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Intel Stands Up For Consumers in Next-gen DVD War
Sanity writes "According to a Macworld story, Intel is standing up for the interests of consumers in the war between Blue-ray and HD-DVD, by making its support for either format contingent on support for 'mandatory managed copy', the ability to copy content to 'home servers' so that it can be accessed from around the home. While it is refreshing to see someone consider the (often ignored) interest of consumers in the world of DRM, it appears that 'mandatory managed copy' will still allow content producers to limit what consumers can do with the content and equipment they own well beyond the limitations imposed by copyright law. Thus the question over DRM remains: should we be policed by our own property?"
I think they do understand this. Thats why they want to control the Media, the player, the TV/Monitor/Projector and anyrecording devices you may own.
At some point the bits will be transfered unencrypted--unless all manufacturers get together and use the same encryption tech which we all know works so well (dvd). You may have to mod your hardware but its still possible to get at the information. It can be made difficult but never impossible to access and fiddle with digital information. Its a big advantage and drawback of digital tech. If information ever goes quantum then we are fucked. I dont think we are that far off (maybe 100 years) from seeing entangled particle communication systems.
If something exists that does not need a creator (god) then why must the cosmos need one?
Intel is talking out of both sides of their mouth. If they really gave a damn about the rights of citizens, they would tell Hollywood to cram it, repudiate CPRM and CPPM, and lobby for copyright reform.
I'm not impressed.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Some more expensive programs came with 'dongles' that were even worse. In order to run the software you had to reconfigure your parallel port with a hardware device. If you ran several of these high end programs such as Autocad you had all these dongles daisy chained - it was insane. Plus it caused problems with certain software / printers.
Despite the so called copy protection, people still defeated it, yet everyone suffered. I just don't think DRM works - its costs are way higher than its benefits. I've got 6 machines here at home, I can see DRM restricting me to one machine or only working under windows despite that I dual boot XP / Linux.
I love to read all the free marketeers here tell us that the free market will fix this - it won't. All the large studios who control the content are supporting this en block. The consumer doesn't stand a chance. Any concessions that are made might allow me the 'privledge' of copying only on a machine running on an Intel(c) Trusted Computer under Microsoft(c) Longhorn but thats it.
A clarification is needed.
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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051004-538
As you can see from my coverage here, Intel isn't hinging support for Blu-ray on Managed Copy support. They're going to have to support it either way. Rather, Intel is trying to get the two parties together again to talk about unification, but they're stressing the importance of managed copy to the whole discussion.
I don't think you understand what digitally signed certificates are or how they work. The point of this idea (mostly encountered under the 'public key cryptography' umbrella) is that I can prove to you that I am who I claim to be without allowing you to impersonate me. In brief, the idea is as follows:
There exists two functions, "encrypt" and "decrypt" which are inverses to one another. The "encryption" function is publicly known, but only specific people (the TV in our example) knows how to "decrypt". Now the DVD player generates a random message, "encrypts" it, and gives the result to the TV. The TV "decrypts" it and returns the result, and the DVD can compare that to the original. Note that capturing the data in transit will do you no good -- the data was random! The "certificate" consisted in the ability to do something.
This depends, of course, on the encryption function being "one-way", in that it is very hard to compute the decryption functions from it. All modern cryptography depends on such functions. Finally, in case you were thinking of learning the secret ("decryption function") directly from the TV hardware, there exist tampre-proof chips that break when you try to do that.
If you value your freedom and that of your children you might want to make sure you buy only DRM-free devices and recordings.