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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. "
So much of the computer industry today is based on preventing competition. Software patents, DRM, DMCA lawsuits for interoperating with others' software... (Though reverse-engineering for interoperability was supposed to be allowed, just look at Blizzard and bnetd to see how this turned out in practice.)
Does anyone really think hardware manufacturers are promoting DRM to fight "piracy"? Kind-hearted, generous manufacturers just looking out for the poor little media industry? No, they are racing to be the first with a de-facto DRM system everyone has to use, so that they can license their DRM and be the toll-collectors for all digital communication. Nothing more, nothing less.
Whether a sufficient majority of corporations ends up accepting one of the DRM systems, or Congress ends up enacting one of them as law, it has virtually nothing to do with stopping "piracy" and everything to do with eliminating competitors, both in the hardware and media industries.
HDCP protection you say? Good thing it's already been broken (albeit anonymously). Coming new to you, DRM'd speakers, and your very own set of ContentProtection ((TM)) eyelids!
My UID is prime. Is yours?
It's a felony for me to hook a real monitor up to one of these things, right?
I'd love if there were a DRM system that worked invisibly and was effective at both stopping piracy as well as permitting fair usage.
That would be awesome.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Those familiar with my anti-copyright stance will see in this example how terrible copyright legislation is for content creation. The intent of copyright (to give authors a certain time-limited protection over what they create) has been destroyed, and is now controlled solely by a few massive corporations that control almost every form of media.
UDI is the final step in allowing them to control the old media formats (TV and radio generally). It WILL happen, as Congress and those who control the old formats fail to see that they're outdated and no one cares.
The Internet blew up, in my opinion, based entirely on people's ability to be heard and to hear others. You're seeing millions of bloggers who write freely in order to be heard, not in order to sell their thoughts by coercing others not to copy them. You see people quoted (not always being referenced either), you see people copying and re-posting, and you're seeing massive "piracy" of every copywritten work. Copyright not only failed, but ignoring it created the biggest form of media in literally years. The Internet is at least two orders of magnitude bigger than all the old-media productions in all of history, combined.
What is the next step? Major media companies will continue to restrict content, and billions of small content creates will get together in tiny groups and capture that market. Podcasting is replacing the radio for a small percentage today, but in 10 years where will radio be? It will be an overregulated monopoly that no one listens to because it attempts to target too broad a market.
TV and cable will be another forgotten phenomenon, at least in the way we watch it today. Hundreds of channels of regulated media can not compete with millions of vidcasts, especially as production qualities go up.
Look, folks, DRM doesn't matter. Communists wanted everyone equal, libertarians wanted everyone free. The Internet offers both side a solution that could never come from law or regulation or mandates -- people able to meet one another's needs, disregarding borders and laws and restrictions that we faced for hundreds of years.
DRM? Go for it, big producers. I'm finding new forms of entertainment every day, and it doesn't come in a pretty package and it isn't advertised by beautiful people.
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!
Dongles anyone? Interposed between computer and device that override the repsonses to answer back as an *APPROVED* device for the non approved one.
DUH
Next idea please.
Here's one - track down those that traffic in the pirated goods, and arrest them.
Quit treating customers as criminals.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
If this is any thing like Apple's Fairplay DRM, all you will have to do is bend over one pin and it will be turned off. It's a little bit off extra work on the consumers part, but thats why Apple does it. They know the average consumer usally is lazy and as lathargic as a slug.
"to be like god we make our own dolls to play with, but what does that make us, but dolls for god to play with?" Ikari,
How can the DRM software tell the difference between legitimate free software or a pirated work?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
From Channel Register:The UDI initiative is being led by Intel and its new best friend, Apple, along with Samsung, LG, Nat Semi and Silicon Image. The likes of Nvidia, Foxconn, JAE Electronics, THine Electronics and FCI are also contributing to the spec.
However, they've got competition. The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has already begun work on DisplayPort, its answer to DVI's successor standard. DisplayPort is set to support both internal and external monitor connections, and can be used with multimedia kit.
So, once more we have two groups vying to make their technology a "standard", which then leads to a protracted battle over whose "standard" should be adopted. And in the midst, some technology will likely come along to make the new "standard(s)" obsolescent.
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I think the link to UDI is to the Uniform Driver Interface folks. I think this UDI is different.
we already have HDMI. It supports digital video transfer, has loads of bandwidth and even supports the transport of audio along the same cable. It supports HDCP and it is the standard for High Definition TV. my TV has 2 HDMI ports already.
I know HDMI has a couple of issues, it currently doesn't hass 6 channel high definition audio along the cable, ie SACD and DVDA, but I believe that's due with v1.2 or 1.3, it's on the schedule anyway. The other issue I think is that it only supports video resolutions, ie 720p and 1080i/p. but I'm sure this could be easily revised in the next version to support other resolutions too.
make sure it has backwards compatibility and what's the problem? why do we need yet another connector when we have, and are already using a good one.
is there any other reason to introduce UDI?
dave
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.
I don't think hardware manufacturers were bullied. If DRM is mandated, e.g., to watch HD on a computer you need a certain videocard and a certain monitor, then users will have to upgrade. If they upgrade, they'll have to buy all new stuff. This is a huge boon to manufacturers and software companies.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The people-as-batteries scenario in The Matrix was just an accurate metaphor for what the "content industry" would like us all to become. Plugged up with inputs they alone control, we provide only the juice to keep the diabolical system going.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
These companies try to develop the best DRM technology because they know that the media companies are heavily, heavily lobbying on making DRM required in everything you see, hear, or experience. If their system becomes the one legislatively mandated, well then, you've got yourself a government-supported monopoly there, and a steady income from the licensing of the DRM technology, for which you can charge whatever you want.
Of course, if DRM becomes law, I'll be among the first to break it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
*sigh* I remember when industry standards were a good thing...
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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...that people bought yesterday? There's going to be an uprising if people can't watch current content on their monitors due to DRM. The industry should NOT be allowed to just make you HAVE to buy new hardware simply to access current content. That SHOULD be illegal if we had sane regulations that favored the consumer.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Hardware-based DRM has proven time and time again to be totally ineffective at stopping anyone from doing anything. By nature of being hardware based, it can't change. Because it can't change, it's a stationary target for hackers and someone *will* find a way around it in a matter of months.
It can be legislated to hell and back and it still won't make a bit of difference. I guarantee you a lot of countries have bigger problems than enforcing American patents/copyrights and have no interest in complying with any anti-circumvention laws either. Someone will crack it, the crack will get out into the wild, and it'll be like the DRM never existed.
Let them waste their money developing expensive DRM schemes that a 17 year old in Romania will break 6 months after it's released. The laws don't exist to prosecute this kind of thing in many countries, nor should they. MPAA/RIAA tired of losing money? Stop producing crap and people will buy it. But look at their members' profit/loss sheets recently, what they say in public is in polar opposite to what they tell their shareholders...
the content is now unprotected for all time
Sort of. This is an excellent, clever way to copy the content. However, consider that the copy you have captured may still be watermarked or otherwise uniquely identifiable.
From the perspectives of piracy-detection and legal-prosecution, you may still be on dangerous ground: copies made as you suggest may be tracable and still cause grief for you or anyone posessing them, depending on how the courts interpret "fair-use" that week. I hope using the technique you suggest for personal backup purposes would be legitimate, but you've clearly circumvented a digital rights mechanism (and possibly left evidence in the copy) and I am not a lawyer.
Why do people insist on reusing names for unrelated things? Project UDI is a technology allowing device drivers to be portable across different operating systems and platforms. Project UDI doesn't address display technologies, much less DRM. This "Unified Display Interface" seems to be something entirely different, and it's unfortunate that they're trying to re-coin the "UDI" acronym. The UDI link in the summary is simply wrong.
On the other hand, Project UDI is a very cool technology that people should be supporting, so I guess the extra exposure could help, as long as people don't confuse UDI (Uniform Driver Interface) with UDI (Unified Display Interface)... *sigh*
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
......If they upgrade, they'll have to buy all new stuff......
That's a big IF! Current video, just like today's average stereo and even buggy, virus prone Windows, is plenty good enough quality for millions of current users. Any HD TV upgrading incentive is nowhere nearly as compelling as the transition from VCR to DVD or from vinyl LPs to audio CD were about 20 years ago. Both vinyls and VCR tapes, for example were subject to wear and reduced quality, each time they were played. There was nothing even the most careful handling would help to elimiate this problem. The optical technologies removed this large disadvantage. In the case of VCR vs DVD the fact that DVDs don't need to be rewound and are random access also was a very compelling reason for users to upgrade. By millions of users upgrading, the media companies made gobs of money from re-selling the contents of their vaults back again to consumers of the new playback devices.
The only advantage I can see the new, expensive HD format has over the current DVD, is higher resolution. None of the previous very compelling reasons to upgrade apply. A conventional DVD played back on a big screen TV is plenty good enough for most consumers. This is also true of the present broadcast TV progrmming. HD TV does not reduce in any way the frequency nor obnoxiousness of the innumerable commercials on most channels nor improve on the content itself. For a long time, manufacturers of large screen monitors will have to provide connectivity to existing signal sources. Not many consumers have a desire to replace their DVD collection just for a clearer picture alone.
All theory is gray
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.
OK, let me be clear, because I'm getting tired of people (not just you) reading things into my posts that aren't there.
I am no apologist for the big media industries. I think their lobbying to get copyright terms extended to almost geological timescales is both morally wrong and probably bad for business in the long run too. I think fair use provisions should be rights, and should explicitly include common things like making back-ups, format-shifting and making compilations, and moreover I think any attempt by a copyright holder to actively restrict the enjoyment of those rights by a legitimate holder of a copy of the material should be subject to legal blocks. As far as I'm concerned, they can take their ineffective-against-real-lawbreakers but annoying-to-genuine-customers DRM and shove it if that happens to conflict with the above (as it almost inevitably will). Finally, it's about time the whole industry was dealt with over its transparent price-fixing and other anti-competitive behaviour, as provided for in law.
There, now I've got that off my chest, I will also say that I belive the underlying principle of copyright is sound. Our economies work, and pretty well in comparison to many others, based on some basic capitalist principles. People who rip off copyright material are upsetting the economics at best, and screwing a genuinely needy content creator out of fair compensation for their work at worst. I have no sympathy for people who do this, get caught, and get punished in a proportionate manner. If you rip an album, put it on P2P, let thousands of people copy it illegally, and get caught, then I have no problem whatsoever with your being fined a few thousand times the current selling price of the album, and I don't for an instant buy the usual weasel words about people not necessarily buying the album otherwise, or about the guy who buys more music as a result of the illegal copying (whom I strangely have never met).
Now, to address the specific point you mentioned, sure, let's view copyright infringement as it applies today, and that DRM is designed to combat, in light of the extended copyright duration we agree is too long. How many of the works covered by DRM today would have been out of copyright under a more reasonable timespan of, say, 10 years? What proportion of material traded on obviously mostly illegal P2P nets is less than 5 years old, and still easily available at stores? What proportion is less than three months old, and probably still recovering genuine expenses that those responsible for creating the work incurred, never mind making a profit or covering the media groups' other expenses on acts that didn't work out? (Yes, I know the big media players are very good at passing this on -- which just means you're slamming the good guys who actually make new content if you dodge paying early on.)
If you can show a serious level of correlation between the content widely swapped and increasingly distributed with some form of DRM attached, and the content that is now covered by extended copyright periods but wouldn't have been under the original duration, I'll read your comments with an open mind. Maybe you'll even convince me that my current position on this issue is wrong. However, right now I suspect that the vast, vast majority of illegal copying that DRM is aiming for would be well within even the original copyright durations, and the whole extended duration thing, while a valid concern in its own right, is nothing but more smoke and mirrors to try and justify an ethically dubious position to most illegal swappers.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Your analysis is quite right: you will not be able to create open content without paying for patent licenses and keys (directly or indirectly).
Additionally, however, one should be aware that this is likely no accident: the RIAA and MPAA members are probably more concerned about new competitors entering the market and the distribution of open content than about piracy. So, while the ostensible goal of DRM is to curb privacy, it is ultimately more about creating barriers to entry.