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Longhorn's Copy Protection Standard
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."
In other news, Microsoft to offer computer training packages on Herding Cats.
Seems there was something within the last month where Microsoft's Windows Media advances on big media content were spurned.
"We're calling together a representative coalition of the industry to plan a possible meeting to discuss whether further consideration of your offer is necessary. Not that we're worried about you getting a cut of our cut, but we're all insane with greed and want to be sure we don't let anyone dictate our destiny to us in the same way we have for decades to consumers. Now if you'll excuse me I have several new acts to screw, I mean, negotiate standard industry contracts with."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
All this crippling of Windows takes a lot of time. Besdies, DRM is much better than WinFS.
Forget the RIAA, support your local garage band.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Copy protection would be the best gift MS could give to the open-source movement.
95% of all windows boxes must contain 100% pirated software.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Does this mean that alternate OS's such as Linux and OS X could be consider encryption circumvention devices under the DMCA and upcoming Uber-DMCA's in the USA and around the world? This of course assumes that Microsoft's protection scheme is Windows only. And I think that's a safe bet.
We imagine Apple won't be willing to play ball on this front.
Likely not, but what if the files are DMR-locked (somehow) to only play with a Longhorn-capable client? Reverse engineering would go against the DMCA likely.
Trolling is a art,
Only one copy protection mechanism to overcome, and then it's time to go back to freely backing up you data again.
Sure, we also gain a standardized copy protection format which will be tuned not to break things like some existing copy protections *cough* Starforce *cough*.
And...standardization is good, just a single standard to bypass if we want to make backups instead of having to learn how to bypass multiple protections.
Sure, call me a pirate, but when want to play games on my laptop, I don't want to have to tote the CD around, I'd much mount the disc image to a virtual drive so I don't have to tote a breakable CD for every game I might play while traveling.
If they can't secure the code on the CD what makes you think they can secure the CD?
Why do customers want to upgrade to Longhorn? I seem to keep losing reasons, or never had them in some cases.
-b
It does matter, encryption works the same way. It isn't unbreakable but hard to do so. It keeps everyone and their brother from doing something or looking at your private e-mail. It keeps out the ones who either are too stupid or whatnot from getting past. There will always be exceptions. *shrug*
Since copy-protected discs are not standard CDs, Apple Computer says they are not meant to be played on its products. In addition, repairs required to undo damage caused by such discs may not be covered by its warranties.
Apple designs its CD drives to support media that conforms to (published Compact Disc) standards. Therefore, any attempt to use nonstandard discs with Apple CD drives will be considered a misapplication of the product. Under the terms of Apple's one-year limited warranty, AppleCare Protection Plan, or other Apple Care agreements, any misapplication of the product is excluded from Apple's repair coverage.
Some copy-protected audio discs are causing Mac OS computers to start to a gray screen. In some cases, the discs will not easily eject from the computer.
Yes, I have RTFA. Yes, I have a girlfriend. Yes, I'm new here. And no, I don't want a free iPod.
The CDs are still going to have regular audio tracks, so they can play in regular CD players. Longhorn will still read regular audio tracks, so it can still play old CDs that don't have a DRMed copy of their content. Even if Longhorn checks for a mixed-mode CD and restricts access to the music portion, that breaks older mixed-mode CDs that have the music on the audio portion only, and other content on the data portion. Bottom line, it sounds to me like I'll still be able to just hold shift.
Thank you M$ you just gave me the "final straw" to migrate to Linux.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
...the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
For someone who has no problem with MS, this is really arrogant. I don't care how much the music industry wants copy protection, I bet this letter did not go over well. On September 2nd, you give me a letter that gives me 18 whole days to make a decision that has major implications on the future of the entire industry. I bet this must leave even the most jaded observers questioning MS sanity and arrogance.
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?
I figure in 2006 (when Longhorn is supposed to ship) I won't be buying CD's anymore; I barely do as it is now. I really enjoy ITunes and the pricing for a full album's material is almost always better than any retailer's (including Amazon) price.
ITunes restrictions are reasonable enough that they don't get in my way...and it's cheaper. I don't need a physical CD anymore. Music on demand. I like it.
blenderking.com over 50,000 blenders can't be wrong
Trying to push something at the last second never works. There will be mistakes, a need for new patches, who knows.
I would think as long as a CD-Rom can read a disk as a data disk, then this will all be meaningless. Someone will write an application which will skip over the "bonus" track. The only way this can work is if MS decides their windows media player is the only player they will allow. But didn't the courts tell MS they could not do that?
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
-
There is always another way to rip the audio from CDs. So Microsoft builds copy protection into their OS. Who cares. It wont stop me from making backups of my CDs.
It could actually, or at least make it extremely difficult. The article says it's not clear what method Microsoft is pushing but it could be the "Secure Audio Path" concept (which would protect content all the way to a computer's speakers, making it impossible to make digital copies by recording from the soundcard). In that case Microsoft would likely mandate hardware changes or hardware wouldn't be certified as usable with Longhorn or simply Longhorn would refuse to accept it. Even if you use Linux if all the hardware you get enforces the copy protection in the hardware it's going to make it really difficult to rip the audio from those CDs....And stop buying. Seriously. A major company is catering to another major companies needs. Film at 11.
This is one of many cases that I think the free market will work. If people don't think the quid pro quo value is in their favor, than the RIAA loses because people will stop buying their product.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
RIAA: We like to screw customers?
M$: How so?
RIAA: We used to enforce $20 a music CD throughout the entire 90s.
M$: That's nothing. We make people pay subscriptions for life.
RIAA: Yes, but we enforce $20 over products we don't produce.
M$: Damn that's good. But ours include holes for viruses and spyware. So people will spend more money.
RIAA: Well, our music CDs will soon be unlistenable because we will change format. They will have to buy the music again.
M$: Yes, we can arrest people for stealing our software.
RIAA: Please, we have already arrested a grandmother, a single parent on welfare, and a 5 year old.
M$: You are my idol.
"If you have to work too hard to do it, most people will just give up and/or buy the media"
No, they'll download it from their favorite P2P service after one person rips it.
You don't quite get this 'Internet' thing, do you?
I say we start a movement against the purchasing of music from any label associated with the RIAA. to Quote /. "There's small choice in rotten apples. -- William Shakespeare, "The Taming of the Shrew"
-This whole mess mkes me really mad, whatever happened to the Consumers Rights, or did those die in the 80's? It seems that everything today is geared at protecting the Big Companies. perfect example Grandmas and 12year olds get sued, and it's ok. This is a sick world we live in. Money is not everything, information is everything.
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.
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.