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DRM and the Myth of the Analog Hole
Art Grimm writes "Movie studios want to punish legitimate customers for legally purchasing content, while the real pirates go right on stealing. ZDNet's George Ou writes: "There seems to be a persistent myth floating around the board rooms of the movie companies and Congress that analog content is the boogie man of music and video piracy. In fact, they're so paranoid about it that they're considering a mechanism called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that punishes law-abiding customers for content that they legally purchased. But ironically, the real content pirates who make millions of bootleg movies have no intention of ever taking advantage of the so called "analog hole" because that is the slowest and lowest quality method of stealing content.""
It ain't about stopping ``piracy.'' Not even in the slightest.
It's all about control, and the power that goes with it.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
The whole thing is stupid. The studios will never win.
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Their real fear is that it is becoming easier and easier for people to make THEIR OWN CONTENT and distribute it for free, aka youtube.com. Some of the best movies have been low budget movies produced by a few people with vision.
The whole analog hole (and DRM in general) really isn't about piracy. The studios and labels know they won't be stopping anyone who wants to rip the off on a larger scale.
...
Instead, it's about us not format shifting, basically. The idea that you can take music or movies you bought and play wherever you are, at full quality, is anathema to them. They want us to pay for the CD. Then pay for the mobile phone version. And the portable player. And the car. And
A lot of the movie and music sales - and an even larger part of the profits - the past fifteen years have been people rebuying stuff they own in a new format. Beloved LP recordings and worn out VHS tapes were bought again as CD:s and DVD:s. But now, with fully digitalized content, there is little reason to ever do that again. Copies don't degrade, and the quality is already high enough (especially for music) that a new format just isn't very tempting.
But if you stop people from moving their data from evice to device, people will have to re-buy their content whenever they get a new device. It's an eternal upgrade revenue stream, like the shift from recordings to CD, but without any improvement in the viewer experience;without even having to pay for remastering or repackaging, in fact. And the more fine-grained you make the mesh of walls, the more often we have to pay again. Studios probably love that online services aren't standardized or compatible with each other; it means another resale every time someone switches from one service to another.
In fact, if I were a studio executive, and of a manipulative frame of mind, I'd back one service to the hilt - for, say, three or four years. Then I'd switch allegiance to a new (but incompatible) service, nudging everybody to switch, and pay again. If I'd be _really_ manipulative, I'd look at what my fellow executives in other studios are doing and try to coordinate the shift with them (no need to actually make a shady deal; just follow the group). I wonder a little, in fact, just how much time iTunes has left as the current king of the hill.
A steady stream of income without ever even having to produce any content. Who would not love that business model?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I've seen few summaries so bad. First of all, it's so dripping with bias that it's hard to understand what is even being said. The write-up should include details, not opinion! Also, it fails to make the basic distinction between copyright infringement and theft.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
...and what's more, it IMNSHO can never be entirely plugged.
So long as content has to be displayed, it has to be converted to analog signals in the process. And while it may take a large amount of effort to "uncover" the hole - such as, disassembling an LCD panel and tapping into the driver circuitry - it only takes one person to redigitize the open content and distribute it, and all of a sudden it's everywhere again.
There *IS* one strategy that might work; it involves adding a system for embedding a digital watermark to the decryption mechanism, which could help content owners track stolen content back to the one who did the stealing (assuming that person or group had no way to cover their tracks). But if the content owners implemented such a strategy, there'd no longer be a reason to cover the hole!
All I can say is, if I do purchase a HD-disc and then discover it won't play at full resolution on my hardware, I'll simply download a free-market copy. I'm sure they'll still be available.
it is impossible to empower a customer to consume your content while at the same time restrict their ability to copy it, by any means, with any technology, with any scheme you can devise
it's simply a matter that providing them the tools to consume your media also provides them the tools to copy it, and it is simply not possible to do one without also enabling the other
it's philosophically impossible, no analog hole need apply
the philosophical impossibility is supplied by the concept called "free will"
no company, no matter how much time, technological innovation, or money it has, can defeat a group of poor technologically astute teenagers with time and motivation on their hands to consume your media without your restrictions. no human-devised security sytem cannot also be defeated by human beings. there is no such thing as a technological fix to human ingenuity
the poorest of your customers, who are therefore the most motivated to steal your content, just happen to also be your prime target demographic audience as well
in other words, the current ip system is simply doomed
checkmate
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have a solution to all this DRM nonsense... Make and play your own music (I play guitar), they can't DRM or control that in any way. Besides it is a very satisfying and rewording hobby.
~Allen
It ain't about stopping ``piracy.'' Not even in the slightest. It's all about control, and the power that goes with it.
I cannot believe that. Power for power's sake? Why? You seem to think these guys are a kind of evil overlord trying to keep the peons in their place. That's about the silliest possible motivation there could be because it flies in the face of reality.
NO, what motivates these guys is money, pure and simple (not that there's anything wrong with that since I'm an ardent capitalist). They want to do whatever they can to make as much money as the can for as little cost as they can. Following that logic, we find that if something costs them money or reduces the amount of money they can make, they'll be against it. But here's what you fail to realize: the customer is in the driver's seat here, not the media moguls.
If DRM is too intrusive or obnoxious, consumers won't buy into it, especially since DVD's are already here and "good enough" for most folks. If the industry starts getting heavy handed with ICT, consumers can and quite likely will revolt. Then, faced with the prospect of losing money, the industry will capitulate. They need our dollars (or pounds, or Euros, or whatever) far more than we need them. Deep down, they know that. The problem is that most consumers don't know it yet. But if pushed, they will discover it quite fast.
It's not about power, it's about money. No matter what the media moguls do, the one thing they cannot do is force us to buy their products. We have the power of choice, they do not.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I doubt it's a myth. I bet they know exactly what they are doing. It's just all a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
They know they are fighting a losing battle with the "digital copies" that won't be affected by closing the analog hole. However, they also know that they have a captive audience of people that have already purchased their product. These people, at some point, WANT the purchased product.
Media shifting has (or at least was, don't know if recent case law has overruled or changed it) been legal as fair use. That means it is (or was) legal to copy a CD to casette if you legally purchased the CD and wanted to listen to it in your car cassette deck.
The media companies don't like this. They want you to have to pay them a second time for the different media. They could not (or at least I don't think they have) stop the fair-use media shifting directly. Now, however, using the guise of piracy, they are taking steps to stop people from being able to do their own media shifting. The end result will be, at least what the media industry hopes will be, a large customer base of people that they know will spend money, since they have once already, on their product that will be more inclined to spend money again for different media.
Think about it like this. If an older album sold 10,000,000 copies on cassette, and the same album then sold 1,000,000 copies on CD, the media industry will look at trends like that and see an automatic 10% revenue source for minimal work. Now, suppose a CD sells 10,000,000 copies, and the next audio format comes out. If they can make it imposible to copy that CD to the new media format, then it is likely that they'll be able to capture another 10%. 10% doesn't sound like much, but if they sell 1,000,000 copies of a song, and they are pocketing 1 or 2 dollars, that's 1 to 2 million dollars extra, times the number of titles they can repeat this process with.
In the end, I think they know exactly what they are doing.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
When someone listens to a song the emotional attachment is made with the artist of the song, NOT the company that produced it. I personally feel the whole DRM situation would taper off if this emotional attachment was reflected economically when a consumer purchases a CD. That way the consumer has an emotional incentive to obtain the song legally since their purchase goes directly to the artist and enforces this emotional attachment. The same is true for movies, books etc. The problem is that in order for this to happen, the large producing/publishing companies will have to go away (or at least fall backstage). These companies know this, and what we are seeing is their attempts to stop natural economic and technological trends. Once it becomes economically feasible for an artist/author to produce/publish their work somewhere else, either by themselves or via companies that don't demand ownership of their work, they will do it, and DRM, as well as large producing/publishing companies won't be needed as much.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
...because it requires the co-operation of hardware manufacturers. Sure, your Big Names are going to fall in line - Sony, Philips, Pansonic etc. But there will still be a host of Chinese/Korean/Singaporean manufacturers who will simply disregard the DRM restrictions. I have a DVD player imported from Korea - plays MPEG-2/MPEG-4, PAL/NSTC, completely disregards region encoding and Macrovision 'quality control', and lets me skip any part of the disc that I want (none of this 'cant use the remote on this piece of video' crap). Plus, is has Component Video Out, DVI/HDMI OUT, VGA Out - pretty much any connector you can think of, it has it. Cost less than $150 (minus shipping).
The studios are fooling themselves if they think all hardware shops are going to fall in line. Right now, less than 5% of containers arriving at our ports are screened for radioactive materials - do you really think that some know-nothing Customs Agent is going to care about a harmless DVD player?
They are already willing to degrade quality in order to prevent fair use. What's a little more then?
I suggest you read Slashdot
I can't have simply a satellite receiver, oh no, I need to have a CrapTV receiver and if for some reason I'd like to switch or buy some "other" programming, well receiver goes to the trash. What is the goddamned deal here? Same with the cell phones, cable tv, sat radio and few other things. I really cannot fathom how can equipment manufacturers even go for this crap? It is almost unimaginable that we have somehow managed to build a universally accessible Internet. Someone must have had a brain fart and forgot to grease our public servants.
Back in the day I truly enjoyed my first TiVo. Awesome product and what a concept. Add a dash of DirecTV and one ends up with TiShit. The thing changes channels on its own to record infomercials, convininently and regularly reorganinzes my channel list to include removed by me shopping channels, bitches constantly about not being able to call home and a host of other annoying things. AND to top it all off we're being charged $5 or so a month for a DVR SERVICE. What fucking service!? I bought the damn thing for top dollars, it's a computer with a hard drive and all it does is record what I tell it to. What service!? That whole DRM shit is really no surprise and will likely go the same way. We enjoyed having pricey but no less standardized CD's and DVD's for a long while but the end is near. We'll end up with yet another "service". Wanna listen at home? Here you go. Wanna listen in your car? Sure, you'll need to pay more for this additional, exciting "service". Wanna listen to some other record label? Well you'll need a whole new equipment for that. Actually it's already here in the form of sat radio. It's not about piracy at all. Frankly those who'd even consider watching a video-recorded movie are pathetic losers who have no appreciacion for film, any film and will not spend real money on it anyway. Pirates will do whatever they do and no crappy DRM will stop them just like all the software activations and cable/sat scrambling haven't done a thing but to annoy and limit an already and duly paying customer. Actually it may as well increase the demand for pirated media not because it's cheaper or free, but because you'll be actually able to listen to it, watch it or use it. It is not about providing customers with content, it's about controlling what you do and selling sub-content. Commercials on TV don't work cause everyone hates them so they need to sell shit some other way. They'd be glad to precede every song on a CD with an "information from our sponsor" and to ensure sponsor's happy, it'd be neat if they could guarrantee that the customer will definitely listen to the promo - cause he's got no say in the matter. Yea, he paid for the CD, who gives a shit, we can make more money this way. It also be cool if we somehow made it a law prohibiting turning down the volume for the promo's duration. Many DVD's already have that great feature and one must sit thru several minutes of stupid - ehem pardon me, "exciting" previews before they get to watch a movie that they paid for. They're so exciting they have to make us watch it, to watch it. Some media
The funny thing is that the studios would almost certainly see a lot less actual piracy if they would stop having their DVD presses run cheaply in China and other places where it's sometimes difficult to find a legit DVD.
I guess they added up the figures and came to the conclusion it's still cheaper doing it that way. They only fake the losses when they need to force through some new law.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Long and short, DRM and copy protection stops casual copiers. But dedicated copiers, if left with no other alternative, still have the analog hole as a last resort. And once one dedicated copier puts something on the file sharing nets... ...it will be more convenient to download the pirated version of the film than to buy it in a store and jump through whatever hoops they want you to jump through in order to get it to play. Video games reached this point a few years ago - there are lots of people who go out and buy a game, then download a pirated version (or just a crack) so they can play it without all the anti-piracy crap.
Steve Jobs touched on this issue when he introduced the iTunes Music Store. Apple understands that in order to make money selling music, they have to make it significantly less hassle to buy it legally than to pirate it. The MPAA hasn't figured this out yet.
I don't watch very much TV, so I have no interest in paying for cable or satelite TV. However, I really like The Daily Show. I used to pirate it via BitTorrent, but then SuprNova got shut down, then another torrent site got shut down, TVTorrents doesn't seem to have new episodes posted on a regular basis, the P2P networks I've looked at are unreliable and slow and don't usually have new episodes... there are probably other places I could look, but it's just a pain in the ass. So when Apple announced they would be selling a monthly subscription, I jumped at the chance to throw money at them. Why? Because it's significantly easier than pirating. It's not perfect yet (iTMS MultiPass isn't as smooth and seamless as Podcasts are), but it's not a pain in the ass.
I don't have much money to spend on entertainment right now. If you want any of it, you have to give me something I want for a price I think is reasonable without being obnoxious about it. Period.
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That must be why movie studios spend millions of dollars restoring master copies of old films (gone with the wind etc.) then... or are you just talking rubbish? The best way to preserve something long-term is to keep copying it (like medieval monks with manuscripts), and that works better with digital methods (and extensive error correction codes) than with analog.
Its about control of the consumer/citizen.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I am a big libertarian over here in Europe (which would translate to democrat in the US, yes, we are so far apart!), but there might be times when markets do seem to fail. The DVD was a large success. But the next generation? DRM is just one of the areas where the entertainment industry seems hopelss. Will the consumer "wait and see" for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray? I guess they will. Will they wait for DRM to actually work? Most likely! Will that translate into much sales? Hardly!
Same happened to the music industry and online distribution. They slept through it. They didn't even combat online piracy very good. They still don't. Maybe in part because Kazaa promotes the most popular and therefore acutally serves them. But iTunes came along pretty late in the game and still much earlier than the labels themselves.
Many people now have some sort of 5.1 or 6.1 Dolby Digital system at home. The music industry could sell all their stuff in sourround and reap similar profits to the movie industry with their old stuff on DVD selling like mad. Competing formats, no marketing, complete failure!!!
I still don't think the government should get involved in many of those cases, simply because markets sort it out eventually (see iTunes). But they would serve the industry much better if they would take lead in some sort of standard body. It might take longer with the government involved, but shorter and cheaper than the upcoming standards war.
IMHO this is the most important factor in trying to fight onerous DRM: The average consumer's complete apathy towards and/or ignorance of the drawbacks of the technology. And now we've hit on the REAL cause of theater revenues dropping in recent years. People used to like going to the movies. They paid a few bucks, got a decent seat, some popcorn, STFU'd, and watched the movie on a big screen. Now, you pay an arm and a leg, get a plastic seat, pay the other arm and leg for popcorn (or risked ejection by bringing your own snacks), yack yack yack incessantly throughout the movie (either to their companions or their cell phones), and watch the movie on some screen that probably has been completely poorly maintained, if at all, and listen to sound on blown out K-Mart quality speakers. Even the bigwigs at the MPAA have admitted that the poor theater experience contributes to the loss of revenues they're seeing. (There are exceptions to this experience; I saw V for Vendetta on opening weekend in a "premium cinema" near where I live. It's expensive, sure, but not all that much more than a regular theater, and when you factor in that the popcorn is free, the seats are leather, you have 2 of your own armrests, a pull-out tray table, and a full bar in the lobby that allows you to bring drinks into the theater, not to mention the THX spec sound an video, it's a fucking bargain.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
A digital SPDIF out is built into 99% of DVD players, most of which play regular ol' audio CD's. Since a PC has been determined by the courts to NOT be a recording device (the RIAA vs. lost the MP3 Players case), so SCMS is not an issue, the SPDIF out looks to be a yawning Digital Hole, although digital capture would be limited to a 1X speed. SPDIF to USB anyone? I'm sure there are some cheap (under $70) USB Audio Adapters that will enable SPDIF CD ripping from a DVD player ... in fact, a cheap cable that's just SPDIF-to-USB has been a dream of mine --- truly a RipCord (TM, I hope soon).
I'm a software guy - otherwise I'd create this thing ... any volunteers in the hardware world? We will all be grateful to you for the death of ALL audio CD copy protection.