Slashdot Mirror
SVP : More Video Anti-Copying Technology
rkroetch writes "NDS, STMicroelectronics and Thomson have announced they will develop a new anti-piracy technology called SVP (Secure Video Processor). This will require a special SVP processor in the box to play the encrypted video signal. All those licensing fees for our DVD-ROMs for nothing?"
Why they always have to call it piracy. Why not something like, "Copyright Control Device/Software".
Oh well, I suppose I do understand why. I just don't like it.
tv out anyone?
fuckin' bastards....
i'll be sure to avoid anything that has this in it until it's easily bypassed.
of course, given past techniques, that shouldn't be too damn long...
someone's probably already hatching a plan..
...but people don't believe me when I say that we currently have the technology to create a total lockdown of digital content.
Sure, the analog hole is still there, but we don't want to be limited by that, do we?
Stop the world; I need to get off.
Satisfies and exploits the proven consumer demand for high value content that is accessible and distributable over a variety of media
Thanks, but no thanks. I don't buy from people who exploit me.
Yet another waste of resources that could of gone in to making the technology better.
It's was never designed to do that...
How long is it going to take for some malaysian company to make a PCI card with the required chip on it?
From the article...
NDS, 78 percent owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, has developed the anti-piracy software component for SVP. Beginning next year, Thomson will embed SVP-enabled chips developed by STMicro into its video playback devices and set-top boxes.
American satellite TV operator DIRECTV, a News Corp affiliate, is the first to use the new technology, the companies said.
Now, let's think about this for a second. Even though DirecTV has about millions units in circulation now, the actual decryption part of the operation is done in the form of a single smart card that is very easy to swap out. Therefore, DirecTV doesn't have to make everybody get new boxes to apply this tech, they just have to send out new cards.
I am curious as to how they will manage encryption with this, and if it will be yet another encryption through obfuscation.
It seems the smartest approach is to publish and patent the encryption scheme, but make it so time consuming, that you will need hardware to do the decryption properly. That way any one who tries to get around the protection scheme and not pay royalties will be easily sueable.
The upside for non-mainstream OS users, is that it will most likely mean non-OS dependent solutions (maybe).
Of course programmable logic chips could potentially be a threat, but not a major one, as most people don't have that type of hardware.
" A rise in piracy has accompanied the explosion of digital video players. Crafty programmers have discovered ways to crack into DVD players, for example, to make copies of Hollywood movies quickly and cheaply." Yup, and this will be cracked too. It's a game of cat and mouse. Remember how DVD's were supposed to be iron proof? And they certainly haven't locked down CD's. Create whatever technology you want but in the end, unless we change the greater system of licensing media, none of this will matter and piracy will continue.
What licensing fees? We didn't license anything. We bought copies of copyrighted works. Those copies are our property.
At this point the general befief is that pirates of legend merely sought to share homes, villages and governors' daughters.
That's because people who are technologically adept and who have sufficient resources are quite rare. Only someone who can hack the hardware would be able to grab the original digital content from a properly-designed black box.
I suspect that hardware like this will, in time (if not immediately), be used to enforce pay-per-view or something like that for permanent media. From the info page:
Yep, sounds like pay-per-view to me.
It really is only a matter of time before everything that's available falls under the control of something like this...
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
The new technology is fine with me. As long as its presence is clearly marked on the DVD box, so that I don't accidentally purchase such a protected DVD.
When we finally do get those implanted Nikon eyeballs, they'll probably come with anti-piracy chips. (The country-code would be a bitch on business trips.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Yet another waste of resources that could of gone in to making the technology better
Don't forget the roughly equal amount of effort that will go into cracking it.
AKA the analog hole..
What is your penile percentile?
....that the only difference between this processor, and the old style processor, is that they put "secure" in the name...
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
Both the summary here, and the article, call it anti-piracy technology.
In "ye olden days" pirates were people who would go to great lengths, working against heavily armed opponents and risking incarceration or worse in order to obtain something that, nine times out of ten, wasn't worth having in the first place.
Thus their ledgendary rum consumption.
Now-a-days it's closer to ninety-nine times out of a hundred, but the principle is the same.
-- MarkusQ
i won't buy anything like that. i doubt you will see anything new with drm for tv outside of the next 10 years. nothing is going to replace the dvd players. it would take some device that can play with even better resolution like the dvd did with repsect to vhs. the only reason people purchased dvd players is because they are very cheap, and the resolution is considerably better than vhs. for a new device to take off, they will have to make it cheap and so much better. i doubt that anything which is superior to dvd will come out at a cheap enough price that people will buy it in large enough quantities to make a differance. plus, if there is any company that could dominate such a protocol, it would be microsoft. unless they get involved, any other company will not be able to get widespread enough approval from the industry.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Sure, they can have make the media unplayable without the chip, but:
If you can see and hear it, you can copy it.
If you can make a raw copy of the media, you can pirate it without loss of quality, even if you can only play the copies in an SVP device.
This sort of technology has no use in preventing piracy, only in making money and killing competition. Manufacturers must license the "technology" or else they can't make devices that will play the latest media. Consumers must purchase new DVD players to replace their perfectly functioning old players (most won't, you can bet). There will be no interoperability with other devices. And PC users will simply be out of luck, unless they decide to license it for software use to companies like Microsoft, which will completely defeat the cryptographic advantages of embedding the DRM in hardware and make it as useless as DSS.
if only people could protect their private data from corporate databases, like banks selling customer information to marketing firms or third parties. too bad nobody wants to protect people the way the movie industry wants to protect their content. :(
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
With Moore's Law still in effect and multi-core processors coming, what requires dedicated hardware today may easily become software doable in three years. Which would be about the time it hits mainstream, given that the public buys into it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
But as long as only one isn't deterred
Of course. It's absurdly stupid of media companies to think they can actually contain piracy. After all, there only needs to be one determined person to make a copy and release it. Their only real success, generally speaking, is to make legitimately purchased media more encumbered and piracy more appealing.
On the other hand, look at it from a different perspective. If this stops non-perseverent people copying movies for their friends, in the eyes of the entertainment industry, isn't it worth it? That's the sort of success media companies expect inconvenience to bring.
Obviously, it's a terribly arrogant business model: very much like the Democrats after 2000 blaming Nader - that people's votes didn't need to be earned by the Democrats, that the left were merely obligated to spend them on Gore if other options were removed. Rather than giving anyone any real reason to actually buy movies, the entertainment industry scapegoat piracy and do nothing to actually woo buyers back. Voters, buyers; piracy, Nader. Very apt, actually.
I'm one to say "suck it up" when terms change, like with hacker becomming a bad term. However this is one I say the media industry should get nailed for. Why? Because piracy is still very, very real. In North America and Western Europe we tend to forget about it since we have powerful navies/coast guards that keep our waters essentially free of it.
Well that's not the case in much of the world. There are still real pirates that really do raid ships, rape, kill and steal. We also aren't talking like once every 10 years or something, we are talking about a reasonably common occurace in relation to other violent crime.
Thus I think it is quite stupid, and unfair to those that suffer from real piracy, to equate digitally copying a song to violence on the high seas. When real piracy is dead and gone, then maybe I'll accept the transformation of the term.
Think of how low they could cut the costs of production and distribution which would allow them to sell their products at a lower price, which would make them more attractive to the groups most likely to pirate their goods. I guess I just don't understand why the MPAA's members would rather sit around and piss and moan about piracy instead of trying to defeat it. It's not like it's impossible to make a good deal of extra money off of it.
Personally, I blame the fascist culture of "right to profit" that has developed. If I build a house that looks identical to yours, have I stolen your house? Do you have a right to tell me to pay you a royalty on the sale of my house? How about the original developer, does he/she?
If corporations affected by technology would invest their money into researching the new technology and finding ways to update their business model, they'd do well for themselves. But that would require effort and a pretense of competition. It's easier to make the small companies earn their place in the market than make the big ones justify their size and reach.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
With the advent of cheap memory, cheap drives, cheap screens and nifty cool players, WHY is hollywood still stuck in 1989?
.. I paid for it, it's MINE to do as I please .. are they going to give me my money back when I want to de-license it? No? Piss on them) could be on a little teeny little drive that isn't going to fail because the "shiny disc looked pretty" as a mirror.
Why do we have to have obsolete 8 gig plastic discs, when our movies (I dont give a shit what they say about you're only licensing it
Piss off, Hollywood - I paid you my ransom money now leave me the hell alone.
Oh yeah, and for that BS copy protection? As long as my eyes see it I'll find a way to get past your POS scheme.
= Grow a brain...
nor free as in Free Software. There never can be any of those as long as the DMCA is on the books.
All the world is not the USA, at least not yet. It may be illegal in the land of the free, but there are still plenty of other countries where it is legal and can even be Free.
But what does this have to do with anyone paying a license fee for a DVD-ROM?
You bet your bippy we do, look up "3c licensing" and "6c licensing" -- the fees are surprisingly high. Even for DVD-ROM rather than DVD-Video equipment.
We don't pay that either, at least not directly.
If anything, that makes the fees even higher since each middle-man between you and the manufacturer tacks on a percentage. The higher the base price, the larger the absolute value each middleman adds to the price.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
All those licensing fees for our DVD-ROMs for nothing
Simple solution - stop consuming the 'property' of these robber barrons.
Its not like this is food, shelter or clothing.
Come on...I can stop complaining because this week I got a satnd-alone DVD player, and when I went to watch a _legal_ movie on it, because it was connected to an old TV-set, and the only way to do that is to have a VCR to modulate the signal, Macrovision Protection(tm) kicked in, and I could not enjoy the movie at all.
We are _already_ slaves to the Media companies. Perceive that none of this crap will stop some "Pirate Cappo" who cashes in 100.000 East Asia Bootleg Disks a week - this guy can pay people to bypass wahtever protetcion they put in it.
It just stop us - ordinary people - from making perfectly legal things, like quote some seconds of a video to a lecture, or whatever.
-><- no
Back in the 80's, a lot of people were hyping copy-protection schemes for software. It was basically snake-oil; none of it did any good, and any software which used it soon died because copy-protection doesn't help the consumer.
Now, here in the 00's, we have the reincarnated version of this. The ONLY people who care about it are the Media conglomerates. Again, not the consumers.
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
So, my big question is this. Does anybody have any actual numbers on how much money has been dumped into these snake-oil schemes?
A fool and his money are indeed soon parted. It really beats me why spends their time developing this stuff, let alone funding it. Clearly it is self-delusion.
Okay, how about this time we wait until AFTER they start using the algorithm before we tell them it's been hacked. I'm looking at you Edward Felton. ;-)
Well, so now we have to pay for a new "license" to possess a device that can playback other "licensed" media we bought from the store. For all the licensing, we still need to pay for the license in this damned player to play something we rightfully own.
Is it just me? Or is everyone starting to get sick from the word "license"?
So what are we getting here, is a "license" something that I can eat? Or is it something I can use to wipe my ass like toilet paper? Or can a "license" protect me from the elements?
None! It is really just a pay-and-pay world nowadays. We have to bear all these extra costs just to be able to spend money and view their products?
I'd say all consumers should unite and show them what consumerism is all about by giving them such a big backlash they will never get to forget it.
Screw it, it is not like the stuff they make are so worth it anyway. I can't stand the (RIA|MPA|BS)A making such a big fuss over their pathetic ingenuity and creativity.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
What if this technology would allow us, at the press of a button, to browse the entire Blockbuster catalog (or, since this is Slashdot, everything from Vivid Videos) and rent the movie for 3 nights on our PVR for $2.99?
What if a studio releases films under this sort of pay-per-view scheme several months before selling copies in DVD Video format? Or what if a studio decides never to sell copies of one of its films to the public? And what if the studio later decides to pull one of those films from the PPV market, either for some sort of "Disney Vault" business model or for political purposes?
Erm, how about: Okay, how about: "I don't buy from people who try to squeeze out every last bit of comsumer surplus..."
Hehe, sorry about that, but I'm sure none of us mind minimizing the producers surplus. Refresher:
- Producers Surplus - The area above the supply curve, but below the price
[RANT]What makes the whole discussion stupid IMHO is that we're all this anti-'piracy' crap is by definition not talking about internal market features. Attacking 'fair use' on the other hand is, if anything, going to lower the demand curve- we are talking about reducing the marginal utility of the widgets here.
If you were not willing to purchase the product at the 'market clearing price,' then the producers are not losing revenue.
People downloading free copies of various titles does not directly affect the relevant portion of the demand curve**! Nor does it cause translation along the demand curve! Think of it as 2-tier price discrimination, where a subset of the people who exist to the left/below the market get it at marginal cost :) Crap, that means some consumer surplus. I highly doubt there is a significant cross-elasticity of demand between .torrent's and movie tickets/DVD sales.
Bootlegging is an entirely seperate discussion. IANAL, but isn't there already a body of legislation that addresses that?
** The market externalities involved can in fact shift the demand curve. The marketing exposure can be priceless (bandwagon effects, knowing the product exists, being familiar with a product/brand, etc.), however it also has the [perhaps all too oft] effect of lowering the percieved utility of a product to it's actual value... If you know how much that InternetPrivateDick software [or the-other-12 tracks-on-the-cd, CuteNFuzzy-Jedi-Episode-2 1/2, etc...] suck, you're less likely to pay as much for it ;)
Naturally, anything that causes consumers to act more rationally or with more complete information might make Economics more workable, much to the distress of all those other social sciences... And likely most politicians...
And I won't even mention the fact that most restrictions that insulate producers from the market are bad for both society AND the producers, nor that these markets are already far from perfectly competative... Ok, I guess I did mention them...
[/RANT]What?! We can do that?! Well where's my governor's daughter!?!
Oh, I mean.... Shiver me timbers! Whar' be thar scurvy landlubber who's fair lass I may be hav'n ta tup? YARR!!
*Ahem* Now if you'll excuse me, my download is just about finished here... time to watch a movie! Now where I put me dish o' popper-corn and mug o' ale? Yarr!
Crafty programmers have discovered ways to crack into DVD players, for example, to make copies of Hollywood movies quickly and cheaply.
You can crack a DVD player to burn discs? That's gotta be one of the sweeter hacks I've heard about. Or maybe by 'crack' the reporter means 'buy professional DVD duplicating equipment'.
It's almost a peaceful feeling to watch the heat death of one's society.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
If I contracted with an architect for an original design, and the rights to the design, then, damn right I would be demanding royalties on production and sale of a copy. If I were really pissed off I might sue for demolition.
Great! The more incompatible "standards" there are, the less likely this stuff will catch on.
"the entertainment industry scapegoat piracy and do nothing to actually woo buyers back"
I read somewhere recently that if you were to take away the massive box office sales made by Mel Gibsons very un-hollywoodish "Jesus Chainsaw Massacre" then box office sales overall would be down by 10%.
I doubt very much that box office sales are affected by DVD piracy, so the natural conclusion is that Hollywood are simply making crappier movies now than they have ever made before.
Movie making for dummies^h^h^h^h^h^hHollywood Executives;
1) Identify an as yet unrehashed TV show or movie from the 60's 70's or 80's.
2) Cast some generic stars for the lead roles and pay them huge amounts of money.
3) Obtain the cheapest, crappiest script possible.
4) Blow vast amounts of money producing an over-hyped piece of crap that has little or no resemblance to the original and absolutely none of its charm.
5) Complain that the internet is to blame when it tanks at the box office
6) Move onto next project, return to 1)
I can't wait for the big screen edition of The A-Team, starring Richard Dean Anderson as "Hannibal", Ashton Kutcher as "Murdoch", Owen Wilson as "Face", and special guest star Iron Mike Tyson as "Mr T"
Oh god, it hurts already
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
You're focusing on points in his post that are rather minor. The main thrust of what he said is rather insightful (and I would mod it as such, if I had modpoints) -- simply, that in today's "Information Age", corporations can't fuck the consumer and assume that there's nothing he's going to be able to do about it, simply because he (in all likelyhood) isn't technologically adept enough to fix it.
For example, in the old days, copying from one tape to another was restricted and there were silly copy protection schemes for VHS, which were trivial to circumvent if you knew what you were doing. In this case, the "good enough" mantra was key: the corps knew that only 1% of the population "knew what they were doing", but 99% of their consumer base would be powerless to circumvent the system.
But in today's world, the technically adept %1 can distribute their rips, information on how to rip, etc, etc, to the average consumer.
Stuff like the broadcast flag, DRM, etc, these things annoy the hell out of even the non-technically adept. Whereas before they would grin and bear it, now they look up how to get around it on the web (where people like us post easy, step by step instructions), or they go to Kazaa or Grokster or whatever, and download a copy the technically adept have conveniently made for them.
The world isn't the same as it used to be. Security through obscurity is not even remotely "good enough", even in the short term, anymore. Because we live in a world of distributed information. And the average joe who may not have the skills to hack hardware will obtain what he wants from those that can. For free.
This is of course the real reason they are so up in arms about P2P, etc.: not that stuff they control is being distributed "by word of mouth" but that stuff they don't control will be. If a band can make it without ever signing with a label, if an independent film can reach the audience without a distributor, a lot of middle-meddlers are going to be very, very unemployed.
-- MarkusQ
This, despite protestations to the contrary, is NOT a new usage. The OED gives usage examples of piracy / pirate in the context of written works going back to the 17th century, with indications that usage existed even earlier.
:-p
Piracy as applied to radio goes back to at least 1913.
This is one term you CAN'T blame on the RIAA
(and I'd be happy to provide citations if you'd like)
If the Thomson hardware is as crappily shitacular as the Thomson DVD drive in my XBox, we have nothing to worry about -- either it will fail to enable the copy protection scheme correctly, and movies will be watchable, or it won't let you watch *anything* -- in which case, the machines will be yet another failed technology on the trash heap.
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
Slightly offtopic, but this reminds me of something I tend to tell people a lot. I've had friends who become paranoid about putting pictures or whatever online, looking for javascript to prevent right-clicking and watermarking everything. I shake my head, and I tell them, "If you don't want people to be able to copy something, don't put it online." Javascript is easy enough to bypass, and watermarks are easy enough to remove.
Now, I'm not saying people shouldn't be a little piqued if they find that their content has been copied. But being a little philosophical about this can save you a lot of stress.
Personally, when I stick something I created online, I figure it would be flattering to find it elsewhere. And some people might even have the decency to credit me for it, which is always nice.
It is surely the envious, the lustful, the smug and the spoiled, who would demand the right to the fruits of another's creation without payment or consent.
Here an "sufficiently uncrippled format" should be a format that allows users to enjoy the work in perpetuity, with no further obligation to the publisher, possibly by using backups and/or software (not applicable if such things are precluded by DRM, patents or whatever). For example, software in ordinary CD-ROMs without timebombs in them is included, so are paper books (you can scan them) and non-crippled music CDs (you can rip them and backup them forever, and you will always be able to play the PCM data). DVDs should also be included, especially when related patents expire and DeCSS is legalized, so that you can rip the bits and play it on the computer anytime in future, when hardware DVD players and DVD-ROMs may be no longer available. In contrast, any time-limited or player-limited versions, such as those using that SVP technology mentioned here, will not count (unless it can be legally hacked), and the publisher had better make it available in some other less-crippled format at the same time. This rule can be loosened for new kinds of copyrightable works for which no such perfect backup mechanisms are available yet, but these should be special cases.
As for a "reasonable" price, I think up to twice the normal price would be acceptable at first, for example up to $40 for a DVD. If the publisher want higher prices, they should make every buyer sign an agreement with them promising that they will not copy the thing they have bought, i.e., it should no longer be of the copyright law's concern.
And if movie publishers want to stop people cameraing their movies and making bootleg copies, they'd better either release the thing in DVD at the same time, or sign an agreement with everyone watching it (no children allowed).
In short, I want to respect your copyright, but if you make your thing public (i.e., not a trade secret or privacy-related stuff), and you don't want to accept my money, you still have no right to prevent me from enjoying it.
they stole television from Farnsworth,patented technology that they took from the color consortium,sold their consumer division to thomsen in the 90's and moved the jobs from Indianapolis to Mexico and other offshore places,
Now they are back in the "video" business making encryption chips.
What's New?
... All those previews at the beginning of the DVD that you cannot skip past: "This Operation is Prohibited By The Disc."
After all, the player is the hardware and the disc is the software.
They are merely increasing their commercial intrusions; there are more "previews" on recent releases than I used to see.
It's gotten so I am afraid to invest any more than $9.95 in a DVD, because higher priced DVD's usually are more recent titles, hence have a greater chance of showing advertisements for other current releases.
Norm
Copy protection blocks both legal and illegal copies. There is nothing wrong with copying a DVD, especially for backup (or active use in the case of backing up or archiving the original).
Really, it's the distribution of the copied DVDs which is illegal, something which the movie companies (and music companies in regards to CDs) generally leave out when mentioning the "terrible hackers" and their circumvention of copy-protection.
I wonder if all those people do not have principles. What are they seeking for? World domination? I think people with such invasive ideas should be publicly humiliated until they learned.
Usually I feel compelled to follow the rules and not copy stuff, but this kind of protection makes me kinda think about doing the oposite, not because I need, but because of their intentions to limit my freedom, 'cause I HATE to be forced!
I like to be told what the rules are and what can happen if I don't follow them, but I also appreciate my freedom to choose not to follow them if I wish.
Those thieves BLATANTLY STOLE THE TERM, and probably didn't pay the originators of it for the use of their linguistic properties. It's plagiarism at the very least - why next thing you know, people will be appropriating the narratives of Brothers Grimm and claiming their fairy tales are now "intellectual property".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The issue of copying music isn't IF you can copy it, it's HOW WELL you can do it. No matter what you do to protect your media content, it has to be playable on your standard TV, stereo, or whatnot. I mean, I can easily copy any movie you give me with a camcorder, right? :)
;)
The industry would be better off figuring out how they should be selling their products instead of how to gouge the general public. Ventures like this have always proven to end in failure, and always make things more inconvenient for the people who actually pay for it (usually the less technically-savy too)!
Isn't it funny how you can copy an Aerosmith CD and steal from Sony Music, with your Sony CD burner and CD-R and support Sony Electronics? Who really loses?
As previously mentioned, with each copy-protection system tried, they are broken, worked around, or otherwise caused to fail. The recording industry (and collective associates) have spent big money on bigger/better ways of troubling their coustomers... I can't imagine suing all of your [potential] customers is good for business? Personally, I could see myself downloading a song that I might have heard a bit of on the radio or something, likeing it, then buying the CD... but if I were to be sued for the mentioned download, fscked if I'm gonna give them any *more* money. I really wonder how long it will be before this industry spends all it's money on troubling their customers and none on actually producing/marketing worthwhile media, and simply dies.
Mak'tal shree lok'tak mek'ta sa'tak Oz! - Daniel Jackson
unfortunately, many parts of the entertainment industry, including parts of Hollywood, are engaging in what can only be characterized as greedy practices. There is a certain degree of price fixing going on, not to mention that the media would be less expensive if they stopped wasting money on copy protection technology.
I understand that it costs lots of money to make CGI and other things, and this is also part of the problem, part of the lack of any real choices for the consumer.
It would be better if it were acceptable to make movies on lower budgets; it would be better if more talented artists, directors, producers, etc... could have an opportunity to express themselves to a wider audience, and if these types of things were to take place, naturally, the price of a DVD would go down somewhat. Maybe not a whole lot, but somewhat - and it might also vary from movie to movie.
I cannot help but to think that there is greed occurring on the part of the entertainment industry - that greed is just as unethical as what is called "piracy" today. Of course you still have probably some areas of the world where people make illegal copies and sell them - that's something else entirely. These days, piracy and copy protection are really aimed at the consumer. That's greed - it's greed because it's unnecessary to aim it at the consumer. Maybe Spock would say, "Greed isn't logical."
So circumventing the copy protections is nothing more than bringing the greedy companies to justice - in a way. Circumventing copy protections is a necessary evil, so to speak. But of course it would be better if it wasn't necessary at all. Perhaps many people wouldn't even mind purchasing two copies, in case one gets scratched up or something - it's just that they are too expensive, so no one does that.
You want your precious "intellectual property" to remain unique and artificially scarce? Then keep it a secret! Information, once unleashed, naturally spreads from mind to mind like a virus; the vast majority of people are OK with this natural state of ideas because at a gut level it just FEELS RIGHT and it promotes progress.
You want to get paid for the fruits of your labor in the face of the new reality of millions of 'dirty, envious, spoiled pirates'? Then get paid UPFRONT for the scarce (and often not-so-scarce) act of original creation, just as a plumber gets paid for a job well-done, rather than getting royalty payments for an artful and propietary pipe fitting his grandfather did in 1930 that no other plumber could dare build on...
--
Power to the Peaceful
What really matters is
... highly contrived construction that the prosecuter has put upon the facts ...after successfully having a lot of other
1) what a judge says the law means
2) how the judge says this law applies to the...
3)
4)
facts "excluded" from the case
The only good defence is good publicity so that the scheming can be seen. A bit of daylight and a few watchers helps folk behave.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
PART ONE
Copy prevention which permits legitimate use whilst denying "other" uses is impossible. Not just supremely difficult, actually impossible. That is not a limitation of present technology that will be resolved by a sufficiently clever invention; it is a limitation of the Universe, like nothing being able to exceed the speed of light or a system never being able to put out more energy than is being supplied to it. Human beings will walk naked upon the surface of the Sun before copy-prevention is made to work.
The Secure Player is designed to render digitally-encrypted content into a form that humans can appreciate. In other words, analogue audio and video. Such signals can always be copied and re-recorded in an unencrypted form, and there is no way for the Player to be certain what is happening downstream of itself. Any form of distortion applied to the signal in a blanket attempt to prevent recording must be imperceptible to humans watching the signal. Any attempt to detect the presence of a recording device {time domain reflectometry?} can be defeated, since we have the advantage of knowing what measurements are being made.
PART TWO
The publishing industry -- and whether that be books, records, movies, CDs, videos or DVDs, the rules are the same -- has always depended for its very existence upon a simple idea: that the initial cost of the wherewithal to package-up content in a form that will be acceptable to consumers is great enough to prevent anybody from entering the industry. It should have been obvious that this situation would not persist forever. The moment that the printing-press had been invented, someone had already begun work on making a portable version.
Now let us compare and contrast the situation of the publishing industry with two other almost universally disliked industries: the fossil fuel industry, and the meat industry. The fossil fuel industry continues to extract coal and oil from the gaping wounds in the flesh of Mother Earth. One day there simply will not be any more oil or coal left down there. Even before that day dawns, there has to come a time when non-fossil fuels are the cheaper option. At least the meat industry has the foresight to breed enough animals to replace the rotting corpses upon which its supporters gorge themselves. There is nothing inherently unsustainable about feeding an animal and using its body to rearrange amino acids. With careful management, it is perfectly possible to obtain a supply of meat which is limited only by the amount of fodder available; and turning plants into burgers this way is less wasteful of resources than artificially texturising proteins (though it does rankle with the prevailing creed of mortality-denialism).
It is my contention that the publishing industry today is in the situation that the fossil fuel industry will face very soon. Everything that the publishing industry depended on for its business model to function has been annihilated. Today, the cost of the equipment required to manufacture DVDs, CDs, books and so forth is close to negligible, and entry into the market depends only on the willingness of customers to buy the wares you are selling.
PART THREE
Copyright violation is not the same as theft. If I steal a CD from a store, the store no longer has that CD to sell. If I make a copy of my friend's CD, my friend has their CD back once I am done. The store cannot sell that CD to me, because I already have another copy of it; but so what? There might be a million and one other reasons why a store might lose the ability to sell me a CD, not the least of which is that I might not even like it.
I see a CD recorder as being somewhat analogous to a breadmaker. I buy my own blank CD-Rs [flour, yeast, salt, sugar and water] and use my own effort, together with electricity I have paid for with money I earned by my own graft, to make bread for my consumption [CDs for me to listen to].
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!