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Sun DReaM Finds Home In IPTV

An anonymous reader writes "The Register has a story reporting that Sun's DRM will find a home in a Korean IPTV system. From the article: "This week Sun released the source code for two components of DReaM, its DReaM-CAS (Conditional Access System) and DReaMMMI (Mother May I) the underlying mechanism for always asking a central resource for permission to access content. In papers that Sun put out this week it has described both of these processes. DReaMCAS or D-CAS currently only manages access to content in the MPEG-2 format."

5 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. MPEG-4 content, MPEG-2 transport by bunkport · · Score: 3, Informative

    It will only work for MPEG-2 transport, not MPEG-2 content. The content will be MPEG-4 since bandwidth's scarce.

  2. Re:WHHYHHYHY! by ChrisGilliard · · Score: 1, Informative

    (shudder) to quote Bruce Schneier, you can't make water unwet, you can't make bits uncopyable.

    Sure you can't make bits uncopyable, BUT you can make it very difficult for people to copy the bits. This is all that DRM attempts to do. Microsoft actually came out with an interesting paper on this several years ago. They called it the dark networks I think. It referred to the perpetual group of people that will copy software/movies/mp3s/etc without permission. This group of people is less than 5% of the population. The goal of companies that produce content that they would like to control the rights to, is to keep this group as small as possible.

    --
    No Sigs!
  3. Re:WHHYHHYHY! by discordja · · Score: 2, Informative
    --
    I stole this .sig
  4. Re:DRM and GNOME by Dolda2000 · · Score: 2, Informative
    DRM built in to Gstreamer (and hence, GNOME).
    Somehow, I'm just having a very hard time believing this to its full extent. DRM needs a full chain of trust, complete down to the BIOS, to even stand a chance of being effective, and since GStreamer (and GNOME) are seldomly, if ever, run on "trusted" kernels, it just seems completely and utterly pointless to implement DRM in GStreamer.

    That being said, I can't deny that the work is being done. If anyone's interested, here's a link to the announcement. The short version seems to be that "we have no control over if people will be using DRM anyway, so we're implementing it in the hopes that it will never be used, just so that GStreamer won't be dumped over lack of DRM support".

  5. Re:Open Source DRM is like... by Dolda2000 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Open source simply means that anyone may look at the code, not necessarily that you have complete rights to do anything with it.
    I have no idea whence you got that idea, but the people who coined the term "Open Source" seem to think otherwise. From The Open Source Definition:
    3. Derived Works

    The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.