Slashdot Mirror
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.""
As far as I can tell from the chatter, only W-B seems dead-set on using ICT. Fox has decided against it, University probably won't, and Disney likewise seems to be leaning on the side not activating ICT (for now). A few weeks ago Sony surprised me by also opting out.
I'm not sure why the media companies are trending so softly on this issue... most people with analog HDTVs won't know the difference between the degraded and full-resolution versions anyway, and the video-philes who would catch on are likely too small a group to really impact the companies.
Me, I'm so disgusted with the whole DRM mess that I feel absolutely no compulsion to get HD in any form. Perhaps as my current technology begins to wear out I'll find myself spending more time in the real world, with its amazing "true to life" resolutions and frame-rates.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
I will not buy any DRM crippled product, movies or music and am not shy about encouraging others to boycott them. Respect my personal property rights after the sale, or there will be no sale.
How ya like dat?
Everything has been said about movies that can be said. But i've noticed everyone is kinda focusing on DVD's and movies still in theaters. In some ways..the analog hole is being closed in the HD world. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players aren't going to include componet video output and the newer HDTV componets are abandoning componet as well, per FCC ruling, going exclusively to HDMI and DVI connections. Which not only has a LOT of HDTV owners up in arms because our sets are going to be completely useless, but does in a way close the analog hole in the HDTV world. Then again, it's only a matter of time before someone makes a converter. However, the audio world is the one place i continue to see an analog hole exist. SACD and DVD-Audio players use analog outputs rather than optical or coaxial digital signals to carry thier audio to the reciever. Analog audio is good quality, let's not forget we live in an analog world..our eyes and ears process analog. The main problem in the piracy world is taking advantage of this hole properly, which many won't do because of the time and expense involved. I'm an audio engineer, I quite honestly find audio Cd's quite lacking in the sound game. The whole audio and DRM thing has come up before, along with discussions of the analog hole. The problem with the hole in the audio world is the equipment is almost good enough to capture an analog source with virturally no noticable loss of signal. It was even brought up a few times that record companies go back to distributing on vinyl to prevent piracy, it MIGHT work comsidering few people have the capability to properly record vinyl. It still boils down to someone will find a way..even if you've got someone with clip-leads in the back of a TV set reading the raw RGB being sent to the projectors (at least until we abandon CRT technolgy)..the methods will keep getting more creative..and the quality may or may not in As far as movie theaters..that's a losing game. Cameras keep getting smaller and smaller and more hidden in everday objects. Even if you place IR emitters around the screen to "overpower" the brightness of the screen in video carmera...a simple IR filter fixes that. So, in the myth of the analog hole...i couldn't call it busted..and i wouldn't quite call it confirmed as quality issue is there..but i'd diffently call it plausable.
I agree for the most part. They don't care about professional pirates. They've already figured out they can't do much about them. They are trying to keep the average user from being able to copy it. Analog is a huge hole in that regard, because even the hopelessly incompetent can use it.
The biggest problem facing independent distribution is NOT global corporations; they have little to fear from independent developers. The biggest problem facing independent media is not the difficulty of production/distribution; the biggest problem is that THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE WILLING TO CREATE MEDIA!!
Steve Wozniak, the (co)founder of Apple Computers, once remarked that he thought every one would write the software he or she needed, and people would be free of the big software companies forever! While many quality open source applications are available, there are still many software niches where open source alternatives are either nonexistent or lacking compared to a commercial alternative.
When desktop publishing software became affordable, some analysts predicted that every person could have their own magazine; this is not the case. You do not have to spend much to distribut your music online, even if you want to charge money for it. You do not have to spend much to start an amateur film studio, yet there are not many independent films out there on the 'net'. Hell, there are not even that many amateur pr0n films! (at least, not at the rate I go through them)
For independent development to flourish, people just have to shut up and start producting: software, music, literature, videos, etc.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
The real analog hole that the studios are trying to eliminate is the massive amount of legal content already in people's homes that the studios think is stopping people from buying new content.
Pirates are just a useful scapegoat.
I was recently looking for a DVD player/recorder for my parents. They wanted the player for two reasons, one to record shows they like, and two to send some home videos off to my sister in England. When I went to a few stores to check out the models they had, I asked one of the sales staff if the recorders could encode region free DVDs (so my sister could pay them on her TV). He looked at me like I was some kind of crook and actually said: "here in Canada we obey international copyright law".
Sure I could have reencoded the DVDs after they were recorded, but that is beside the point. My parents own the copyright to their home videos and should be able to do whatever they want with them. This is just another case of the industry hurting the consumers.
We didn't buy.
you don't *have* to buy bottled water. same psychology as starbucks: people like to splurge on themselves. you *have* to go through time warner if you want the movies they own the rights to. this is a limitation on what you consider yours: your culture. thus the resentment and the impetus to act
there are two kinds of riches: financial riches and cultural riches. content creating companies are limiting the public domain as much as they can, and will push the limits forever, until there is no public domain. the impetus to do that is driven by financial gain, theirs, at a corresponding culturual loss, ours. songs and movies that should have gone into the public domain years ago won't go into the public domain now until you are dead, thanks to sonny bono
so that is what is happening in your world todya. ip law has ceased to make sense and ceased to be morally sound. corporations are enriching themselves at your detriment. you should own your culture, all of us should own our culture. but if it were up to bmg, time warner, etc., they would own your culture forever
it's a balance. the content creators DO have a right to limit your access to content they create. this provides them with an incentive to create content. but only in certain ways, and only for a certain amount of time. and yet currently, the limitations on what they can do to limit your access and how long they can limit it are exapnding beyond the common sense balance between financial incentive and cultural considerations
what do those limitations do? they impoverish you. not financially. they impoverish you culturally
that's not morally right, nor even financially sound, in the long run, for the content owners. for pulic domain culture is the basis for the creators of content for the next big financial gains of tomorrow
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are a LOT of idiots posting and modding here now, and they all seem to have 6-digit UIDs. I wonder why that is?
Because a population of 899,999 is very likely going to have more idiots in it than a population of 99,999?
Seems like there's a lot of idiots posting anonymously, but that's not much of a revelation either..
The biggest problem facing independent distribution is the signal-to-noise ratio. It's easy enough these days to make a movie, CD, app, or any other sort of media and distribute it -- and people are doing that nonstop. On any college campus, there are more artistic events than crowds to attend them. The problem is sorting out the good stuff and delivering it to passive consumers.
Old Media established itself performing that service. Now, it's becoming clear that we don't really need them to do it for us, with mainstream music and Hollywood blockbusters becoming ever more WTF-ish and handy Web apps making the task of finding high-quality independent stuff ever easier. I don't think consumers a whole see these copyrights as being anywhere near as valuable as the corporate owners do. Remember that Netscape used to sell for $40 [didn't check fact at all], videotapes used to sell for aroun $99, and a CD with one good song would sell for $20 (as opposed to $0.99 on iTunes). I'm suggesting that a media copyright isn't a perfect monopoly: As competitive, free and independent media proliferates, the value of a media copyright approaches zero.
It gets better every year. I've found OOo even more effective than MS Office, at a company where everyone else is using MS Office. That's nuts.
Note the following:
Yes, the analysts were wrong: Everyone actually has several of their own magazines now. The problem is that media isn't worth what it used be. So media companies struggle to hold onto the most valuable things they have, while consumers see less and less importance in any single item.
Part of why they recompress (and strip out extras and other stuff) is because most DVDs are dual layer. Its significantly cheaper for the priate to recompress it to fit on a single layer blank than it is to produce a bit-for-bit copy on a dual layer disk.
One thing which often gets overlooked by the "industry" (and associated press) is that to the majority of viewers "quality" comes a long way behind availability. There are plenty of people who will quite happily watch a VHS recording full of dropout recorded from poor quality broadcast.
I fervently hope that the content industries lay the DRM as thick and as heavy as technologically possible. If the DRM is wimpy, people will not know who to blame for the DRM annoyances that they have to put up with. If the DRM is heavy enough and intrusive enough, maybe people will start to understand WHY they the movie that they bought won't play right with their 2 year old television. I also hope that people start returning movies and music when they can't do with it what they think that they should be able to do with it.
I'm in Thailand too, and agree the subtitles are next-to-useless. It's not just the English subtitles either, the Thai subtitles are just as bad. They seem to have been run through an automatic translator and left at that. E.g. a guy who's been shot shouts out "I'm not going to make it!", which is translated as "I probably will not continue doing it!" . Mind you, I guess you can't really expect perfect translation for 100B a disk.
3 /closer-subtitle-surrealism
Have a look at this blog entry I came across too about the situation in China, funny stuff - http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2005/03/2
But isn't that part of the point? If the mass of consumers don't stop buying DRM then aren't they all saying that DRM doesn't bother them? Sure it bothers you. And it bothers me. But we can hardly claim that it bothers most everyone if it doesn't bother them enough to stop purchasing it.
I guess I don't buy this argument. If the media companies do something that consumers *really* don't like, consumers will find a way around it. And that way will cut into the media companies profits. Which will create a profit incentive for some other company. Which, as you point out, has happened before. The good news is that it will happen again.
You can worry about it if you like, but consumers really are in the drivers seat.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Media shifting has (or at least was, don't know if recent case law has overruled or changed it) been legal as fair use.
Media shifting is still perfectly legal in this country (the US). However, thanks to our good friend the DMCA, it is now illegal to break any system designed to prevent copying, no matter what the reason.
So it boils down to this: a standard redbook CD has no copy protection on it. Thus, it is perfectly legal for you to rip the CD to your computer and make a mix CD for your car, compress to mp3 for your iPod, and print out the raw bits and wallpaper your living room. However, almost all commercially-produced DVDs contain copy protection in the form of CSS. So while it is legal for you to copy the content of a DVD you own to another media (DVD, DVR, VHS, SVCD, whatever), the act of bypassing the CSS in order to get to the content is illegal. Most DVD players paid a licensing fee for the DeCSS algorithm, and likely signed a contract stating that they will not allow someone to use that algorithm to make a copy. So you can't hook a DVD player up to a DVD+R player and make a copy of your favorite movie (by design), nor does PowerDVD include a dumpvideo function. Any player which did not purchase a license and sign a contract is illegal, including every player available for Linux.
However, I'm pretty sure that clause of the DMCA has never been tested in court in the context of Fair Use, so it's hard to say whether it will stay legal for long.
I use mplayer on Linux, and fully exercise my fair use rights by watching the DVD I rightfully purchased. Sometimes I even dump the video to the hard drive and flip a few bits to convert from VOB to MPEG-2, for backup purposes on my RAID data server. Except for the fact that mplayer's DeCSS algorithm is illegal in this country (and only illegal because of a law on shaky ground), everything I do with my DVD video is perfectly legal under both my fair use rights and precidents set in the Betamax and Rio mp3 court cases.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.