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Longhorn's Copy Protection Standard

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the makin'-copies dept.

hype7 writes "The Register is reporting that Microsoft have attempted to force a last-minute CD protection standard on the recording industry in order to ship it in Longhorn. From the article: "Any such deal would see Microsoft support 'an industry-wide copy control platform' built in to its next-generation Longhorn operating system, with the computer giant instructing labels that the compatible secure CDs must contain additional multimedia content, such as bonus tracks, 'as a quid pro quo for adding effective [DRM] into the consumer experience'". It looks like everyone except the consumer is going to win on this one - Microsoft controls the secure format, the RIAA gets a secure format, and the consumer loses all their rights for the "quid pro quo" of a bonus track."

15 of 558 comments (clear)

  1. Who'll be buying CDs... by richieb · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ... by the time LongHorn comes out...???

    --
    ...richie - It is a good day to code.
  2. Ok... by El_Ge_Ex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why do customers want to upgrade to Longhorn? I seem to keep losing reasons, or never had them in some cases.

    -b

  3. Boringhorn by slashpot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...and how is this going to stop me from jacking the sound out to the sound in on my sound card, recording a wav file, then compressing it to mp3?

  4. What if it is outlawed? by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What if a country who cares about it's citizen's rights (like Germany, where Macrovision is illegal, because it prevents backups) and decides to OUTLAW the copy-protection scheme?

  5. Article says independent studios are scared by Maestro4k · · Score: 4, Interesting
    What I found most interesting about the article was this little blurb from near the end:
    • Many independent labels are rumoured to be terrified by the proposal, our sources suggest, which could grant Microsoft the mandate on CD copy protection and, if it is accepted by the industry, potentially increase the costs of CD production.
    While here on /. we take it for granted that cries of Microsoft's trying to take over/muscle into a new market/etc. will occur but this is the first time I've heard of a company from well outside the computer industry voicing similar concerns. If this happens and their fears are realized Microsoft would effectively be able to leverage their OS monopoly into practically owning an entirely new industry for them -- the music industry.

    I don't know about you but that thought's pretty scary. I don't like copy protection at all (I bought the damn thing, I want to do what I want to with it, and no that doesn't include sharing it illegally) if it's going to happen I don't think Microsoft is a trustworthy steward to have in control of it. Based on their past actions the whole music industry would probably get worse than the current corrupt and abusive (to artists and fans) system.

  6. Bring on the Fair Use Lawsuits by grunt107 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Unless the MS encryption scheme was given to all music media players (including rival OSs), a music industry crushing fair use lawsuit should be brought. Music has always been (by design) a portable genre. Old example - I buy an LP and make a tape (or mix tape if it's for m'Lady) so I can play it in the car. When CD burners came along I pulled the LP into the PC, split tracks and cleaned the audio - then made a CD. I also ripped these tracks into my MP3 player to go jogging (like I jog!).
    Movies are less portable, but I should be allowed a backup, and I used to be able to 'cut' a scene and make it my desktop wallpaper. Those should also be 'fair use'.

  7. That does it by nahdude812 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No kidding... as long as there's an option to purchase a CD sans-bonus-track (or whatever it is), I'll take it if it has no freedom sacrificing protections on it.

    I was thinking Longhorn looked pretty nice, and I'm one of those Slashdotters that spends a fair amount of time in Windows (I dual boot, honest!). I'm *not* going to give up freedoms I currently have now though, which means buying only non-encumbered software, including my OS.

    I'll buy the non-encumbered CD's, and pirate the bonus tracks. Unless the non-encumbered discs are cheaper, then I when I pay the same price as the next guy, I want the same content he gets.

    It's BS, and I won't have it.

    Hopefully soon we'll see recording companies springing up whose philosophy is to allow users access to their fair use rights. Or recording companies who make their money from live concerts or the like, rather than from album sales. Give the albums away for free, and I guarantee I'm more likely to show up at a concert.

    --
    Slay a dragon... over lunch!
  8. Re:garage bands by Skynyrd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Uh, garage bands that are successfull turn into standard RIAA bands. There's no way to win unless you eventually drop support for the band that USED to be a garage band.

    I have several friends in bands, and none of them aspire to be rock stars (at least in public). They understand that they need to keep their day jobs.

    However, by buying their CDs and tshirts, you can help them make some cash. Not enough to be famous, but perhaps buying some equipment or a bigger van - or a vacation for their wife who puts up with a lot of crap by being married to a guy in a band.

  9. Re:I don't see the logic by Dan667 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A professor I had summed up the cryptography (or DRM) problem in a way that I could understand.

    See that guy over there in the bright red smoking jacket, the big ego, talking really loud. He's the attacker, he only has to find one way to attack successfully.

    See that other guy over there with coke bottle glasses, polyester, and trying not to be noticed? He's the defender, he has to defend against every possible attack.

    Not only is DRM doomed, but the guy who rips it will brag to everyone who will listen to him that he made a successful attack.

  10. Bullshit by Moraelin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "95% of all windows boxes must contain 100% pirated software."

    And I'll call bull on that. Except maybe if you're talking China or ex-USSR where they can't even afford to pay hundreds of bucks for a text editor or 40 bucks for a game. (If a game costs as much as your monthly salary, or more, and you also have to eat out of that salary... well, moral decisions just get a lot easier.)

    Even by the BSA's BS statistics, about the highest software piracy rate in the USA is in North Dakota, at almost 40%. And in some states it's in the low teens.

    That's a bloody far cry from your 95% bullshit.

    And bear in mind that there's a reason there's BS in BSA. Their statistics are inflated beyond belief. If some chinese kid downloads 3DS Max to toy around with making models for a game (e.g., "X2: The Threat" only supports 3DS Max models), the BSA counts it as $6000 lost sales. On account that surely every single kid, even in china, would have paid $6000 to make mods for a $40 game.

    Yeah, right. Dunno in which country kids get $6000 as pocket change.

    I.e., again, in practice, the real piracy rate is actually lower than that.

    The reason why a majority of Americans or Europeans pay for their software isn't that we're more stupid than the Chinese and just can't find a crack. It's because we're not the kind of cheapskate whose only options are free beer or stolen beer. Because it's the morally right thing to do.

    Some of us actually paid for Windows. Yes, go figure. I went and bought the Win2K copy I'm writing this on. Retail. And for Linux too, for that matter. The SuSE 9.0 I use at work, I've actually went and bought the funny green box. And for a ton of other software, copy-protected stuff included.

    In fact, I'll tell you what: if Microsoft could actually come up with a copy-protection scheme that actually _works_ and actually stops pirates, Microsoft would have my heartfelt gratitude. Speaking as a consumer, and no, I don't work for MS. I'm sick and tired of seeing good games companies going bankrupt, while freeloading cheapskates (some driving SUVs and sports cars) leech their games on P2P.

    (On the other hand, crap that only inconveniences the paying customer and doesn't actually do anything to pirates, I've still had enough of.)

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
    1. Re:Bullshit by ivan256 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In fact, I'll tell you what: if Microsoft could actually come up with a copy-protection scheme that actually _works_ and actually stops pirates, Microsoft would have my heartfelt gratitude. Speaking as a consumer, and no, I don't work for MS. I'm sick and tired of seeing good games companies going bankrupt, while freeloading cheapskates (some driving SUVs and sports cars) leech their games on P2P.

      You're living in a dream world. If people can't get little utilities and general purpose software for free anymore they won't start buying it, they'll stop using Windows. Software companies don't go bankrupt because of piracy. They go bankrupt because their software isn't worth what they charge for it. Sure, people may use pirated copies because the program is useful at the low price point, but almost everybody who pirates software would do without rather than pay for the application they "stole". This mentality isn't limited to "$6000" software as you imply. It's the same for $50 software too. Who has $50 to spend on a silly utility, or a mediocre game? Not many people. $50 is more than a week of groceries for a family of four for most of the world, including in the US.

      Games provide a great illustration of this point. Many games these days have an online component. Most online games have an effective copy protection mechanism, and few if any of the online players of these games are using pirated copies. This hasn't stopped the majority of these games from tanking though. The fact of the matter is that most games, even good games, don't do so well, and it's not because of piracy; it's a matter of supply and demand. More and more games come out on the market every year. Supply is infinite in the sense that nobody has the time to play every game that comes out... Yet the price point is fixed. This ensures that only the best of the best games make a signifigant profit. And those games *do* profit, even if there is some, or a lot of piracy. Most game development companies are started out of a passion for games, out of an idea for how to be profitable, which is what feeds the oversupply of games. Once you pass that through the publishing cartel you're guaranteed that many of your favorite development houses are going to go out of business, piracy or no piracy.

      What will really happen if Microsoft figures out how to stop piracy once and for all is that people will start using platforms where everything that is non-novel (Office software), or can be written by one guy in less than a week (practially every shareware application released in the last 10 years) is free, or in the case of games, they'll do without for the most part; countinuing to buy only a select few each year and maintaining the current situation.

    2. Re:Bullshit by vhold · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Unfortunately, virtually any form of copy protection is an added nuissance. A large percentage of the time, people who pirate software have fundamentally fewer annoyances then people who acquired it legally. Thats really backasswards.

      Everytime I buy a game, I immediately go out and look for a crack for it because having to throw in it's CD everytime, and sit there and wait while it churns around looking for flawed sectors or what have you is really annoying. Used to be one of the things that made games on the PC so great is that you didn't have those kinds of load times and you didn't have to hunt for a disk. By going out to look for cracks, it exposes me to all kinds of extra piracy potential that normally I wouldn't even be remotely close to.

      Same thing with operating systems even, I legitimately own a copy of windows XP pro, but I have a second sort of experiment on computer that I went and got a cracked copy for because I didn't want to have to constantly be dealing with some microsoft hotline each time I changed the hardware. It's over the top and more or less useless. When it finally becomes totally impossible to bypass all this junk, when they've finally totally bolted it down to their ultimate hapiness, guys like us will stay on the old platform for as long as possible and eventually just move off forever.

      As for expensive office apps, I just can't justify spending $400 so that I can familiarize myself with them. My workplace totally will pay that amount for their computers, and it's totally advantagous to Microsoft in general if I'm familiar with a product enough to justify spending work's money on it. But if I can't *cough* evaluate it on my own terms, I'll never get to that point.

      I think it's in that particular arena overall that open source stands to gain the most from ridiculously overpowered DRM. There are a lot of problem spaces in productivity applications where opensource flounders around because people can play with the commericial stuff for free with piracy, they learn it, head to work with it and buy it there. Forced away from that, those commercial products are going to have significant brain drain slowly over time, leading to less sales at work, and nobody will pay those high prices at home. I think they'll really shoot themselves in the foot here, unless, for example, Office XP Professional becomes $50. If those kinds of high end apps actually had reasonable pricing for the home enthusiast, I'd probably own like 6 major apps as opposed to zero.

  11. *how* many years..? by spasm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    let me get this straight.. microsoft are ramming some hastily conceived and rush-designed security format down their partner's throats, and will be locking themselves and said partners to it.

    and then they're giving us *how* many years to come up with workarounds or outright cracks?

    heh. hehehehehehe.

  12. Re:garage bands by paranode · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have several friends in bands, and none of them aspire to be rock stars (at least in public). They understand that they need to keep their day jobs.

    And you honestly believe they'd turn down millions of dollars from a high-profile record label to keep their day jobs?

    Few people are that tightly bound to their philosophy. Just like the poor coder of an OSS project would probably denounce MS all day, but take a job with them in a heartbeat if they came knocking on his door talking about six figures.

  13. Re:Other Initiatives... by Stripe7 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Really simple what will happen here. Chose M$ longhorn or Linux where none of this BS will reside. With the strides the Linux Desktop will be making, by the time Longhorn comes out, the Linux Desktop will do just about everything you need sans the DRM. I see the RIAA trying to outlaw Linux with something akin the "Induce" act within a few years.