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European DRM News

Posted by michael on from the restricted-music-disk dept.

burgburgburg writes "Two new fronts opening in the battles over digital rights management. First: news.com is reporting how French authorities are investigating EMI France and music retailer Fnac over anticopying technology included on CDs that allegedly renders them unplayable on some systems. The investigation began after the Bureau of Competition's antifraud unit (DDCCRF) received complaints from a consumer group known as UFC-Que Choisir. Second: BusinessWeek reports that the EC is investigating Microsoft to make sure that they don't illegally dominate the field of digital rights management. Regulators have told Microsoft and its partner Time Warner that they are looking into their plan to acquire the company ContentGuard, which makes DRM software because of concerns that it will create or strengthen Microsoft dominance of the field."

22 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Well.... by thewldisntenuff · · Score: 4, Insightful


    Article 2 is interesting....Here's a quote -

    "Regulators put Microsoft and partner Time Warner on notice that it intends to investigate their plans to jointly acquire Bethesda (Md.)-based ContentGuard, which makes digital-rights-management (DRM) software to prevent music and movie piracy.

    Call me crazy, but wouldn't each content company want their own DRM software? I mean, if you've got one lock, and a whole hell of a lot of people trying to open it, once it is open, you're screwed. Furthermore, content companies wouldn't want to pay a MS tax on each piece of content that is protected with MS-DRM. They'd be better off with their own DRM scheme......A monopoly in the DRM arena seems stupid at best - but am I wrong?

    -thewldisntenuff

    --
    My MythTV HowTo
    1. Re:Well.... by Gooba42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Keep in mind that with DMCA-like legislation in place it's illegal to even tamper with the lock, not to mention if you break open the lock *and* steal the goodies inside.

      Just fidgeting with the DRM stuff is a crime even if you're just curious and even if you're not successful.

      --
      I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
    2. Re:Well.... by SpecBear · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The "one lock" method has been used repeatedly by the content industry. Think Macrovision and CSS. It has the disadvantage you stated (crack one, crack 'em all) but has the advantage of providing consistency and influence over people who make content players.

      If there are six big content providers each with their own system, and one of their DRM systems screws up on one the players, the manufacturer of the player will say "The DRM is screwy and we don't support it. Bitch at the content provider." If there are six big providers who all use the same system, and it doesn't work on one player, then the player is broken and it will be "fixed" to work with the DRM.

      Remember, DRM isn't about stopping piracy. It's about controlling how the everyday user consumes content and allowing the content providers to build a revenue structure as they see fit without having to worry about users circumventing it through things like (time|space|format) shifting.

  2. Its just a fund rasier by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They will threaten to investigate, and the companies will pony up with protection money.. then all will be back to normal in the pursuit in the reduction of the citizens freedoms..

    Its the way of the government...

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  3. DRM by danknight · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If they ever perfect DRM people will just make an analog copy and take the one time (small) quality hit. I'm not even going to talk about bit-for-bit copys that the real pirates use. It's really just a way to lock in the consumer.

    --
    wanted: one clever sig,apply within
    1. Re:DRM by ahsile · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm not sure it ever will be perfected. As quick as the publishers put copy-protection on, people are breaking through it. And, there are a lot more of us out there trying to break the lock, then are trying to keep it closed.

      --


      Find Nearby Indie Events
    2. Re:DRM by Audacious · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ok, so let me get this straight:

      1. If I ever have a power failure in my house or the battery dies in the computer the encryption key will explode. So I sue Intel over this in a class action suit and they have to fix everyone's cpu chip. Massive recalls, etc.... I can't see Intel doing that.

      1a. Besides which - you can buy CPU chips by themselves and they don't have any power being applied to them. You think Intel would develop something that you can only plug in once? Not likely. Man! Would Tom's Hardware have a fit!

      2. If I install a watchdog on my computer, install a program which has this technology on it and it shows me how to access the information on the chip my CPU will somehow know and blow itself up. I don't think so. You give too much credit to the PR guys. Either the information can be accessed or it can't. If it can't - then no one else can either. Which makes this technology moot. Use common sense and logic. It is either:

      A. You can access this information (albeit in a specific manner).

      B. Or you can not access this information.

      A program which watches what another program does (Anti-Virus Software anyone?) interrupts whatever the other program is doing to check it. A watchdog program is just doing the same thing. It intercepts whatever the other program is going to do BEFORE it does it, checks it out, and can send that information to a file or the screen. Thus, BEFORE any request goes to the CPU for whatever reason, those commands are intercepted and stored so someone could hack (fairly easily) the command used to access the key information. Once you can do that - the key becomes meaningless because you can then forge the key (captured on output from the CPU by the same program) and make a new disk with this.

      Further, what a lot of hackers used to do (and probably still do) is just to find the JSR to the function which does the check and negate it by either putting in their own routine at the end of the program and JSR'ing to it so it can return the key or just NOP'ing it so it is never called. If the function is supposed to return TRUE or FALSE depending upon whether or not the key passed verification, then you just JSR to a function which pushes a TRUE value onto the stack and return.

      JSR myFunction
      .
      .
      .
      myFunction:
      lda a1,1;
      push;
      return;

      What's so hard about that? Then you just load the program in, disassemble it, and do a global replace on that JSR CheckKey function.

      After all, why try to disable something when you can just go around it? This is a lot like those dongle things. The people who sold the dongles would also include a set of functions which would check the dongle and the dongle would send back the "special" id. (Sound familiar?) The problem is the same with this Trusted Computing PR BS. Remember that rule #1 says:

      "You have to start somewhere."

      It is no different with them. Somewhere, somehow, you have to be able to access the key. You find that and the rest is as easy as eating a donut.

      --
      Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke. :-)
  4. Re:If people would just stop stealing... by Dutchmaan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...and if corporations would sell things for their real value people wouldn't feel compelled to steal because we would have pretty much everything we could ever want...

  5. I agree with Phillips... by Glock27 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Any CD that's copy protected shouldn't be called a CD. Simple enough...

    --
    Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
    Score: -1 100% Flamebait
  6. If we chose not to buy it.... by Anonymous+Luddite · · Score: 5, Insightful

    this wouldn't be around for very long. I doubt that's how it will work out, though. :-(

    ..."Contraband" by Velvet Revolver, a band newly formed by ex-members of Guns N' Roses and the former frontman of the Stone Temple Pilots, became a best seller in June despite heavy copy protection and a warning on the packaging.

    (above excerpt from the USA today article.)

    --
    http://request-header.info
  7. Re:Kudos to Europe by gmanic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And that's what I like about the "old world" and I'm glad to be back here - even if some other things go terribly wrong - still better than fully-openly-industry-funded-government

    Although, might not be that much better...

  8. We need balance back in the system by speedfreak_5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How about this?

    Set the copyright system back to the default 14+14 years. If the record companies decide to use DRM on their stuff, make it illegal for them to apply for the 2nd 14 years. That way people can make backups of their stuff unhindered by sh*tty copy protection, and they get to make a little more money.

    -=OR=-

    Let them keep their Life+70 terms and DRM. In turn file sharing must be legalized and royalty-free sampling and public performance made legal for everyone who buys a CD.

    --
    Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
  9. Re:Kudos to Europe by Ignignot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you think that European governments are any less influenced by corporations than the American government you are mistaken. They're just funded by different corporations. Also, Europe's monopoly laws are slightly different, so you will have companies prosecuted in the United States that are doing perfectly legal things in Europe, and vice verca. This doesn't mean that one is less influenced by industries. It just means that they're different environments for companies.

    --
    I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
  10. People will buy anyways by lothar97 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    We've seen over the years that people will pay for any kind of crap, from pet rocks, to "Catwoman" movie, to the next manufactured boy band. If it's the "cool thing," people will jump over cliffs like lemmings to obtain it.

    It would need to be a massively coordinated effort to get a huge band's copy protected CD boycotted. You'd need mass targeted media, such as MTV or P. Diddy, to lead the charge. I figured it would be bad for them to lead the fight, and I doubt most people would care.

    --

  11. Re:If people would just stop stealing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Your ethics of convenience stems from a world view built upon a foundation of sinking sand. What exactly is this "real" value you suggest? Whatever you decide is "fair," right? What makes you think that your idea of fair is better than someone else's idea of fair? Quit rationalizing theft and just accept the fact that in a free-market system the price of something is set by the level of demand for that thing.

  12. Re:Kudos to Europe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    but on this side of the ocean (in the USA er UCA) we find a monopoly doing illegel things, we just let them off the hook.

    has any corp in europe been found to be a monopoly and then let off the hook?

    welcome to the United Corperations of America, did you get the memo, and have you been a productive worker today?

  13. Re:Analog copying by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Never going to happen, for two reasons:

    1. We will never see audiophiles agreeing to replace their multi-thousand dollar speakers.
    2. There's no such thing as a digital speaker. They are, by their very nature, an analog device. An analog waveform causes the cone to move. Therefore, at the point where the signal enters the speaker's voice coil, it must, by necessity, be an analog signal. It takes a dollar's worth of hardware to adapt an 8 ohm impedance speaker signal into a line level input.
    If you can change the laws of physics to make a digital speaker possible, you -still- haven't solved the problem. Buy a good microphone, put it in front of a good (hypothetical) digital speaker. Record. What? You've made microphones illegal somehow? Well, I guess the recording industry won't be making any more recordings, either....

    The only way it would be possible to remove the analog hole would be to remove the human being from the mix---hardwire it into your brain somehow. I know I won't be the first to sign up if they try that.... Maybe it's just me....

    (Mutters something about always mounting a scratch monkey.)

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  14. Re:Kudos to Europe by Blue+Stone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Stand up to industry bigwigs?

    In case you've forgotten, we have the EUCD over here just as you have the DMCA overe there - the effective privatisation of copyright law (Corps now write their own rules - trying to circumvent those rules brings in the law).

    Our governments are just as 0wnz0red by media corporations as America's, I'm afraid.

    --
    Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
  15. Re:If people would just stop stealing... by Dutchmaan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Quit rationalizing theft and just accept the fact that in a free-market system the price of something is set by the level of demand for that thing.

    I think that was in relation to supply if I'm not mistaken...

    What is the fair value when the supply is for all practical purpose instantaneous and infintely repeatable?

  16. Re:If people would just stop stealing... by Wile_E_Peyote · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think that was in relation to supply if I'm not mistaken... What is the fair value when the supply is for all practical purpose instantaneous and infintely repeatable?

    Only problem with that is...people still need to get paid. What you pay for a CD or Movie, doesn't just go to the artists. There are millions of workers living off of the money. Studio techs, salesmen, marketers(shudder), attorneys, IT workers, secretaries/clerks, warehouse workers, PHBs, etc... etc... etc...

    If a company decides to sell something for a low price or starts losing tons of money to piracy, that lost revenue needs to be made up somewhere. It's not going to be the president of the company or the artist taking the paycut or losing their job. It's going to be Joe and his buddies, who drive forklifts and barely make enough to stay above the poverty line.

    W.E.P.
  17. Not quite true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    While I agree in theory theat Sony would love to do as you describe, this sentence is simply impossible:

    analog speakers and mics will start to disappear from the market

    There is no such thing as a "digital speaker" to be in opposition to an analog speaker. There are digital-grade speakers, which are constructed and optimized to play the frequency range of a CD, but they are no more digital than the speaker in your 1930's vintage RCA Victor. There are PCM-based speakers, but their utter output is still the same: air vibrates. Speakers are, and ever will be, an electromagnet attached to a material cone. Changes in the current loop of the magnet vibrate the cone and viola: sound! There's simply no other known way to produce sound mechanically from electricity.

    Want to capture the sound? A 2 dollar inductor around the electromagnet will do the trick. Amplify, convert, record.

    Then again, in 20 years people won't know how to build an amplifier. So I guess the media companies will become safer as time wears on.

  18. The reason for DRM in Europe by El+Cabri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Copy-protected audio CDs are much more present in Europe mostly because it is made of small, insulated markets where people are culturally much less litigious, and where the legal system often does not offer the possibility of class-action lawsuits.

    Imagine launching a copy-protected CD on the US market and ending up with a 1 or 2 million people demanding damages.

    This just shows how judicially insecure media companies feel on that subject.