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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."
Could this possibly tie in with their crappy newly-released PCs? I'd love to get one of those and tear it apart to see what DRM they've put in.
Mickey with a shotgun saying something about a "motherfucking IP infringer" comes to mind...
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
That being said, I'm not surprised that it's Disney who made the official proposal. I give it 10 years before DRM violation arrests are second behind drug possession arrests. Buy prison stock now.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Tape recorders are a nono? How about wax cylinders? Punch cards?
Very, very vague.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Because, as we all know, once something falls into the public domain, no one will want to keep it around anymore and it will forever be lost.
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 ----
If you don't think that disney can get the government to change something so important, google around for "Mickey Mouse copyright act"
Then we won't be able to listen to Disney music?
Bring it on!
As highly as it would like to think its own influence is, I don't think Disney is capable of forcing the entire tech sector to follow their restrictive standards. I've personally written some of my own content to DVD; would I be mandated to include DRM because of Disney's bought-and-paid-for laws? Worse yet, I bet there would be either an explicit or hidden licensing cost to Disney or whoever for the DRM technology. Whatever happened to free speech? If I want to put something of my own creation, isn't that protected free speech? What can Disney possibly have to do with me, my content, my DVD burner, and the friends I give my content to?
And one more thing. DRM is a joke. With the state of current DRM anyone can crack DRM by downloading a simple program such as DVD Decrypter. You don't have to know anything at all about encryption. Assuming DRM gets better in the future, which is debatable, it may be harder for the individual to crack the protection, but there will always be the hardcore hackers who hack the video and upload it to a P2P network for all to share. Assuming DRM gets so restrictive that it cannot be cracked, what can you possibly do to stop people from pointing video cameras at a monitor or TV screen in their own home?
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
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 believe the fact that we are able to rewatch recorded programs is a happy coincidence of the fact that DRM or self-destructing media have not been practical schemes to date. I suspect our legislators and courts would at least entertain the concept that if it's broadcast once you can timeshift it and consume it only once, as you're effectively getting the same service as you'd get by viewing it during broadcast (with the added feature of skipping commercials).
Disney's trying to get a bigger slice of the pie, of course, but there's nothing inherently wrong with what they're trying to do. If you have a problem I suggest contacting your representatives and electronics/software manufacturers.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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.
"You know what annoys me? Mickey Mouse's birthday being announced on the television news, as if it's an actual event. I don't give a shit. If I cared about Mickey Mouse's birthday I'd have memorized it years ago. And I'd send him a card: "Dear Mickey, Happy Birtdhay, Love George." I don't do that. Why? I don't give a shit. Fuck Mickey Mouse! Fuck him in the asshole with a big rubber dick. Then break it off and beat him with the rest of it. I hope Mickey dies! I do, I hope he Goddamn dies. I hope he gets hold of some tainted cheese and dies lonely and forgotten behind the baseboard of a soiled bathroom in a poor neighborhood, with his hand in Goofy's pants. Mickey Mouse. No wonder no one in the world takes our country seriously. We waste valuable television time informing our citizens of the age of an imaginary rodent!" -George Carlin
Well, yes, but remember that copyright applies to anything that is created/creative; and the creator may license the creation as he or she sees fit. DRM had better respect that. As for me, I shall try and persuade my children to license anything they create (until they turn professional) under an open licence such as Creative Commons. I'm sure they will prefer the potential exposure their work will receive. Give it a few years, and the Disneys of this world will be snowed under by people whose work is equally good because of this newfound ability to share.
I applaud this move. The sooner all this nonsense becomes unbearable, the sooner (educated) consumers will tell the media companies to take their DRM and shove it.
I believe when I say, "Fuck That", I speak for all of us.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
From Lessig's book Free Culture:
"Indeed, the catalog of Disney work drawing upon the work of others is astonishing when set together: Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), /Song of the South (1946), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), /Robin Hood (1952), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Mulan (1998), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), and The Jungle Book (1967)--not to mention a recent example that we should perhaps quickly forget, Treasure Planet (2003). In all of these cases, Disney (or Disney, Inc.) ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his culture. Rip, mix, and burn."
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
I think copywrite has a place and protection of art has a place also, but at some time the business model just has to change. Once the medium has become so ubiquitous it seems it is going to be hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It is SO easy for distribution of music, video, etc., and any attempt to shut that down will either: be too hard; be too confusing for the mass market consumer; or some mix.
Part of the ability for the artists, the people who create the artists, and the people who owned the artists, to own the marketplace relied heavily on the ability to control the media. With the explosion of media options, control is barely doable, and if doable is going to be way unreasonable.
So, the shift in the business model will be a sea change (a sea++ change?). And while the grubby money mungers at the top have always been able to be filthy rich with their controls and sleezy contracts now they will have to settle for less control, more flexible contracts with artists, and ultimately less wealth. They'll be dragged kicking and screaming, but eventually that's where I see the marketplace going.
(case in point: Grateful Dead completely bypassing the record industry, and basically cutting CD's live and in person at their concerts.... and encouraging fans to make copies....)
All these posts saying "If it can be heard, it can be copied" and the ilk are missing the point. The publishing industry's agenda for perpetuating their needless existance is something like:
It's not going to matter if it can be copied-- simply the act of having the capability to copy will be illegal. If you don't have all DRM-compliant devices, or if you tamper with your DRM-compliant devices, you'll be charged and trucked off to prison.
We need a revolution in "intellectual propery", and we need it quickly. Too many people already fail to understand that the system is a social contract, and the terms of that contract are negotiable by the people-- not dictated by the corporations.
It is no stretch to think that, if they could get it, the DRM helmet is their ultimate goal.
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
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
I don't think Piracy is the real concern here. It's all these irritating people who are avoiding the goal of the media oligarchs to control *all* media, all content, all music.
Once only the RIAA can manufacture music that can be played they can finally crush all those troublesome musicians, artists, actors and film directors because there will be nowhere else to go, there will be no alternative music available in the USA.
It is the same play that was made by threatening CD manufacturers with lawsuits for aiding and abetting that was used to make it harder for small businesses to get CD music manufactured, and which backfired only because the CD writer became cheap.
The media companies wish the printing press to be a monopoly granted by government (to them of course). It worked in the USSR why shouldn't it work in the USSA
No. A key element in capitalism is the free-market. Government regulation, such as mandating DRM in all devices, is counter to that element. The word you are looking for is "corporatism," the other side to socialism's coin.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
Then Disney wouldn't have been able to steal also many movie plots from Rudyard Kipling and the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson.
Infuriate left and right
The only thing magic about Disney these days is their almost bottomless capacity for greed. Their products are unimaginative, formulaic and their theme parks are little better than entertainment sweat shops. Disney lawyers suing day care centers for having the audacity to paint one of their characters on a wall, DRM, the Bono Act. The list gets rather lengthy.
A greedy, ugly, disgusting company.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Back in the Soviet Union, they had extreme security for anything that could be used for duplication of information, lest it be used for spreading subversive information. Now Disney wants the same thing, except that the claimed reason is different. The ability to quickly and easily spread information as far and wide as possible is what has allowed our society to get as far as it has. Now they want DRM technologies so that information flow would be restricted. This is about as far from progress as a proposed law can get
I must have the director's cuts of some of those Disney movies, because I just got through watching The Jungle Book and there wasn't a stitch of clothing on that oh-so-friendly bear. Also, in Dumbo they try to draw your attention away from it but if you freezeframe it you see that the mouse doesn't have pants on, just a shirt...
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.