison sentences and that the politiction will not be, well, easely convinced.
Let's say, hypotheticaly of course
Good Luck. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older but I do remember when the Christian Coalition tried to boycott Disney because their film studios were producing non-family movies. (You are aware that Disney owns quite a few studios.) Well they tried to boycott everything Disney owned.
To make a long story short, they couldn't determine everything Disney had their hands in. The reason their boycott "worked" is because the Christian Coalition is big enough and generated enough publicity that Disney wanted to quiet them down. They in no way, shape or form impacted on Disney's bottom line. I'd even argue that the boycott didn't effectively impact Disney's reputation and that the only reason it worked was due to the culture at Disney which is adverse to anything which would call into question its family-friendly image.
So again good luck. The /. crowd isn't the CC in any aspect. Long ago, I boycotted DVDs because of CSS now I've got three players hooked up to the TVs, a NetFlix subscription, and DeCSS is still illegal. Sometimes I have to wonder if this is how it happened to the Flower* Power generation.
*Btw, fwiw, my handle isn't a 60's reference. I took this handle after a Disney character. The thought of being a cute little stinker online was too much to pass up. I eagerly await the C&D missive from our content owning and distributing Overlords.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
I know this is so so off-topic, but its kinda fitting and without even reading the article im sure its obvious this is this years nomination for crazyest crack-induced suggestion by a corporation so its just not worth it. All these media giants are going crazy over making sure their films and 'entertainment' are protected more than most government documents (although in reality we all know how secure DRM is and how well people look after their laptops full of secret data) but theres a really interesting trend you can see for yourself on imdb.com - on the world-wide top rated of all time film list, almost every film was made before the last ten years, but on the world-wide top box-office earning list, almost all the films (that have made the most money) are from the last ten years. So to sum up, all the media companies are really keen to make sure you buy their films, yet they have been poor films but more money than ever before! infact almost every new release seems to be a box-office record breaker, but lets not forget, the last ten years have given us Gigli, Torque and Crossroads! how can they be making so much money with so much crap? My theory is its a conspiracy (obviously) and they are trying to get rid of the means for the masses to make their own entertainment (limit the quality of cameras and audio equipment without a license) after that and DRM they can make us watch whatever they want, why? because (double conspiracy) they have embedded subliminal messaging into films that will turn us into their slaves! the new overlords are comming!
sorry i kinda discredited the rest of the post there..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
While the FCC is asking the question about copy protection for digital broadcast radio, as it stands they do not really have the authority to actually mandate any copy protection for it. I'm pretty sure that those in charge are aware of that as well.
The only reason the broadcast flag for TV happened was because Congress gave the FCC broadened authority to move the DTV transition. That expanded authority is missing for digital radio, and will likely never happen.
So, calls for the FCC to mandate DRM will not likely work, and if the FCC tries, it would probably be killed by a court appeal. Watch Congress - that's where anything important will happen.
I agree completely with your post. I dont know what we can do to change things. I have spent a great deal sitting around thinking about it. Writing letter to congress doesnt help, if you actually get your letter past their staff and to them they dont care. If you dont have a large check attached to your letter they dont care. Despite the best efforts of the EFF it seems like they are having no effect, it just gets worse and worse. The only chance to have any change is to figure out a way to motivate the public, but I doubt the public cares nor understands. If you have any suggestions on what I should be doing to get the word out speak up, but I am at a loss. Our founding father had enough forsight to seperate church and state but not enough to seperate big business and state.
I fear that most people are already too far gone. Most poor bastards don't have enough independent thought left to even think that it's possible to question a notion like "A creator should receive economic compensation every time their work is copied". People simply think that the current system is "just the way it is", and their hobbled minds aren't flexible enough to even comprehend that things could be different.
This statement is VERY consistent with my experience of non-geeks. I actually DO socialize with non-geeks on a regular basis (I don't even refer to them as non-geeks...thats just for the benefit of slashdot). They are utterly unaware of these intellectual property issues, and they DO all blindly accept the notion that content creators should have complete control of content use until the end of time, and so on. The history of copyright law, the ideals of public domain, and so on, are completely lost on them.
Stupidity and ignorance are outright dangerous. Unfortunately, pointing out one's stupidity/ignorance is never well-received.
LRM is a Legal Rights Management system designed to control legal rights given to corporations for the protection of humanity. The system will allow corporations to exist and to run business under fair-trade conduct but will prevent them from stealing the rights of others. LRM will also provide mechanisms to control corporations for the purpose of new and exciting business methods such as limited time models and restricted mergers. under the *IT TACA DA PISS Act, LRM will be mandatory for all registered corporations. The following is a brief guide to the key features of the proposed LRM:
- Limited Time Models:
Corporations will be allowed to use business models for a limited time only determined by public vote. For example, the distribution and sale of plastic disks containing digitally encoded video and audio maybe restricted by public vote to a time of (for example) 1 year. After this time the corporation or corporations would be forbidden from practising this business model.
- Restricted Mergers:
The number of mergers or 'buy outs' a corporation will be permitted to perform would be determined and hard coded into this legislation. After the allowed number of mergers a corporation would have to be liquidated (the assets rewarded to the tax payer) and rebuilt to regain its allowance.
- Fair-trade Conduct:
A democratic process will exist for the regulation of all corporate entities. Voting by the general population will determine rules by which corporations must follow. Such rules could include the restriction of DRM technology in products that are deemed 'aggressive' by the voters and the clear labelling or banning of products that attempt to tamper with the parameters of existing playback devices (such tampering if not clearly labelled may be deemed criminal intrusion of a remote computer system). Flaws in products may also require clear labelling including the lack of security measures deemed vital at the time of production.
- The restriction of 'tools' for the purpose of by-passing LRM
Lawyers, Head-quarter Relocation, Campaign Contributions, 'Politicians', Sponsored School Education Programmes and 'Remakes' will be banned, their use, trafficking, sale, possession and discussion will be offences subject to fines of up to $10,000,000,000 (which will be rewarded to the tax payer) or 2 years corporate suspension (from a tall building).
*IT TACA DA PISS Act:
It Takes Ages Creating A Decent Anagram Politicians IMFO Should Stop.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
So can't someone sue them to get the courts to declare that the FCC has no power to regulate these things?
I really hope someone does exactly that. However don't overlook the fact that not only are you going up against the government, you'd be opposed by the entire legal might of media-corporate America. MPAA, RIAA, BSA, broadcasters, all of the major sports leagues, and god-knows who else.
And even if you win, then you've got an entire second round when the FCC and everyone else petitions congress to GRANT the FCC exactly that power.
Sigh. Fight fight fight and we're lucky to claw one step forward while getting shoved two steps back. Hopefully things will start to get better as yesterday's computer-savy teens and 20-somethings begin turning into tomorrow's 30-something and 40-something congressmen and senators and judges. In the mean time things are getting ugly and entrenched.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
One of the pieces, Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (in the prehistoric section) was still under copyright, and Disney paid both Stravinsky and his publisher. Stravinsky later claimed that Disney threatened to violate his copyright if he didn't take what was offered, because the copyright was Russian, and the US and USSR weren't officially recognizing each others' copyrights at the time. (He also complained about how they butchered his music.)
FCC: Hi Mr. Eisner! How can we help you today?
Michael Eisner: Hi, I'd like to mandate Digital Rights Management on all hardware please.
FCC: Ummm, this is the FCC... we do broadcasts. Not hardware and encoding standards. Perhaps you should speak to the manufacturers, or Congress?
Michael Eisner: Awww, come ooon! You gotta help us, they won't listen to us anymore. They just keep going on and on about how Digital Rights Management is soooo completely not feasible. They won't listen to reason! And well, Congress.. there are a few there that will ah, *cough* listen *cough* to us. But those damned manufacturers keep brib... er, lobbying Congress to block our initiatives! Besides, if you can get me strong encryption hardware on every DVD player, there might be a little something in it for you, IF you know what I mean... *wink* *wink*
FCC: Mandating that every DVD player bound for North Korea have hardware level support for strong cryptography? You're in the wrong place. You need to talk to the Bureau of Information and Security. But I can save you a trip. The answer is NO. Next.
People who work for government bureaucracies are at least ostensibly working for the good of the country - something not remotely true of a publicly-owned corporation. Governments also have to follow stricter laws that serve to at least slightly protect citizens (obviously the prison system is not the best example of this working, but there are laws lurking somewhere in there at least). And most government agencies routinely face budget cuts, which has forced at least some prison systems to let some of the more minor criminals go.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Sometimes I have to wonder if this is how it happened to the Flower* Power generation.
No. How it happened to the 'Flower Power' generation is that there was no Flower Power generation out of a very few small local areas, i.e. San Francisco. Most of the 'coopting' occured simultaneous with the development of the myth that there ever was a mass 'hippie' movement. The hype turned into the 'reality' by the time most people found out there was anything happening. By that point it was a marketing operation, i.e. 'hippie' carnies selling t-shirts at concerts. Same as it ever was, essentially.
resigned
When you outlaw Non-DRM audio, only outlaws will use Non-DRM audio!
Look, I hate the copyright insanity as much as anyone, but I don't think that's a solution--it's simply too abuseable.
It's easy, really, especially if you control enough of the media--don't print any books. Then, when they've been out of print long enough that the author loses copyright, gobble them up & don't give the creator a dime.
Now then, personally, I'd like to see copyrights changed to a FIXED term. E.G. You have x years to publish it that we'll give you for an unpublished manuscript, and y years after, discounting the first z years it was unpublished, but none after that. So we wind up knowing in advance exactly when such and such a copyright will expire for any given work, and have no more of this life + 70 BS (which, incidentally, reminds me of a prison term more than anything).
Of course, I don't think that software & such should get more than 10 years, and more artistic works more than 50 all told (these, BTW, are maxiumums, not minimums in my thinking), which happens to be far less than is mandated by the Berne convention, which surely makes reform more difficult.
Oh, and as is already being challenged in the courts, I'd like to remove the 'automatically copyrighted' bit, so that you have to actually indicate somehow that it is or is supposed to be copyrighted. Though these are "formalities" under the Berne convention, I think they have more value to the public than is realized.
It's funny, though, how people complain. If you think about it, yes, you might lose some things which were exclusively yours, but so many forget all those other things they *gain* which they couldn't legally have otherwise...
Oh well. Hopefully people will wake up before too many years of having to put up with DRM "solutions" from a Mickey Mouse operation, once they realize that "sharing without actually sharing" as DRM tries to do is a contradiction in terms...
It really isn't that difficult to determine Disney's businesses. A quick look at their annual report under Key Businesses will given you a workable list if you are interesting in boycotting.
For movies, you have: Walt Disney Studios, Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone, Walt Disney Feature Animation, DisneyToon Studios, Miramax and the various Buena Vista studios. You can then check in Rotten Tomatoes when you are looking up the critic reviews you can also take a look at the Release Company to see if it is one of the names above. Example: The Village
As you get into other businesses, it gets more difficult. They include: ABC, Lifetime, A&E, ESPN, and local TV stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco - among others. However, Disney is just one of the big five - so that gives you four other media companies to choose from - specifically, Time Warner, Viacom, News Corporation and Bertelsmann.
Frankly, I don't think the other four would disagree with Disney on this point.
Which unfortunately means that they can do all sorts of otherwise unacceptable things simply by invoking the fact that it's "for the national good". The folks working for the government bureacracies in the Stalinist USSR certainly seemed to be doing a lot of "good" for the country. I realize that the US is not like that (yet). My point is that what the bureacracy is "ostensibly" for often has little bearing on what it actually does.
Governments also have to follow stricter laws that serve to at least slightly protect citizens
[snort] Governments set those "stricter" laws. And they can discard them if they choose - see the PATRIOT Act for a fine example of that in action.
I'm not saying that corporations are less likely to perpetrate evil than governments. I'm just saying that governments aren't necessarily any better than corporations.
You must not be from California. We have a very powerful, very self-interested public prison guard union here that has successfully pressed the government into giving them significant raises, despite the fact that the already have the highest pay in the nation by far, the state is in an ongoing fiscal crisis, teetering on bankruptcy. And they are also, as has been hinted at by others about privat firms, pressing for laws that will put more people in prison for longer (three strikes law).
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
...is that Disney was one of the VERY FIRST to LITERALLY circumvent copyright law in order to keep their Mickey Mouse in their possession for longer than the law says they can. This is what REAL copyright circumvention is. The perfect example of why the rules don't apply to the gigantic conglomerates, but the rest of us can all go to Hell.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
They are wasting their own time and money. Why do they bother coming up with these hairbrained anti-piracy schemes when within the space of 3 days, some spotty teen who lives in a basement is able to break it and spread the hack far and wide? They are better off making good content than trying to protect the usual pap they are trying to sell.
RebateFX.com - Spread rebates for Forex traders
Besides, AFAIK the biggest problem in US prisons is not the infrastructure, it's the constant prison rapes.
Actully, the biggest problem in US prison is the inmates that didn't commit real crimes.