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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."
I hope their catch-phrase isn't going to be Keep Dreaming.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
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Sun also has a "customer" in Fluendo... the company set up to develop GStreamer... the media framework in GNOME. Fluendo have committed to the whole DRM shebang. Locked down kernels, trusted computing, and DRM built in to Gstreamer (and hence, GNOME). And Sun, a full-blown member and devotee of The Trusted Computing Group with it's DRM hardware.
Lovely thought isn't it.
All that corporate involvement in GNOME was worth it, wasn't it? I mean... now that we've a got DRMed desktop that is completely controlled and developed by three corporations and a few small businesses around edges.
Why are customers paying for the extra costs of DRM?
How many times do these people have to be told, DRM can't work, at least not the way they want.
(shudder) to quote Bruce Schneier, you can't make water unwet, you can't make bits uncopyable.
STOP STOP STOP.
The only crypto should be authentication, as in, I the user want to be protected from fraud.
That and I don't really see the worth. Not a lot of TV is worth seeing once let alone twice.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Do you?
No one in Sun "believes" in this DRM stuff. They just do it because theu have to to play in the pointy-haired Western markets. They make it Open Source to make a point.
When Digial Restrictions Management puffs and wheezes its last breath in a few months, Sun will calmly pick up from where it left off, as it has always done, as if it hadn't happened.
The enigineers in Sun know what they are doing, and they keep the PHBs beaten into shape. Mark my words.
This is just Sun playing ball with the suits in the short term.
In the mean time, I urge you Slashbots to learn how to use a compiler.
Stick Men
It will only work for MPEG-2 transport, not MPEG-2 content. The content will be MPEG-4 since bandwidth's scarce.
The important questions are these:
(a) Does the DRM system prevent users from making fair use of protected content? (Shifting content in time, space, format)
(b) Does the DRM system enforce additional non-piracy-related restrictions on the end user at the behest of the content industry? (Region codes, preventing use of things like track skip/fast forward/other remote control buttons)
(c) Does the DRM system continually depend on an external authority which, if it were ever to become defunct, would effectively revoke the rights of the user to access the content? (And, can that external authority track the usage habits of the end user?)
While (c) here is an implementation detail that has implications concerning things the content industry would like to be able to do, (a) and (b) are make-or-break issues which apply to all DRM. That is, if (a) and (b) are true, then the DRM system is just as oppressive (perhaps even more so) than the DRM we're already afflicted with, regardless of the platforms that the DRM is available on or the open-source-ness of the scheme. But if (a) and (b) are false, then the content industry won't use them.
From the article you linked:
We believe in content owners' rights to control their creations as they see fit. And consumers have the right that if those systems are onerous, they just don't have to buy them. So the fair usage issue gets sorted out by the market. - Glenn Edens, Director, Sun Labs
This is a foolhardy assumption. The entire reason that the content industry plays the way they do is to ensure that there is no consumer choice when it comes to DRM. They use the legislature to enforce particular DRM schemes on the public. They collude in I-can't-see-how-this-is-legal associations to ensure that whatever DRM scheme is used is burdened with licensing terms to prevent electronics manufacturers from making playback devices that permit the full scope of fair use or that don't impose non-piracy restrictions on the end user, and those licensing restrictions are given teeth by the even-more-broken patent system. Even the biggest duel of the new millennium - Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD - laid to rest the question of DRM fairly early when both format consortia announced they were using AACS. And none of this is motivated solely (or even primarily) by piracy - the real goals here are to be able to track the end user, to manipulate the international content market, and to force the end user to watch advertising.
I dont want my content phoning home every time I play it. If I want to watch debbie does dallas 100 times a day that's my business and not theirs.
Next thing you'll know if you watch CNN too much you'll get republican are great email and snail mail and if you watch Fox News the democrats will be trying to swing you back.
Or if you watch only shows showing violence you'll be flagged for special security at travel terminals.
This can be abused way too much. Corporations do not protect our security if there's a dime to be made off selling your information.