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Microsoft Licenses Analog Anti-rip Technology
photojournaliste writes "CD copy-protection specialist Macrovision is to work with Microsoft to ensure their respective DRM and anti-rip technologies are interoperable, the two companies said this week. Sounds straightforward enough, but the deal runs deeper. Microsoft agreed to license a number of Macrovision's patents, in particular those relating to analogue copy protection technology and more recent extensions to that system that cover video-on-demand, pay-per-view content and support for the US 'broadcast flag', which determines whether consumers will be able to record digital TV broadcasts."
People hack their Tivo's to go "Broadcast flag - very nice - I'll ignore that and record it anyway"..
Same for Myth TV etc
TheLogster
I hope Microsoft take over Macrovision, then we can have Microsoft and Macrosoft. Microsoft can deal with insecure software and Macrosoft can deal with securing copyrights, what a world it will be then!
I like the broadcast flag. If we couldn't record stuff off the television, perhaps the nation would find better things to do with their time that watching endless television programs. Like extra exercise, or socialising. We'd all be a whole lot better for it...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Since when was interoperability a goal for access protection systems? Surely they mean inoperable!
I'm sorry but that song you can't get out of your head is in violation of copyright laws. We are going to install a little chip now to ensure we are compensated.
Imagine Provider A sells music and other media content without restrictive technology. Provider B has strong restrictions. Artists who publish with B will not benefit from "bootleg cassettes" to gain popularity (think of Metallica...)... Artists who publish with A become popular, Provider A ends up selling the most popular artists....who makes the money?
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
What is this television thing anyway? Does it involve moving away from my computer?
from TFA:
"An Internet-delivered movie, downloaded to a PC, can now be protected on analog video playback out of a PC"
They're actually concerned with someone outputting a digital format (MPG, DIVX, WMV, etc.) to an Analog source like a VCR? C'mon
I thought the purpose of ripping the media was to have a perfect (or near perfect) digital copy
The master of the eye-killer blinking videotapes gets in bed with my unfair lady of blue screens of death.
If there have any offsprings, shoot'em.
So, how will this work outside US? Or will they just assume the laws are the same in every country? And if it only applies to US, how do one determine properly if the computer in question IS in the US? I guess they simply implement it for everyone and won't care about laws in different countries.
I find it amusing to see these companies invest millions in technology and licensing to fight a battle they know they are not going to be able to win.
All it takes is one person to circumvent the protection (we all know how good macrovision has been in the past...) or to have access to source material to distribute it to millions using P2P.
They need to change their business model, give us what we want (DRM free mp3 or similar) for a reasonable price or eventually suffer the inevitable... (which could be a good thing too, the music industry reborn)
Regular users don't really contribute that much to piracy. Lets ignore the people downloading things for a moment and concentrate on the uploaders (the real problem). The people distributing most of the content are "hard core" pirates. They are the one's who will be paying lots of money for ways to get around copyprotection (or manually doing it themselves). I should imagine that as soon as a method of getting around the broadcast flag is published every single one of the main rippers nd distributers will be using it widely and carrying like they are right now. Sure, home users wont be able to record off of the TV/Radio until startups start offering the hacks for a small fee, which wouldn't take too long.
"DRM never has been about absolute control. It has, from its inception, been about making piracy enough of an inconvenience that regular user don't bother to do it."
And they usually don't. They just get the material they want off of somebody else who does bother.
DRM schemes ONLY stop regular users (and even then, only until someone writes up an easy to use program/utility that the public can use) while they are a mild inconvenience to the professionals.
It only takes one unscrupulous person to make one DRM-less copy of something (be it actual material or a box that ignores DRM) and distribute it and then everybody can have a copy.
I'm tired of the industry trying to use technology to solve a social problem.
Silly rabbit
They're focusing on how to prevent consumers from accessing material when they should be focusing on making it easier for consumers to pay for material. In the days of Napster's popularity, if the record companies decided to integrate a payment subscription system with high-speed downloading servers, then they wouldn't have to worry about piracy. People would pay to be able to download MP3s with no proper tags and no errors at the maximum speed their connections could handle rather than unreliable and unstable P2P sources. They could have worked on producing software for ISPs to use for automating the billing process. They could have bought into Napster during it's popularity and turned it into a subscription service, and even if other P2P applications were around, Napster had brand-name recognition that people would go for. But instead on focusing on how to use the technology's potential, they sent in the lawyers to block it. Brand name has more pull for consumers than cost-effectiveness. Just look at sneakers- people don't try to buy the cheapest ones around but go with expensive brand names instead.
This would be the best move ever ... for open source that is. The minute my friends can no longer rip their CD's to mp3's, they'll ditch Windows and move on to something else. I'm serious. None of my friends are techies. They use their systems to browse the web, write email and the occasional word processing document and to manage their music and photo collections. If Microsoft ever were to cripple their OS in such a manner, they'd jump ship in a heartbeat. Especially if the alternative OS and supporting software is free and can be installed on their current systems.
I think you miss the point as well.
The point of the broadcast flag is that the user says, "Hey I'll record the Pay per view X on the DVR so I can watch it later or so I can watch it with my wife" The DRM prevents him from doing this.
He instead just goes out and rents the DVD.
The DRM and the ways to circumvent it are not convenient enough to get him to commit the act of piracy. (and playing movies from a computer to a TV is not really that common in the mainstream)
Thus it add a layer of inconvenience to committing the act thus dissuading people from doing it.
There will always be pirates. That is a given. The inherit law of DRM is that it will be broken, eventually. That is why what I said above is insightful DRM has never been about complete control because even the movie studios know that is impossible. DRM has and will continue to be about making the piracy enough of an inconvenience that the mainstream will not do it.
As an aside,
By the way it is the convenience of P2P and bittorrent that bugs them, not the fact they exist. If P2P and BT were tiny do you really think they would be so up in arms. It is the fact that anyone can click next on a windows box to get through a default install and then have access to huge amounts of pirated data.
I would like to weigh in with a comment on these assholes.
Macrovision has been touting their "Secure" tech for a number of years.
It has been broken time and time again.
I have a hard time believing that Microstupid is dumb enough to buy into this.
After the early efforts to get a halfway good anti-spyware package together via the buying of Giant. They have to sink down to the low-lifes like Macrovision.
This is why I keep refusing the DRM "upgrades" to my media player 7.
Firefox just kicks IE up one side and down the other IMHO.
Put it this way, in the big trade shows. Macrovision employs a very humble booth.
I had such high hopes for the Bill Gates security speech.
Oh, well.
You know, I just realized why, in TNG, they never listened to anything but classical music and never watched anything other than plays.
Copyrights and analog locks trapped all modern culture in outdated media that ended up being lost to the ages.
And people say that series lacked foresight.
All I needed to know about digital rights, I learned from Star Trek.
The whole reason they're doing this isn't so Windows can do DRM. Both SBC and Verizon are going ot be using MS software on their set top boxes to deliver IPTV. I guess they need some kind of DRM in the box.
This is no different from encryption on HDMI signals from the current crop of HDTV boxes. As far as I know, nobody has turned on the encryption, but the option is there.
Ok so these things called the PC were created and over time consumers really started to dig the FREE, or mostly FREE things they could do with them...
Eventually this PC thing found a way to communicate with other PC things and then something wonderful happened... they all got connected and the internet was (re)born...
Some new things were a little too close to breaking the law but were mostly tolerated because the big players... Microsoft especially were making and continue to make insanely gross amounts of money...
This internet thing really started to catch on and consumers found LOTS of really cool uses for it. Email, games and sharing. Sharing jokes and greeting cards eventually became photos and music... in the meantime lots of folks realized that they didn't need big guys like Microsoft and they unleashed alternatives and Open Source software was (re)born... its mascot quickly became Linux.
Back to the big guys... Most big guys missed the many opportunities the internet could offer their business models and instead turned to the "wise" politicians to see if this "sharing" thing could be stopped... The politicians thought long and hard and after a significant amount of cash-for-thought was spread around the DMCA was born.
Ah the DMCA... pure genius... this gem makes tinkering, copying, sharing and most fair uses illegal... its pretty broad in scope and isn't well defined in intent but the big boys loved it because now they now had the perfect club to start smacking down any innovation that even appears to be threatening their empires.
Well... all the money in Washington was just a bump in the road for free use, sharing and innovation so now the big boys have decided that everything must be locked down from start to finish... back to Washington for more spreading of the cash-for-thought and voila... the broadcast flag is born!
This things is even more genius then most of the other road blocks to innovation any of the big boys could have thought of. The flag (required by ALL recording devices) will be controlled by whomever has the rights at the time... movie guys, software guys, distributors... hell even the cable guys can turn off recording access. Of course the cash spreaders assure this is NOT going to be the case but history proves otherwise. The flag will eventually bring us to the era of pay-per-recording at home... now how fuckin' sick is this concept. Oops... hope the charma cops were blinking!
In the end what the legislators and big boys don't seem to realize is that without free and FAIR use and yes sharing, the internet would not have grow to its ginormous size and influence, without free and FAIR use and sharing the big boys like INTEL, Microsoft, game companies and even the movie boys would not have grow to such seemingly unstoppable empires... so if they take away the free and FAIR use of these technologies consumers will either find or create free and FAIR alterntives despite what laws these robber barons of the 21st century buy from those hopelessly corrupt legislators in Washington.
There just doesn't seem logical that business is going to continue to grow by locking consumers out their right to fair use and by restricting access.
In my country, copying and sharing for personal use is very much LEGAL and we still have BILLIONS made from the consumers herds. Yes, unfortunately there is still and large majority of the herd that doesn't realize the feed is free. Oh well... MOO!
No ..... the ultimate rights-management solution is PharmaGard (TM). Unlike conventional scrambling and encryption technologies, which work by unscrambling the picture and taking a leap of faith that nothing can intercept it on its way to the screen, with PharmaGard (TM) there is never a recoverable, unencrypted signal: the final decryption takes place in the viewer's brain.
The secret of PharmaGard (TM) is a special pill, containing a phenylethylamine-type {= ecstasy-like} drug that you have to take before you watch the film. The first few minutes of the film are neurolinguistic programming -- basically, reprogramming your mind so that, under the perception-distorting influence of the drug, it unscrambles the picture -- embedded into an advertisement sequence. There is no possible way for the viewer not to see this sequence if they are going to see the film, so this advertising space would be worth a fortune. As long as the drug's effect lasts, the film appears unscrambled through your altered perception. When it wears off, your eyes go back to normal.
Anyone can copy a film protected with PharmaGard (TM). But only people who have taken the special drug can watch it. If viewers invite friends to watch with them, their friends will have to take some too. A stash of pills are provided with the movie; if you want to watch it again, you have to buy more of them from your local retailer.
PharmaGard (TM) also provides built-in age-restriction. The pills for different-certificate movies are formulated slightly differently. The pills provided with an "18" film will contain an additional substance which reacts with Human Growth Hormone at the levels found in under-18-year-olds to induce undesirable side-effects e.g. nausea, breathing difficulty, loss of balance &c. There will be less of this substance in a "15" film pill to account for the fact that a 15-year old's body will contain a higher level of growth hormone; but the "15" pill will not be a powerful enough psychedelic to allow the consumer's brain to unscramble an "18" film.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!