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DRM Advocate Violates DRM
Alsee writes "A year and a day after arguing DRM was good for business, acceptable to consumers, and necessary in today's world, JupiterMedia VP and Research Director Michael Gartenberg comes face to face with DRM reality, downloads a circumvention tool, violates DRM, and blogs about his MS Reader DRM issues being solved ... permanently. Perhaps now he would be interested in the EFF Action Center where Americans can quickly and easily ask your Representative to co-sponsor the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act."
To quote Mike from his original blog last year:
"Our research shows clearly that DRM is only an issue to consumers when it's technology they keep bumping into."
That remains true. His problem now w/ the MS DRM is that he's bumping into it. If the DRM was improved so that it would get out of his way, he would still have no issue with it.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
You can be for DRM, but against shitty implementations thereof?
No wait, that would involve too much thought and judgement. Black and white is so much easier.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Oh ho ho... we've gone from praising DRM to circumventing it, haven't we? This is exactly the problem with DRM, when the DRM is so bad it restricts the legitimate use of the media it's protecting. I like how he praises DRM but says it's a "necessary evil" and is willing to circumvent it when it inhibits him.
Sorry Mike, you can't have your DRM and circumvent it when it's in the way too y'know.
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Re-read the comments he made: From the first article, last sentence "DRM is a necessary technology that need not burden consumers, tech vendors or content providers."
From the second one, last sentence. "Good case study for firms on HOW NOT TO IMPLEMENT DRM solutions."
He didn't make a 180 degree turn on the issue. He was critical of this particular implementation of DRM (and the general cluelessness of Microsoft tech support when it came to his esoteric issue).
It's a small step for him in a better direction, perhaps, but he hasn't changed his position from reading those remarks.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
The blog entry (TFBE?) highlights a huge problem with DRM schemes. You legitimately obtain a copy of a protected work. Years later, something breaks or becomes obsolute. Now you're screwed, because you can't use the protected work that you paid for. You have two choices: buy another copy, or break the DRM. But the latter makes you criminal under the DMCA.
This madness has to stop!
If God had meant for man to see the sunrise, He would have scheduled it later in the day.
Actually for once, the AC's feeble joke is spot on: DRM isn't as much about preventing people from cracking it as it is about having solid grounds to sue infringers.
DRM's more or less open goal is to prevent "casual theft" in the form of playground CD swapping, but it's much easier to sue someone who took deliberate, non-obvious steps to circumvent a protection than sueing someone who just copied something. For infringers, it takes away the "oops I didn't know it was forbidden" excuse.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
nice to see its bi-partisan names on the bill.
Goes to show that evil is not a party line problem; its a congressional whore problem, spanning both parties.
I hope that this passes. Reasonable R's and D's need to get behind this kind of thing, putting the assholes like Hollings and Hatch out to pasture...
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
He still supports DRM, but only "good" implementations of it.
What he does not get is that DRM *has* to be intrusive to work. DRM is based on having someone other than the owner of the machine control the data on that machine. If you want to move that data to another machine, you have to request permission and it had to be hard to get pewrmission, otherwise people will take advantage of you and copy the data more times than allowed.
DRM is all about control. Control does not work unless you show them who is the boss early on.
An interesting side effect of this is what it is teaching Americans. It is teaching them that they only way they can do what they want in society on a day to day basis is to break the law.
Contemptable laws generate contempt for ALL laws.
Or as Macalypse the Yonger put it...
"Imposition of order = Escalation of Disorder".
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Apple's DRM, in the iTunes Music Store, is hardly there at all. It's "nudge nudge wink wink" DRM, it's "honor system" DRM. They should call it "digital rights hinting". Apple's old "Rip, Mix, Burn" ads pretty much tell you how to remove DRM from their files, if you're not prepared to use any of the widely-available HYMN variants. Just... change the order a little. Yeh, you take a one-time hit in the audio quality... but if you care about audio quality why aren't you buying and ripping CDs instead of lossy-compressed files anyway?
DRM is acceptable when it's just strong enough to remind you that this isn't freely redistributable content, but not strong enough to actually prevent you from breaking it when you need to.
That's what Microsoft doesn't get. That's what Michael Gartenberg doesn't get. Strong DRM will inevitably screw you over. If Apple used strong DRM in iTunes I'd have been really pissed when I ran out of authorizations due to a bad disk that forced me to reinstall my OS a couple of times... because even though Apple was willing to reset all my computers AGAIN, it took a while, and having all my music burned onto audio CDs meant it wasn't actually held hostage by the DRM...
That's why Apple's DRM works. Because it doesn't. If it did, it wouldn't.
Good DRM = Good. Don't try to go around it, that's bad.
Bad DRM = Bad. It's good to circumvent it if you need to.
Um, so who gets to decide what's good and what's bad?
In the words of Homer, "Ummn, I don't know, the Coast Guard?"
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
that's the point that drm needs to achieve anyway... it needs to do it's job without being an inconvenience. if you can tell it's doing it's job, then it's doing it poorly.
Good case study for firms on HOW NOT TO IMPLEMENT DRM solutions. Wrong. Which generates more revenue: selling people the same content over and over again each time they buy a new computer, or giving it to them once and letting them migrate to any other machine for the rest of their life? He is obviously forgetting the main purpose of DRM: to make consumers pay for the same content over and over again! I'd say Microsoft's DRM is optimally designed to acheive Microsoft's goals: derive continuing revenue from something you used to pay for only once.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It did way back in the day, with copy "protected" floppies. And then abandoning it, and using more copy "protection" and abandoning it, etc.
The computer world keeps learning, and then forgetting.
Perhaps some needs to give free Ritalin to IT industry execs.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It's funny that he still sees it as a "necessary evil"... How many other problems will he need to face before he realizes just how unnecessary it is? DRM makes suits feel better, but rarely stops people from getting around it.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
This is quite sad. The entire Slashdot crowd is being very unfair, here. He didn't change what he was saying - he said one thing and then did another. That's totally different. He castigated the community about how things should be, but when faced with harsh reality, he broke the law and tried to convince you that the law is not at fault - someone else made him do it. It's not that the law didn't protect him as a consumer of content, it's that the producer of content did a poor job - so now, he had to break the law - but they still shouldn't fix the law.
Get ready for office!
Education is the silver bullet.
Honestly, this is also the IT industries fault.
The next *BIG* drm scheme will be *secure*
Faster than Ever! More features than before! Able to deliver virtual reality in a single packet!
A large part of the blame lies on the bozos (or maybe they are smarter than we think) selling 'uncrackable' (snake-oil) DRM.
Of course, if it ever was uncrackable, they wouldn't be able to sell version x+1.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Of course, if it ever was uncrackable, they wouldn't be able to sell version x+1.
Not if the DRM vendors rent the patent licenses and trade secret know-how to publishers rather than sell them. Then the vendor would be able to sell version x+1 when the publisher's contract expires.
It is extremely important that we continue to build a hardware infrastructure capable of enforcing rigid DRM. This enables me to do things like, for example, prepare a confidential document, send it to someone, and have it NOT be copyable.
But the availability of the technology is a separate issue from the use of the technology - something bittorrent whoring slashdot users should understand easily, but apparently seem to have a brain-freeze when applying the concept to DRM.
Just as we don't accept the argument that bittorrent is illegal merely because it can be used for illegal activity, or is in fact mostly used for illegal activity, we should not also label DRM bad just because it can be used for bad purposes.
DRM doesn't stop you from copying your music. Music distributors putting DRM on the music is what stops you.
Wither the technology is at fault or the people who use the technology inappropriately are at fault. We can't have it one way when we like the technology and the other way when we don't.
paintball
Everyone gets this wrong. DMCA, which I will *not* defend, has an interoperability clause which essentially grants any competitor "fair use" rights to reverse engineer a format.
When Real came out with Fairplay, Apple rewrote the iTunes DRM to break it instead of suing, because the interoperability clause would have gotten their case laughed out of court.
So long as Real doesn't actually publish Apple's DRM algorithm, the courts are fine with competitors deliberately reverse engineering DRM formats. Keep the secrets and everybody's fine.
"This enables me to do things like, for example, prepare a confidential document, send it to someone, and have it NOT be copyable."
What you describe is fundamentally impossible to do.
You can wrap it with ten tons of DRM Snake oil, but if the recipient can read it, it can be copied. Accessing = copying.
Well my idea of DRM (stuff that "D"isturbs my "R"esplendent "M"ind) is that whatever impinges upon my senses is mine to play with as I will. OR KILL ME. Then again what Orthodox Thelemic Odinist Subgenius would argue otherwise ?
Witness blackbirds in England who have taken to include the sounds of car alarms in their calls... (After all this could be another bird trying to muscle in on their territory).
The attempted enforcement of DRM on all current "Bit Manipulating" technology sums up how shallow, unimaginative, uninteresting and shite our 21st century culture currently is. Working "uncrakabull" DRM (which will never occur, trust me) is the ultiate masturbatory fantasy of the utterly untalented who only seek to catch and control the output of the inspired (who will do what they do regardless of reward) In the long term all it will mean is that large parts of DRMd culture will be forgotten. And quite frankly it's for the best.
Any good artist will do what they've always done... i.e. make a living by performing their art live or doing custom work for willing patrons.
Watching the retard "media crowd" arguing over who owns the "rights" (sic) to pimp the inspired work of artisits reminds me of nothng more than flies arguing over who owns the right to the dung of an elephant.
In't booze grate ????
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
This enables me to do things like, for example, prepare a confidential document, send it to someone, and have it NOT be copyable.
Why would you want to do that? If you don't trust the person on the receiving end not to copy the document... well, you're screwed, because if it's that important and they can see it, they can copy it.
Every other form of information hiding is different from DRM because you are worried about an unintended third party viewing your message. Even then it is extremely difficult to do right, and impossible to guarantee. With DRM, it is the intended recipient who you are worried about. You're trying to simultaneously give them access to the message, yet not allow them to share it with anyone else. This goes way beyond mere encryption in terms of impossibility.
The enemies of Democracy are
so... why the HELL was Dimitry held in jail?
The LoC's exemptions to 1201(a)(1) cover circumvention acts, not circumvention devices. Dmitry was held for the latter.
You can wrap it with ten tons of DRM Snake oil, but if the recipient can read it, it can be copied. Accessing = copying.
For instance, if I am a commie spy, and you send me a DRM'd double-super-secret document that becomes visible on my screen, such that it can be seen and read, well, I can utilize some archaic technology to circumvent the DRM, in fact, this is a classic commie spy technique: I can write it down on paper or take a picture of the screen with a camera.
This public service announcement was just to drive home the point about how unbelievably stupid the thought of using DRM for protecting secret documents is. If the destination isn't trusted, you can't send them information. It simply doesn't matter how you diddle with it.
Jeff
I think its important that Mr. Gartenberg, after exhausting reasonable methods to restore access to his content, then immediately reached for a (presumably) illegal DMCA-breaking tool to gain access. By his own advocacy these tools will not be available if his viewpoint prevails.
In his follow-up blog entries he completely avoids this point.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
The DMCA is connected to this issue because it seeks to supplement technical DRM by making it illegal to distribute a DRM "circumvention device". Experience having taught harsh lessons to DRM proponents, from ecrypted satillite broadcasts that are decrypted with cards from Canada to CDs that are copyable with the application of a magic marker, the DRMists know that they need the legal enforcement to make it happen.
"necessary evil" is still EVIL.