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New Consortium to Push UDI and Include DRM
MarsGov writes "Intel, Apple, Samsung, LG, Nat Semi and Silicon Image formed a consortium to promote Unified Display Interface (UDI) as the new standard to connect computers to monitors and TVs. UDI will be HDMI and HDCP "anti-piracy" compatible. "
Looking past the news report and skimming the documents, I see nothing in the core spec (vol 2) nor the physical spec that requires DRM by default? If I'm reading the specs right, It may be HDMI and HDCP compatible, but you can certainly develop without them. I could be confused, of course, so wait to see if Stallman to revisits the project. Notice that this project has been going on for quite some time. :)
Get off my launchpad!
Let them put the DRM in. It will just get cracked, and then we will use it like we want to anyway. It will be against the law, and the guy that cracks it will probably face a law suit. What we need to wait for is grandmother or a teacher getting sued for using the crack under what would normally be fair use. Then maybe the public notice how bad it is getting. Or maybe they will screw up the DRM and it will open the doors for display viruses. Screw pop up porn ads. How about in monitor ads. Little Billy will have a hard time why the naked women on the screen won't go away. In short, I fear that DRM must first get worse before it will get any better.
How about replacing the cathode ray tube in one of these TV sets with a dummy one?
From the current flowing in the scan coils, we can determine where the electron beam is on the screen {though to generate a standard timing signal, we really only care about when it jumps to the left hand side or the top}. From the three grid drives, we can get the levels of red, green and blue light emitted by the nearest pixel.
Apply some rudimentary signal conditioning which, if you could get the circuitry to fit on an A6 size piece of breadboard, you really would not be trying at all; and you have a set of signals suitable for feeding into any old-fashioned SCART socket on any old-fashioned TV set or DVD+RW recorder.
There is no way to protect any kind of content against the "dummy CRT" attack -- and once it has been successfully applied, the content is now unprotected for all time
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Letter To Iran
Actually, I love big productions. My lady and I go to other cities all over the world to see them live, and we attend film festivals to see them first.
When Serenity came out in theaters, I liked the plot so much I went 4 times (x2). When the DVD came out yesterday, I bought one copy for myself and 6 for presents. Yet when Serenity was released on ThePirateBay, I downloaded it until I could buy it. Why did I pay Joss Whedon and Universal for their DVD? Because I wanted to support their FUTURE efforts, not their past ones.
Nothing prevents content producers from protecting their creations in a free market. I'd say you have a good argument up to 1995 or so, but with the Internet, content producers can completely control their own content with zero laws. All they have to do is create stronger encryption standards, get together and make hardware that follows it, and they're there. That's what they're doing here. I am completely fine with content creators doing this -- I don't believe in copyright so I don't believe in fair use.
The consumers will also be fine with DRM. It will only succeed if it meets the needs of all parties. If it doesn't, another format will succeed. You can't stop entertainment, but you can stop those who don't allow every party to profit from the transaction.
The toll-collector aspect is twofold:
1) You have to buy hardware with DRM built into it -- otherwise you can't communicate with anyone else who's in the DRM chain.
Usually this DRM is protected by patents and/or trade-secrets, so every individual piece of hardware needs a license from the IP holder. At the very least, it requires knowledge of private encryption keys and/or registration of public encryption keys with a central authority. This probably won't be a free service, and by definition can't be a public service, otherwise the private keys will be exposed to the public and the system does nothing.
2) Despite what they tell us, a working DRM system cannot freely permit unscreened content from third-party, independent producers.
Here's why: if the system allows unflagged media to enter and be displayed normally, it allows an independent content creator to release non-DRM-encumbered content. It also allows anyone with the know-how to bypass the DRM on a single piece of licensed content and re-release it without the DRM. Thereafter, anyone using p2p sharing will just download the re-released, non-DRM version, and it will be appropriately non-flagged as if it were a piece of independent content. Voila, the DRM chain is broken.
Therefore, the only DRM system that has a chance of working is one that requires all content to be registered in some manner, even if the registration is provided without charge (at a loss) to independent creators. This means you can't distribute your newest novel without going through a corporate/government approval body.
It's certainly possible no functional DRM system will ever enter widespread use, and I hope this is the case. However, the only functional DRM systems will meet both of the above criteria. In my limited foresight, that is what the DRM supporters are actually attempting, only in small steps at first.
(I wrote this reply soon after you posted, but Slashdot's excessive anti-anonymity measures have delayed its posting for over 58 minutes. For this reason, I'll be unable to reply again even should your life depend upon a response.)
All fine and good, except only half the project is content producers banding together to create stronger technical protections and hardware to enforce it. The problematic half is them banding together to pressure for the passage of laws mandating that every TV contain these technologies, criminalizing hacking them etc etc. So the libertarian "let the market decide if it wants DRM" dream is, well, a dream.
Right now, they rely on the DMCA and other stupid laws to protect their BADLY WRITTEN DRM. If they want stronger DRM, they have to realize they can't rely on laws to protect bad programming.
I personally wouldn't buy a proprietary media format, but if consumers do, then producers should be free to make whatever they want. I believe that competition will let the cream rise to the top.
I don't believe in copyright either, but, due to its legal side, DRM is like copyright only worse. You may not believe in fair use, but copyright with fair use is less repugnant than copyright without it.
Let's ignore copyright for a moment and look at the most restrictive protections on content not using the law: subscriptions. Many writers (including myself) have private subscription newsletters that people pay to receive. They could copy these newsletters (and some do) the majority don't -- they want the information and they don't want many others knowing about it. I look at some of the US$1000 per year newsletters I used to subscribe to and I never saw them hitting the public eye.
The same is true with any information. You can sell information that is valuable, and you can sell information that isn't. If it doesn't have much value, you have to make your money by offering it to the widest audience at the lowest price. $2 for a TV show per person (x10,000) versus $1000 for an investment newsletter (x20) is the same money. Which has a bigger market, and which is more valuable?
Copyright can't change simple economics. If you make a product that is good quality and people want to see more, they'll pay for it. If they don't care about it, they won't.
I'm pleased that they're using HDCP as it's been cracked already.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/236
Its going to be really interesting to see how successful the new consortium is in forcing US copyright legislation on the rest of the world.
Or, perhaps, hardware not made in the US, or for US export only, will have versions of the interface that don't include DHCP. Gee. I wonder how long it will take for US consumers to buy their hardware from outside the US instead.
Also worth noting: there's nobody from Microsoft, and nobody from Red Hat. IBM has some people, but IBM is so big they send a few people to any standards effort.
In other words, any DRM system that would actually prevent copyright infringment would necessarily disallow un-"protected" content, because any method of allowing non-DRM content (including all Free content) would allow cracked (i.e. de-DRM'd) content as well.No, this isn't FUD. In fact, we're only one step away from it now. For example, SSL certificates aren't free, unless they're self-signed. And because of the point made above, the equivalent of self-signed (or unsigned) certificates could not be allowed at all in the DRM system, or it stops working. Therefore, there would necessarily be a central licensing authority to which all content must be submitted. Moreover, there's no reason to belive licensing would be free, because Verisign isn't free.
Make no mistake, any DRM system that worked as I describe would be very, very bad. Not just because it would create a "DRM tax," but because it would also make censorship trivial merely by witholding licenses from anyone that Central Licensing doesn't like. In effect, we would all become digital serfs, with Microsoft and the RIAA (or this consortium -- whoever wins the battle) as our Lord and Master.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz