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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.
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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.
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.
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 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
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