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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.""
I don't know what research the author of TFA has done on bootleg DVDs, but I've seen a few a friend brought back from Thailand.
The ones that hit the street before even the US release of the DVD are either from a video camera in the theater or from copying a screener. Often you can see the screener warnings while watching the movie.
Additionally, to serve an Asian market, many have had additional Asian subtitles added and then were recompressed, causing quality to diminish.
Bit-by-bit copies are fine and good in theory, but that's for discs already in release, serving the languages for which the discs already have subtitles or alternative soundtracks. But by then, there's already been a brisk trade in bootlegs those films.
Yes, the analog hole is inefficient and not the best way to copy something. It's merely an example of how a determined pirate can still get around most DRM. It's like protecting graphics on the web. You can disable right clicking, do odd things with MIME types, etc. But in the end, all someone needs to do is capture the screen and crop out the image.
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...
Start a happiness pandemic
I had a phone that was capable of analog on verizon... it sucked the battery dry ~5x faster than digital, even while not making calls....
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
That this "penalty" is only a decrease in resolution. Unless they have a gigantic TV, in which case my guess would be that they could afford the better technology, the average Joe won't notice unless he's specifically looking for it.
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.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
Oh my god! Is it geek porno night already?!
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.
Yeah, a digitally shot, digitally editted, digitally mastered and digitally distributed movie definitely looks better analog.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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.
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!
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
Same here. I just can't decode those 1's and 0's in my head fast enough.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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
RIAA: *compairing DRMs with the MPAA... "I see that your schwartz is as big as mine! Let's see how well you handle it."
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.
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.
...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?
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 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.
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
now that you mention it... my 5 years old nephew thinks tv stands for TorrentVision. ----nubis :)
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.
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