The History of Hacking DRM

phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica writer Nate Anderson has penned an in-depth look into past DRM-crackings and what the future looks like for people who are vehemently anti-DRM: 'Like a creeping fog, DRM smothers more and more media in its clammy embrace, but the sun still shines down on isolated patches of the landscape. This isn't always due to the decisions of corporate executives; often it's the work of hackers who devote considerable skill to cracking the digital locks that guard everything from DVDs to e-books. Their reasons are complicated and range from the philosophical to the criminal, but their goals are the same: no more DRM.'"

Comments

Anti-DRM?

[rwven]

I don't know anyone who's NOT Anti-DRM. All DRM does is make buying music miserable for the people who are doing it legally. People who don't care about the legality of it will just torrent the CD or get it off some other file sharing network. They avoid the headache of DRM as well as the "cost" of being legal...

The only way DRM will ever be plausable will be if they produce a DRM'd codec that plays on anything. People are sick of buying CD's on itunes and not being able to play them on their other players...as well as other music services trying to play on itunes.

Re:Anti-DRM?

[Darundal]

I know several people who are pro-drm. They are also the least technically literate people I know, have next to no experiance with any digital music players or services, and they generally assume that because someone is accused of something by a company or the government, they are automatically guilty.

In other words, they are joe consumer incarnate. They don't follow the issues, they are unaware that their is even any type of debate over this subject, and and they are unlikely to ever encounter any issues with DRM because they all use Windows and are the type to be highly loyal to a brand, so probably wouldn't ever buy a music player from another company.

While I myself am vehemently anti-DRM, your post assumes two things;

A: Everyone is aware that there is even an issue, and will become frustrated by DRM

B: Even if someone becomes aware and frustrated, they would attempt to use other channels unconcerned with industry FUD and would know what those other options are or where to find out about them

Re:Anti-DRM?

[kimvette]

You're being sarcastic now, but what happens if/when you dump (OS X|Windows) for Linux or BSD? Or, when the day arrives when you come to realize (much like Philip J. Fry did) that the Dave Matthews Band doesn't rock, and decide to exercise your right of first sale and sell (as in transfer ownership) your property (the music you bought) to another person? Oops, guess what? You don't actually own anything to transfer now.

Or, what happens if/when Apple goes belly-up or is forced by the music mafia (RIAA) to shut down iTunes and quit the music business? Good-bye music collection, so sad, too bad. You'll be pissing and moaning over DRM then.

Granted those are hypothetical scenarios, but much like Divx, it can definitely happen, only this time around everyone with a clue will be continually saying "told ya so" like a bunch of nine-year-olds.

Re:Anti-DRM?

[CastrTroy]

DRM doesn't make anything any cheaper. iTunes still cost as much as a regular CD. Sure you can just buy one song, but for the entire album, the price is pretty much the same (sometimes more on iTunes). Plus you get a lower quality version, no physical CD, no Case, no Liner notes that are already printed on a commercial quality printing press (not some crappy liner notes you have to printe out on your crappy inkjet), and they pay pretty much 0 production cost. Oh, and the music is locked down a lot more than it is on a regular CD. For iTunes to be worth it, it would have to be down around 25 cents a song.

Re:DRM is not evil

[mrsbrisby]

I'm a vocal pro-market advocate, and I don't see any problems with DRM. If you have something you want to keep out of prying eyes, you should be free to protect it in any way possible -- including making it ultra-proprietary.

You're confused. DRM is about you keeping customers away from their data, not you keeping customers away from your data.

If I buy an accounting and compliance package, and it timebombs six months into full use, I should be able to buy another one, and transfer my data. I should be able to pay someone else to transfer that data because I feel the first vendor was untrustworthy.

DRM means I must pay the first vendor, or go out of business (compliance laws). Never mind what happens if they go out of business- I have no options anymore.

Now, you might think the government has no business protecting people from incompetent companies, what if the vendor did this on purpose? What if that company deliberately set up their accounting package to explode so that they could underbid the competition and recoup the costs later? Isn't that tantamount to extortion?

Carefully disguised pro hollywood puff piece.

[plasmacutter]

There seem to be no substantive points.. I see nothing after reading this whole article which can't be found on about.com or from the mouth of anyone between the age of 16 and 26.

I did however find carefully slipped in hollywood propaganda, like this little nugget:

"The force of law (and the risk of lawsuits) combined with the obscurity of most cracking tools means that even DRM solutions which are easily cracked can be effective at preventing casual piracy"

This devious little term, causal piracy, actually refers to what should be our legally protected rights to fair use, and our rights under the AHRA for reproduction on recording devices.

Then there's self serving drek:

DRM's not going away anytime soon, and newer techniques such as BD+ promise to make future technologies even more difficult to hack for long periods of time.

hollywood to hackers..."naa naa-na-naa naa".

  Not to mention it goes against every point made in the "if you can't use the door, find an open window" argument that cracking the cypher is not necessarily necessary.

Re:Carefully disguised pro hollywood puff piece.

[Angst Badger]

Actually, I thought the point on preventing casual piracy -- which I took to mean not legitimate backups but making copies for your buddies -- was really crucial. Professional pirates, the folks who are selling counterfeit DVDs out of Hong Kong and other points east, are not in any way going to be deterred by DRM. They have the resources to route around it at the hardware level and the incentives to do so. But stopping professional piracy is a job for bilateral trade agreements and customs inspections, not DRM.

In between are the people uploading movies and music to the alt.binaries.* hierarchy and p2p systems like BitTorrent. Frankly, as much as I'm sure the big publishing firms would like for this to stop, the (admittedly modest) technical knowledge needed to take advantage of this kind of mid-range amateur piracy are beyond the average user, and the effort involved is sufficiently great that most people would rather just buy the damn movie at the store. The publishers may or may not understand this, hence the occasional wave of egregious lawsuits, but I suspect they do, if only because crushing Usenet binaries and p2p networks would neither legally nor technically all that challenging.

The goal of big media is to make most people afraid to pirate their products. The huffing and puffing over the technical fringe is just a publicity stunt.

The only really disturbing aspect of DRM is the legislative component, which tramples all over fair use and other elements of free expression. That is something to worry about for sure.

As for BD+, I don't think it will stick around long after the first time some discs are distributed with buggy flash code that cripples the players they are inserted into.

Re:DRM that plays on anything?

[IamTheRealMike]

No, the point of DRM is to prevent supply from being infinite, because a market in which there is infinite supply is a failed market.

The fact that Apple and Microsoft can't resist abusing it to promote sales of iPods/Windows is unrelated and not inherant to DRM.

Re:DRM that plays on anything?

[IamTheRealMike]

"Failed market" is an economic term. Informally it means a market where the usual workings have broken down for some reason so it's no longer operating efficiently.

For instance operating systems are a failed market because network effects make it economically unviable to break the Windows monopoly.

In the absence of copyright (and a way to practically enforce it - DRM), creative works would be a failed market because supply is infinite, therefore pushing prices down to zero. The creator of the creative work gets nothing in return for production of that good so, the market has failed.

Failed markets are very common. A market is quite a fragile thing, which is why we have lots of regulation designed to protect it and bracket it (like anti-trust law). I would say many of the more stupid errors of the 20th century were due to inappropriate application of a market, which then failed .... the UK rail privatisation is a good example of that.

Failed markets aren't necessarily unprofitable. In the case of failed DRM then the 'failed market' becomes unprofitable in the classical sense because nobody makes any money. In the case of operating systems it's obviously very profitable for the dominant monopoly.