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Is DRM Intrinsically Distasteful?
jelton writes "If digital media was available for sale at a reasonable price, but subject to a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying), would you support the usage of such a DRM scheme? Especially if it meant a wealth of readily available compatible devices? In other words, if you object to DRM schemes, is your objection based on principled or practical concerns?"
Sure, I support the ability to use DRM. That should be the artist's choice. But not a blanket enforcement of it. Why? Because there are some people who make audio productions who do not charge and do not restrict distribution. As long as that is still possible, and those people don't have to pay some arbitrary group for a "license" or other enabling mechanism to distribute their "stuff" for free, I'd be all for it.
But... our history is that once we close the doors, we lock people out based upon income or other arbitrary factors that really have no bearing on the subject at hand, except perhaps as prejudice or a money-making scheme. Radio station licenses are a racket. Product bar codes are a racket. Liquor licenses are a racket. Marriage licenses are a racket. The whole "top-40" thing is a racket. The list is long and depressing. My expectation is that if a DRM scheme is settled upon, the only model supported will be commercial and involve money and/or equipment that the little guy just won't be able to afford. Cynical? You bet. But based on past performance.
We've seen this begin to happen already. Vista will degrade audio that is "unsigned", meaning, created or put in place by software that hasn't got some kind of deal going with Microsoft. This is bad on every level — models like this only hurt the little person.
We're better off without DRM, I'm afraid, because the proponents of it are uniformly commercial, as are their goals... but the world is not.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And if pigs had wings...
Would this protection from "illegal copying" also prevent me from legal copying? Aka backups that are protected by fair use? If so, then I would be against it in practice and principle.
It seems to me that this is a pipe dream without a fully regulated hardware path (which I find inherently distasteful). Generally speaking, computers aren't smart enough to determine legality without something like Trusted Computing, therefore, unless a brilliant DRM breakthrough is made, yeah, I find DRM inherently distasteful.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Copyright is supposed to be imperfect and leaky. I do not want a scheme for perfectly enforcing it via architecture.
This goes for most laws. The difficulty of enforcing laws is what keeps a lot of laws from being horribly onerous burdens rather than simply being annoying inconveniences. I'm against any scheme for perfectly enforcing laws. Laws should always be tempered by human understanding.
I think Godels incompleteness theorem applies here. Laws are like a system of axioms. You cannot make a system of axioms that can in all cases separate behavior you want from behavior you don't. So making that system of axioms be enforced by the architecture is inevitably going to prevent behaviors that you don't want to prevent.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I would support a system that enables the artists (or publishing companies) to release their works in such a way that the media can only be used by those who have acquired it legally. However, my belief is that the individuals rights (in this case fair use) should out weight the corporations, or even the artists.
Yes, for the following reason: Any DRM would involve someone else having control over what a piece of hardware that I own could and could not do. I paid for it, I should be the one deciding what it should and should not do.
DRM is like a car that is speed-limited at 65 mph. It can go faster, but it just refuses to. Nobody wants that.
If 1 in 100 people does something bad with a gun, we all still get guns. If 1 in 100 people (probably less actually) illegaly copies and uploads or sells a movie or song, we all get super restrictive DRM. Apparently greed is more important than safety.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
That is a worthless mental exercise as there is no way that DRM can be there and it not be 'in the way'.
By definition DRM would cause issues with legit useage.
DRM is wrong, in any form.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think the definition of that term needs to be explored more.
Can I sell it?
I can get all the content I want for free off the Internet. So the reasonable price has to be zero, too.
To me, there is nothing wrong with wanting to protect your stuff (movies/videogame/music/whatever).
If you could some how make a DRM scheme that did not inhibit ANY legal use of the media then I am all for it. Then again in a perfect world people would not steal from other people and there would be no need for DRM.
The only problem then is: What is the deffinition of legal use? (this is ignoring the fact that I don't think this type of DRM would be possible with out including something that is equaly intrusive)
IANAL, however what I have seen stated is that the idea of fair use is not exactly clear, and is all based on precedent (and precedent CAN be over ruled).
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
You don't understand the motivation.
The groupthink is:
- Hate corporations
- Hate DRM
- Download all your media for free on the internet. A reasonable price is $0.
So the answer is yes. All DRM is bad unless RMS writes it and it allows us to get all our entertainment media for free on the internet. If people from corporations are maimed or killed by this DRM somehow, then Slashdot might be OK with it. As long as it runs on Linux and there's source code available.
So, basically, you're saying that if God were DRM, would we be philosophically opposed to it?
;-)
Seeing as how this is Slashdot, I think I know the answer to that one.
And in any case, if DRM were God, if it was working right, we wouldn't even know it was working at all.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
To me, no, DRM is not, in pure concept bad. But in any resonable execution given modern tech and technological interfaces, it has no choice but to be bad.
Were a DRM soltuion introduced that ONLY prevented unlawful distribution, but allowed other legitimate uses (such as format/time shifting, playing on any device that stored that could play that classification of media, etc.), without having to give all kinds of personal data to the reps, or carry around large quantities/weights/volumes of DRM gagetry with you... then yes, it would be perfectly acceptable.
not gonna happen.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Seriously - while most users never come near the limits of what their computer can do, I have spent a ton of time waiting for 3d renders to finish thanks to a maxed-out CPU. Since any real enforceable DRM requires a bit of 'assistance' from hardware, that's just that many more CPU cycles (or GPU cycles, or ...? depending) wasted on DRM that I could be putting to good use.
I buy computers on a price/performance measure - how much performance per dollar can I get is my metric. Why should I be forced to accept a lowered ratio because someone else decided that I (or any given user) could, in their eyes, potentially be a dirty little copyright pirate?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying)
If there were such a thing, maybe so. But I'd also support a medicine that cured every disease known to man without any side effects. Let me know when you come up with that, okay?
Also, while DRM itself is not necessarily distasteful, the enforcement of IP law, in its current form, really is. The penalties for breaking this ideal DRM scheme of yours (and it would be broken, count on it) should not involve jailing people for distributing CD's or suing folks who have to live in public housing into oblivion. Otherwise, it's just as evil as anything the RIAA/MPAA/BSA are pushing.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I can't help it, but the way this question is asked, it sounds very "official" to me. As if somebody in a big media corporation or record label wanted to find out what the masses think, or some such... But nevertheless, here's my two cents:
I don't think there can be any such thing as "illegal copying". Copying is a fundamental operation of any computer, and the internet means we can copy world-wide, instantly, at zero cost. Any mechanism that tries to make this impossible is trying to set the clock back to before the internet age. As many DRM-opponents have pointed out, trying to control copying in such a world amounts to establishing a police-state, no less.
The consequence is that artists, and distributors (in whichever form we may still need them), need to be paid by other means, NOT by the number of copies they distribute, NOT bound to the act of copying.
One idea is voluntary payment (think Magnatune). Another idea is that musicians, in particular, can shift to other means of generating income, e.g. concerts, public performances.
The economy is going to change. It has to, because copying can no longer be controlled. Altogether, this is a good thing, but it can turn into a very bad thing if people try very badly to keep this from happening.
"full legitimate usage" is very subjective.
I am guessing this is based on what the content creator thinks and varies greatly.
It seems most people are for free stuff until they begin losing money.
I wouldn't support DRM. I beleive that when I buy hardware I can do what I like with it, I think there should be a push to more open and modifiable hardware. So much of our digital devices could avoid obsolesence and be given more power beyond the manufacturers original intent for the device simply by allowing third parties to develop and distribute free software intended for the device. From a practical stand point, DRM is messy, it's requirements for the use of media, including using only approved propriatary and over priced devices seems to me to be completely against the "open" ethos that so many of us embrace. I don't think the push for "open" devices, software, and standards is in the least bit overrated, it gives the consumer more power of the devices they purchase, if the sacrafice for those privledges is the inability to play media by short-sighted content distributors, so be it, eventually those companies will either come around, or we'll make do without their material.
After years of 99.9% OSS usage, I now find myself banging my head against commercial software restrictions, licensing schemes, etc. To hell with Stallman's principles, I want my easy-to-deploy-and-manage OSS back!
I agree with the previous poster that its use or disuse should be up to the artist. That said, I personally refuse to BUY anything which is DRM'd.
I believe DRM is fine for rental systems or subscription music where you lose your rights to the music when you stop paying the subscription.
But if I BUY something, I expect it to become mine. DRM as a concept prohibits this- I do not have control over what I buy so it is not mine. I don't mind watermarking or somehow identifying my copy uniquely as long as it does not impact the quality of the product. But if I pay for something, I expect to own it. Just as someone who buys a car expects to be able to change their own oil, or junk it or sell it for parts- I expect to be able to copy/backup the file as I see fit and play it on any device i damn well choose to. DRM is fundamentally incompatible with this.
So short answer- yes I would pay for DRM subscription content like rhapsody. But NO, I would not pay for DRM music that I 'Buy'.
--IronHelix
I hate these impossible hypothetical questions. Technical solutions to social issues are inherently flawed. The problem with DRM isn't the technology - it's the corrupt legislation like the DMCA, which makes it illegal to circumvent the DRM. It's utterly impossible for technology to know the difference between legal and illegal, unless you change the laws to define what's illegal based on the technology.
It's like that stupid discussion that was going around the internet about a plane on a treadmill - at the very core it's a flawed question, and just encourages idiotic discussion about meaningless "what if"s
I would support something like this - if it was fair. Give me a DRM scheme that allows me to register my devices (computers, players, etc.) that allows for unlimited copying & play back on devices that originally did not or cannot support it, it would be awesome. Of course such a scheme would make one song ballon up to double or triple the size of a normal mp3/aac/ogg file... but I digress...
DRM, in whatever form, is intrinsically self-contradictory; remember the analogy with handing someone both the lock and the key and then expecting them to only use what they've been given in the approved manner. I therefore would (and do) object to it on the grounds that it is a bloody boneheaded thing to spend efforts and money on. We've got enough stupidity in the world as it is.
That's provided, of course, that we are not talking about hardware-based DRM, but the question seems to exclude that.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
I really don't see how anyone could object to DRM if it only prevented illegal copying.
Of course, I can't imagine a way to make it work that wouldn't be so intrusive that I wouldn't use it.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Is DRM Intrinsically Distasteful?
Would a monitor and speed regulator on your car be Intrinsically Distasteful?
Would a monitor that reports your TV viewing habits to the govt. be Intrinsically Distasteful?
Would a monitor that only allows you to buy certain foods be Intrinsically Distasteful?
Would a police force that inspects your home every day to ensure that you are not harboring criminals be Intrinsically Distasteful?
Would a monitor that ensures you don't cook microwave food on the bbq be Intrinsically Distasteful?
This list can go on for a long time...
Yes, it IS Intrinsically Distasteful?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Unfortunately, DRM that allows for fair use and for copyright expiration isn't even theoretically possible. Also, even if the DRM rules permitted every reasonable use they could think of, some future development in technology would be sure to clash with it.
At the end of the day, if you can hear it, you can record it, and if you can see it, you can videotape it. It might not be a "perfect digital copy", but neither is a lossy format like OGG or MP3.
Besides, the lack of quality doesn't seem to bother people downloading torrents of a movie some clown recorded with a camcorder, complete with audience noise.
DRM is a waste of resources that only annoys the legal users of the media.
The real pirates will find work around. Hardware DRM? Yeah, right, because no one hacks hardware with a soldering iron.
This question is analagous to "if frogs had wings, would they still bump their butts on the ground?"
Intellectual property is an intangible construct. I don't see much point in discussing "if if if...." Ultimately there is no utopian DRM implementable. Heck, humans can't agree on value judgements...how can an algorithm do better?
To me, DRM resembles the Justice system. It initially started out with good intent - I.E protect the artists (ok ok.. so the label company) to make sure they get their money. However, they kept adding and adding more crap to it, that now all it does is harm the innocent and "protect" the guilty. Any "criminal" can easily still get the songs illegally and hassle free. However the innocent who go out and buy the CD has major compatiblity issues to deal with, rootkits (as in Sonys case), and whatever other crap the record labels decide to infest the CD with. All they are accomplishing is wasting more of their money for R&D and implementing DRM then they save. Pirates will never be stopped. The only people they stop are the complete ammatures who might try to copy their friends cd, but you dont need full blown DRM for that, just implement basic copy protection.
If good quality content is available at a fair price, people will buy it and there is no need for DRM.
Assuming that I could copy, watch, manipulate, change formats, watch on different media players or do whatever I wanted to with (it is mine, after all!) except for distribute illegally. Of course I would support it!
Of course, this is a pipe dream. Even if all players took a thumb-print to make sure I was the true owner, but allowed me to do all the stuff listed above, I would still need to buy multiple copies of whatever so that my wife and kids could enjoy it without me there to swipe my thumb!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Why are format, time, and device shifting considered legitimate uses? There was a time when DRM technology prevented most illegitimate copying, and that was at some point before the invention of the mimeograph, when one would need to own a full printing press and would have to spend time typesetting to copy a book, making any sort of bootlegging or sharing rather obvious. There was nothing impractical about that, it was simply reality, and if anyone disagreed with it and felt they should be able (and allowed) to easily make a copy, then they were simply flouting the principle of copyright protection.
So what's any different now? If you think you should be allowed to infringe copyright just because it's easier, then you must not understand the reason for the institution of copyright, i.e. providing a limited right of ownership as an incentive for making creative works available to the public, rather than keeping them under tight private control.
The problem with DRM, like many things in this country lately, is that you are assumed to be guilty by default.
This DRM scheme already exists, and is fairly easy to implement. It happens to be called the "honor system".
The honor system is very inexpensive to use, and requires virtually zero disk space. It is multi-platform and very easy to extend.
Unfortunately, the "honor system" tends to be extremely easy to circumvent. The weakness with the "honor system" is that it relies on end users to respect the wishes of the content creators.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
"DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying)"
Yeah, good luck with that inventing of artificial intelligence there.
How can you know all the future practical uses?
Also, how can a computer tell the difference between legal and illegal copying? Will the computer know that I have 15 different music playing devices in my house and that I tend to have bad luck with harddrives so I have an offsite backup of the content(in addition to multiple onsite backups)?
Personally, I like the idea of watermarking music. It doesn't prevent anything, but it stops people that legally buy music from casual copying and it makes it easy to identify if music originated from a legal source or not.
In quotes, for a reason.
In my jurisdiction, we pay a media tariff. As a benefit we have a personal copying priviledge.
Now, it would have been "illegal" to copy music for friends before the personal copying provision was put into place. Currently, this provision does not extend to videos or audio books (for two examples).
Let's say that a personal copying provision is put into place for videos. How does DRM get retracted now that it is legal to copy? At that point, it is still either not possible or very difficult to copy the material.
An example closer to home -- I just tried to copy a CD that was "copy protected". Wasn't possible (with the software in place). I guess the "DRM" worked, right? But it was perfectly my right to do what I tried to do. Interesting that the CD had purchased after the personal copy provision was made law.
Just Saying
(In answer to the question -- DRM is always bad).
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Which would require the date to be locked on the machines so I cannot defeat it by simply moving the date ahead 100 years.
point me to a drm'd solution that accomodates all future hardware/software and every possible use that falls under fair use - and i'll point you to a drm that isn't a drm.
DRM is the automatic enforcement of copyright (and then some).
Therefore DRM is also intrinsically distasteful.
QED.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Why does this entire thread sound like someone trying to ask the right question? It sounds like "what would we need to say to make it sound like you were in favour of DRM so we could use this in a position paper?"
:-P
As long as I can buy my CD, NOT have any fscking software installed on a PC I play it from (yes, I mean you Sony), play it in my stereo and my car, and rip it to whatever format I like to use the tracks how I like, I will buy the product. If your DRM impedes any of those things, then I'm not interested.
I own a couple hundred CDs, all legitimately bought, all by non-mainstream artists -- I buy my CDs so I can be sure the artists whose music I really like will keep making more. I expect to be able to make mixes, populate my ipod, bring tracks to work on my laptop and listen to them, and (ideally) put the original CD away for safe keeping after I've made my MP3s from it, or put it in my CD changer again when I've not heard the album in a while.
I'm not really willing to budge on any of that as a requirement of what I can do with my music. I have no interest in any model in which I can't do such things, nor in any model in which someone figures they get an ongoing revenue stream from me. I buy a lot of CDs, stop treating me like I'm ripping you off, cause I'm not.
Well, that's my 2 cents for a Friday afternoon.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In this hypothetical case...
Can I make backups? (And as others have asked, how can it tell my intent?)
Is it dependent on some piece of hardware that might break, or is proprietary?
If the company owning it disappears, am I SOL?
Its more complex than everyone makes it seem. DRM is annoying and is getting more so (my itunes purchase won't play in my car cd mp3 player without jumping through hoops). DVDs are adding more copy protections etc. Nothing more annoying than having to jump through more hoops to get the stuff you paid good money for to play on the device of your choosing.
However the alternative is
http://www.plocp.com/images/vista_MG_3800.jpg
and bootlegs are everywhere. Maybe if they didn't charge close to 20$(in Mexico) a CD people would be more apt to buy them legit. Its completely out of control when ps games are like 3$ US and 2-3 movies per DVD is common. This is such a small scale compared to the bootlegging on the internet (although I'd bet a lot of these things are downloaded before sold).
But being the good consumers/capitalist we're trained to look for as cheap as possible, more so than thinking about all the people who worked on the media who need jobs and a paycheck. Ultimately if it gets bad enough look for much less variety in what gets released.
I understand what DRM is trying to do, but ultimately people will want the format that is cheaper and more flexible. Basic economics indicate they'll have to step up enforcement of illegal activity, there is no economic advantage to being honest and supporting what you like in todays society.
I would support DRM if it allowed for fair use and was an open format of some sort, that developers could implement for free. I really don't know what kind of DRM that would be though.
I really think piracy needs to be prevented through law enforcement, not technology. Similar to traffic tickets. It would limit (but not eliminate) piracy, while at the same time bringing in revenue to be used for education or something. Don't fine a DVD pirate $250,000 or whatever. Charge em $100 or something, but do it much more often.
It really could work.
Absolutely.
The problem is, such a DRM system is impossible.
Why? Because in many cases, the question of Fair Use depends as much on the intent of the copying as on the nature of the copying itself. How can the DRM system determine whether the clip I'm exctracting from a movie is going to be used for non-commercial, educational use, or if I'm going to combine it with a bunch of other extracted clips to make a complete DRM-free copy of the movie which I'll proceed to sell on the black market?
Unless the DRM system can read the user's mind it can't reliably distinguish between allowed and non-allowed uses.
Aside from those complexities, there's still the issue that any "tight" DRM system will, of necessity, be limited to playback devices that support that DRM system. If I have an audio player that *only* supports CD audio or MP3 format (and I do -- there are lots of them around), any DRM system that allows me to format shift for playback on that device is going to leak like a sieve, so content providers aren't going to want to use it. Not with high-quality versions of the content, anyway.
Leaky DRM is pointless. Strong DRM inevitably restricts copying that is allowed under copyight law, and is therefore evil. There can be no such thing as a truly workable DRM system.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This is a classic example of begging the question.
The ability to shift formats, shift time, play back on different devices, "etc", is indistinguishable from "illegal copying". The question is based upon the incorrect premise that the two things are distinguishable.
Consequently, my objection to DRM is based on both philosophical and practical terms.
I object on philosophical grounds because there exists no such device.
I object on practical grounds because any device that purports to "allow full legitimate usage but ... block illicit usage" is a device that does not allow full legitimate usage.
The root of your problem is the notion of "legitimate" and "illegitimate" versus "copying", "playback", and so on. The former terms are terms of law; they are defined by lawyers and enforced by men with guns. The latter terms are descriptions of functionality; they are defined by the laws of physics and mathematics, which are enforced by the universe itself.
DRM is intrinsically time-limited. Eventually one of three things will happen:
A "perfect" DRM will have to adjust to changes in copyright status, which means it'll have to be able to do things like pick up the fact that a work has entered the public domain, or the copyright has been extended. That means it has to contact some authentication service. But we've seen from the DIVX fiasco that there are risks to relying on some outside service to authorize the use of your own equipment and media. DIVX discs are unplayable not because they've stopped making players. If you can find a working Betamax VCR, you can still play Beta tapes. DIVX discs are unplayable because the service that confirmed you had enough sessions left to play the disc, or charged you for playing it again, is gone.
I'd be happy to, if I had any money left over from buying a perpetual motion machine.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
If people from corporations are maimed or killed by this DRM somehow, then Slashdot might be OK with it.
Of course we will. Didn't you read the disclaimer? I think the GPL contains the text 'If this program kills you and/or your cat (either accidentally or intentionally), we can not be held responsible.' or something similar.
And if it doesn't, it should!
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I liken DRM to the locks on my house: they keep the honest man honest.
If someone wants to "steal" music, movies, tv shows, whatever, they will. No amount of copy protection is going to stop them.
Tapes, CD's, DVD's, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, XP Authentication, Serial Numbers...doesn't matter. If someone wants to get something for nothing, they will find a way regardless of how much time, effort, or money you put into trying to stop them.
However, the honest man who won't do any of these things...well, what does it matter if his stuff is "locked"? I mean, after all...if someone isn't going to enter my house uninvited, then the locks on my doors and windows are meaningless.
Yes, people change, and yes everyone who "steals' media starts somewhere...but still, you get my point. The only thing DRM (and things like it) does is inflate the cost of things for people that plan on legally purchasing it anyway. The people that plan on not obtaining it legally...well, you can finish that sentance.
Galactic Civilization II is a PERFECT example. Shipped with ZERO protection on it, it still managed to sell many thousands of copies...if you perused their forums around the time of it's released, many cited the reason they bought it was SOLEY because it shipped with no copy protection, and they support that idea.
Music corporations (and movie studios, for that matter) will NEVER return to the days where they had total control over how people obtained their media and what they do with it. The honest people will do the exact same thing they did years ago, and the non-honest people will always find a way around it. A waste of time, money, and effort.
Living With a Nerd
I don't think that Digital Restrictions as defined in the topic are possible in the real world. You would have to be able to mind read to only stop illegal copying without also stopping legitimate copying. So I don't think it is a well formed question (as my Quantum Mechanics professor used to tell me) and there is no viable answer. I don't think there should be any government support - broadcast flag, mandates on equipment, DMCA type reverse engineering guidelines, etc. that stop me from doing whatever I want with data in my possession. I don't really care If there is DRM outside of this as long as there is no monopolistic forcing off the market of tools designed to get around it. For example I don't mind Apples DRM as long as CD burning is there, and as long as there is a Hymn type program.
I'll go along with this, and suppose that it's theoretically possible to prevent only "illegal" copying (disregarding that a perfect system which "knows" whether or not my use is fair is impossible to create). One problem is that the definition of "illegal" is not set in stone. Do I need to buy a new player when rights I previously are taken away by paid-off politicians? If I wish to defy an unreasonable law, does the device prevent that? What if I travel to another country, where the laws are different; does the device allow me to do things which are perfectly legal there? Does the device delete music I legally got in one country when I bring the device into another country in which those copies are illegal?
I wouldn't care if everything used DRM if it required zero extra time, no resources, allowed for fair use, and was fully compatible. Being a software developer I know this is almost impossible though. Unless you fully control the entire system and software (ie XBOX 360, iTunes and iPod) it is near impossible to implement, this is why DRM is unacceptable in most cases. Even if you have a closed system DRM is still very hard (ie XBOX 1, PS3).
operating under the assumption that drm is a tool for enforcing copyright, then drm should be flaunted, destroyed, ignored. on the principle that there is a better way
in china, copyright is openly flaunted. enoforcement, if it is any, seems laughably inadequate
musicians make money via advertisements or concert tickets only
no middle man at all
what crazy world is this?
whatever you call it, it's absolutely superior to the stifling copyright system in the west
the copyright system in the west has overreached. it was intended to foster innovation by rewarding content creators. that's the original point
however, in the west it is now just a tool for rewarding the middleman. he stiffs the content creator
content creators deserve financial reward: concerts and endorsements. that's their financial reward. it's not jay-z millions. but that's not the point: content creators deserve a compfortable life. but they don't deserve billions. their grandchildren don't deserve money every time someone plays happy birthday. that's patently insane (pardon the pun). and yet it is the law of land in the west. ridiculous
for content creators, i thought the point was love of music? musicians create music only to make money? i don't want to listen to any musician who does that, do you? so the creator deserves cushy upper middle class rewards from endorsements and concerts. what's wrong with that life? you still have the fame, the adoring chicks. just not jay-z millions. oh well, the golden age is over
and middlemen deserve absolutely nothing. in the age of vinyl/ cds, they controlled the means of distribution, so they got something, a lot, no matter what they actually deserved. but in the age of the internet, they've been made obsolete. so they should die
and they are dying. but like any dumb dinosaur, it doesn't realize it is dying, it's a lot of struggling surging animal flesh that takes out bystanders, and it will go out fighting. fine. just avoid the thrashing tail of the dying beast, the day will come when it thrashes no more. and soon
and it has no absolutely no meaning what laws are passed or what drm is in place. the internet was designed to route around damage due to nuclear blast. western culture, those who want music, it's poor, motivated, intelligent youth, they will find away to route around the "damage" to the internet that is drm
make all the laws you want. common sense will prevail. just like china has to honor ridiculous western notions of ridiculously long and stifling copyright for economic reasons. in the halls of beijing, they pay the bullshit lip service. but on the streets of hong kong, common sense prevails
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For me, it can be summarized that once I buy something, it should be mine to do as I please with it within the law. It is unnacceptable that someone can control what I can do with something that I own.
If I buy a shovel, I can use it any way I want - even to hammer nails with it. Of course, I don't bash people over the head with it. I don't need someone to stop me from hitting others with a shovel and there are obvious repercussions if I ever did so. This is called responsibility, and when you give it to people, they feel empowered and generally respect it.
The exact same prinicples apply to software, media, and any electronic devices that use various "lock-in" schemes (Sony, Apple, Microsoft, etc). When you respect me as a customer, I'll respect you as a company.
Principled and practical concerns are as one when it comes to free speech. The technology is at the point that any DRM requires all kinds of supporting laws that stop people from using art (music, video, books, etc) in creative and natural ways. Sampling and mashups might be considered "illegal" as is sharing an e-book in the same way you'd share a paper book (except on a larger, easier, and simultaneous scale). Who knows what I might want to do with a recording? Add it to the film I'm making? Overdub my own backup vocals? Give it to my friends so they can play it at the club they own? Use it to generate a random number? Use it as the theme song for my political campaign? And I'm sure that 6 billion people could come up with at least 10 other (even more interesting) ways to use the song in question.
When copyright was written into the US Constitution, in effect an exception was carved out to Free Speech. The benefits of Free Speech to society were generally understood (see John Stewart Mill) but it was thought that the arts, sciences, and culture could benefit more by this limited form of censorship. Whether those early thinkers were right or not is open to debate (I myself think the arts and sciences would have been more fruitful with no copyright), it is clear that times have changed and that now the restrictiveness required far outweighs any benefits. In fact, if the system is meant to put money in the hands of artists and scientists, it is doing a very bad job (with a few extreme exceptions).
I believe that for DRM to "work" (on all so many levels), then the key will be to implement a metafor of a physical object.
Let's imagine that there is a virtual world parallel to ours, in which these digital objects (DRM'ed files) live, and that your PC and your portable media players are only interfaces into that world.
If you own a record in the real world, then you can play it, skip tracks, move it, sell it, lend it to your friends etc..
Similiarly, if you own a record in the virtual world, then you should be to play it, skip tracks, move it, sell it, lend it your friends etc. in the virtual world - using your PC and/or portable media player.
I think this is a model that both the industry and the public could agree on using.
Another problem is the volatility of digital objects. We are so used to our apps crashing, files getting lost etc. that we do not value digital files as much as physical objects. If something is important then we want hardcopy! People are ready to pay for hardcopy, but not for digital files. DRM'd files need to feel safe, and be safe.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
...wich always only could drive at the max. allowed speed on the road ? It would in fact be more logical to do that, than to implement drm wich only harm some rich peoples pockets.
We do not need drm and it should not be nessessary, if it is there is something wrong somewhere... one thing that is wrong is the price tag on CD's and DVD's, another thing is that people don't consider piracy as wrongdoing. I overheard a funny conversation in the train this morning, a couple were talking about something, he said: "but this is against the law, they shouldn't be allowed to do that...", to wich she responded: "Just like the music you've downloaded for the new years party ?", there were a very long silence...
It's not the concept of weapons of mass destruction that's a problem. Were there some sort of perfect weapon of mass destruction which did not destroy things on a massive scale, but instead only turned the bad guys into unicorns, it would be perfectly agreeable.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
It's many licenses themselves that are evil.
I wish DRM advanced to the point where it'd enforce the licenses *EXACTLY* - that means no playing a DVD in a public space like a nursing home common room (the consumer DVD doesn't give you that license) -- and DRM that enforces that you can't use a MSDN license for product work -- and DRM that enforces that you can't steal photoshop from work.
I think such DRM would be *GOOD* not BAD - because it will wake up customers to oppressive licensing and get the vendors to work on the real issue, which is bad licenses, not bad technology enforcing them.
Let me answer your question with a question. If punching yourself in the crotch didn't hurt, how much would you do it?
So if there was a "perfect" DRM scheme that let me do whatever the hell I wanted with content that I pay for, I would have no problem with DRM whatsoever. Unfortunately, this is intrinsically impossible.
Not being a SlashNerd, I still don't hate DRM as some kind of moral evil. I just don't buy it unless I can crack it, it's as simple as that.
This question is like asking "If multinational corporations were scrupulously ethical and fairly competitive, would you support them?" or "If communism was implemented according to Marx's ideals, would you support it?".
Quite simply, such a system of "ethical DRM" would NEVER exist for longer than a few years at best-- and then they'd try to put the djinni back in the bottle.
DRM is about control. It is part of human nature that those driving efforts towards controlling that which is presently uncontrolled (e.g.: "piracy") want more and more control as time goes on-- not less and less, nor even a static amount. Over time, any reasonable system of DRM-- one which supports fair use and doesn't assume that consumers are all evil thieves-- would mutate into the typical corporate nightmare that we think of DRM as. If not something worse.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Of course, the powers that be would rather just throw more money at enforcing their immoral rules and bullying people into giving them money they claim to be entitled to, and continue business as usual. Much less of a perceived hassle for them. And that is why the **AA and the like are hemorrhaging relevance by the hour.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I purchased a few CDs online a year or so back. I stopped because there just wasn't anything more that interested me at the time. I then purchased a new PC. I decided to leave my old PC as a MP3 store for myself. I loaded up Winamp and dumped the entire contents of my old PC into the playlist. Lo and behold, I got DRM warnings on all of my purchased tracks. Even though I did not copy the music to my new computer (though I had thought about doing so and clearing off my old PC for a rebuild), I was restricted. So I cannot copy to another PC, I cannot listen to on another PC. Fortunately, the tracks worked in my Dell Pocket DJ I had at the time.
I understand the why behind these tracks not working on a logical level, but it certainly left a bad taste in my mouth. I have not bought any music online since. I have bought a small amount of CDs and ripped them to my computer. I find that the industry is trying to fill every hole that their income can leak out of and in the end they are just not impressing the consumer.
Another fine example of their efforts causing more grief to the paying consumer is this:
My friend had purchased the latest Nickelback CD. He does the same as I would, rips it to his computer and adds it to his playlist. The CD would not rip. It would not even play on his laptop. Apparently, only some CD players would play this disc as it was formatted. So now he is limited in how he can enjoy the media. Needless to say, the CD hit the trash and as a result the consumer and the artist lose. He won't buy anymore Nickelback CDs because he as a consumer remembers the artist, not the record label.
DRM was a good idea, but it was implemented horribly wrong. The consumer suffers with annoying popups and warnings and flat-out denials, while the guys who the RIAA wants to nail work around it. The RIAA and the labels are doing a damn fine job of taking their own profits away from themselves...between pushing away consumers via DRM and their rampant lawsuits, I'm wondering if the jokes of the recording industry moving towards lawsuits as a primary source of income aren't just coming true.
"It's amazing what velocity can do when human beings are in season" -Matthew Good
This is exactly what I was thinking. It's not just a matter of not knowing how to build such a DRM system, it's a matter of simply being impossible.
http://outcampaign.org/
DRM is not about copy protection!
If you want to make copying copyrighted work impossible, you have to make copying anything impossible. Period.
For the good uses, you need a way to record and duplicate music. (same applies to movies, pictures, etc)
The recorder and copier does not have a means to figure out if the source is copirighted or not! Think of taping in the movie, recording from the radio using a microphone, snapping a photo with your camera, etc.
It seems that the industry tries to take all tools away from us to achieve it's goal.
Just read the articles detailing on how cumbersome it will be to use vista in a radio, a studio, an sw development shop, for workin on your home movies, etc.
vajk
And how should "illicit usage" be properly defined? Because what is legal or illegal is different in different countries. And different rulings might be given in similar cases, all depending on the judge or jury.
And this changes over time. The set of actions that were illegal 50 years ago is not the same as this set today. How well do you think DRM is able to cope with future law changes? Imagine if in 2050 all copyright was reduced world wide to only last 10 years. Would any of todays DRM "solutions" stop crippling their owner's goods in 2060?
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
...until the day we have chips installed, not only in all our gadgets, but also our foreheads, and there is something instrinsically distasteful about that!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
My biggest problem with DRM is the DMCA. By giving shitty encryption legal protection fair-use is effecitively eliminated. If the DMCA, atlest the protections for encription, then I would have no problem with DRM. DRM lowers the value of a piece of media becuase you cannot apply fair-use, so I'd buy less heavily restricted DRMed media, but I a company should have the right to distribute a piece of their media in any way that they want. It's up to the consumers to determine if they like the way they distribute it.
For example, if Kraft cheese sold cheese slices in locked iron boxes, because they didn't want people to break down the formula they use to create delicious cheese... of course the cost of using their cheese in the way I wanted to may be so high I might just say... fuck you Kraft cheese I'm going to use some other cheese. You follow?
Today under Canadian copyright law I can legally make personal copies for my own use.
As long as I can continue to borrow peoples music selection and make a copy for myself without paying and the DRM allows this I have no objection.
The problem with DRM is twofold.
1. It enforces limits beyond those granted by copyright law.
2. Some people don't like current copyright law.
No, DRM is like a car that starts out to being speed limited to X mph, then the manufacturer of that car then dropping that limit to X-10, etc, and can't be driven on 'unapproved' roads or parked in 'unapproved' parking spaces, and can't be driven by 'unauthorized' people.
There might be an upside to any one of those restrictions (in carjackings, for example, or police chases). But what about the problems such restrictions cause? Injured/cardiac arrest/stroke and in your car? Can't rush yourself to the hospital if you're limited to the maximum posted limit? Neither could someone else necessarily drive you.
Captcha: 'paralyze'. How appropriate to the subject matter...
"It is a good divine that follows his own instructions" - Portia, The Merchant of Venice
I've yet to see a DRM scheme that didn't interfere with legal uses and was remotely effective. If we invented a DRM scheme that only stopped illegal use without any negative side effects, then I would definitely support it. I would also support building a perpetual motion machine for everyone to fufill all our energy needs.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Considering that the time period under discussion is several decades long, that would depend entirely upon a company maintaining those keys, not losing those keys and still being available to release those keys after all those years.
[sarcasm]Yeah, I don't see any problems there.[/sarcasm]
But that goal is intrinsically impossible.
1) It has to allow legal copys, INCLUDING small sections for educational/parody/news other fair uses.
2) It has to work on ANY system, including systems where programers fiddle with things at basic levels (which means that the DRM will not work as DRM because then the programmer can strip out the DRM)
3) It would have to not 'tax' my system in any significant amount. I should not have to buy a more expensive machine so that you can make sure I am not a thief.
4) It would have to not be capable of spying on me, just prevent illegal actions, no 'reporting', etc. --
So, this magical DRM system of yours would be acceptable. But it can't exist.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Three points:
(1) There is literally no technical difference between legal copying and illegal copying. How would a drm scheme detect that I was moving to a device I own vs one I don't. Heck, the concept of fair use is legally murky, trying to reduce it to an algorithm would be impossible. How would a drm scheme detect my "intent" which is central to fair use?
(2) Laws change.
(3) Not matter how it is spun, DRM as implemented today is a technically flawed concept. Trying to turn pki upside down by giving my a private key and encrypting data to it while simultaneously trying to keep my from accessing my private key is an exercise in futility, which is why nearly every attempt so far has failed. The key needs to be anywhere that the media is decrypted (computer, handheld devices, etc), every one of those places is a chance for someone to get at it. And don't give me "trusted device path" garbage, it all ends with two wires going into a speaker cone, and it can be retrieved that way if all else fails.
Finkployd
ooooh short answer, "Yes," with an if, long answer, "No," with a but...
The only DRM that I would gladly accept would be a 10 foot tall genetically modified human, designed from the DNA and up to seek out the people that pirate movies still in theatrical release. These DRM Trolls could wander the countryside avoiding law-abiding, fair use-using citizens, only to bust open the front door of a commercial piraters and smash them into a thick paste. He would be driven through indescribable psychological urges to hone in on scents released in high capacity DVD-R burnings through his tailor-made olfactory receptors.
Ordinary citizens could sit back and relax as the DRM Troll passed, comfortable in our knowledge that he won't be pummeling us and that he will be helping movie actors and crew members.
Under the conditions given, ie. that it enforce all rights under copyright including those that belong to the copy owner, I've no problem with DRM. Well, I'd add one condition: that the system be able to be updated to conform to future changes in copyright law and rights and have those updates take effect. My primary objection to DRM has always been that it protects some rights (those of the copyright owner) without regard to the nuances of copyright law while at the same time not only not protecting other rights (those of the copy owner) but actually preventing excercise of those rights. Correct that imbalance and it'd be acceptable to me (not ideal, but acceptable).
the question is pointless. there can be no such DRM capable of determining human intent.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
If digital media was available for sale at a reasonable price, but subject to a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying), would you support the usage of such a DRM scheme?
The question is content-free. No such system is possible. It's worse than trying to solve the halting problem (because it includes interpreting law).
Systems which ARE possible will be error-prone, subject to misuse both by content sellers (which will use it to abrogate the content user's rights), and will create new vulnerabilities to malware on the users' machines.
Absent such an impossible system there is nothing to support. So the question is meaningless.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
For a lot of us format-shifting is what matters. The problem with DRM is that it simply can not allow format shifting.
The mere idea of format shifting breaks DRM because quite litterally it implies the ability to shift the format into something which does not have DRM.
There is nothing I find acceptable about DRM:
No, I can't say as I find DRM something acceptable at any implementation or level. In its most innocent and benign form it's just irritating noise, in it's most insidious manifestation (and they're going there if they can), it's rage-inducing.
I agree with the objections to external control (analogous to having devices in cars which automatically enforce speed limits). But in addition to that, I want to see a whole new business model, not The Perfect DRM. I want artists to be able to distribute and market their work much more directly. As a consumer, I'm eager to compensate the artists, but less than thrilled about paying more for several layers of middlemen whose marketing doesn't help me find the things I'm interested in or fairly pay the artists I love. I think the old paradigm will crumble, and I can only hope that something better will emerge. DRMs just seem like a tool based on the status quo.
The question is basically, "If there were a DRM system that didn't do the things that DRM does, would you be opposed to it?"
My answer is still yes, for at least the following reasons:
Bottom line: DRM is bad for consumers.
http://outcampaign.org/
I would need to know for sure that I could place the song on any player now or ever to be created.
...or a CD, or any other technology his car's player accepts.
I would need to know that I could transfer it to any media that will ever be created.
I would need to know it would never cause degradation or loss of content.
No transfer or change of use should require external access for permission.
If I drive in a friends car, I should be able to bring the song on a USB stick and play it on his player.
I must be able to transfer ownership to someone else.
I'd expect (although it could be argued against) to be able to share the song with my wife and children.
Finally, since they have a record of my ownership in order to enable the DRM rights, I'd absolutely expect replacement/reissue any time I wanted it.
Then DRM will be acceptable.
The problem is, DRM is absolutely incapable of supporting many of these uses.
So no, I don't have anything against DRM itself, but it is absolutely, inherently counter to the needs of the public.
Yes.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Even the impossible hypothetical situation described is wrong. The prohibition of modern private copying without permission was an accident. Copyright was designed to regulate the publishing industry, not private citizens. Private citizens should not be subject to restrictions as to when they can share useful data. We now have, for the first time, the potential for a society in which any citizen can send data to any other citizen. This is a revolutionary situation which we should be embracing with open arms, not deploying technological measures to destroy, just because it inconveniences the current model for funding large-scale media projects.
"If digital media was available for sale at a reasonable price, but subject to a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying), would you support the usage of such a DRM scheme?"
.... No. Not because of the intent of your question but rather because the basic assumption is false.
... impossible, and cannot possibly exist.
Okay, that is one long question. But here is my one word answer
"If Pigs could fly would you support their right to fly?"
The answer to your question, is the same as my hypothetical question here. Since pigs cannot fly, then any question about pigs flying is necessarily flawed, and the answer has to be "No".
The DRM scheme you describe is
"Especially if it meant a wealth of readily available compatible devices?"
Again, your premise is flawed. There is no such thing available because it is impossible.
"In other words, if you object to DRM schemes, is your objection based on principled or practical concerns?"
Again, flawed reasoning. Your are asking an XOR question (one or the other, not both), where the answer has the possibility of being "both". In this case, that would be my answer, I object on both prinicple AND practical concerns.
DRM is a smoke screen and an illusion. If I can see it, or hear it, I can record it and duplicate it. Quality may suffer, but that is a different question altogether.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
My issue revolves around that very same aspect, preventing illegal copies.
The intent of copyright, as far as I know, is to provide an incentive for others to create content or ideas by giving them a monopoly on their use for a given time period. After this time period, whatever that may be, it reverts to the public domain upon which these ideas can now benefit society as a whole. We want these ideas in the first place.
However, any remotely useful DRM scheme would go against this. Think about it; say I make a culturally significant CD or article or book tomorrow and sell it only via iTunes or some other DRM-only scheme. I die the day after it is published. Under the law, some 50 or 90 years later, depending on your country, you should be able to use my content in any which way your heart so desires. How do we unlock the content?
In effect, we're placing control of our media and "intellectual property" in the hands of publishing companies whom we are forced to hope that they will still around by the time the copyright expires. Some might even try to fight releasing it back to the public (why should they host the unemcumbered copies, or the keys?) See the american sonny bono copyright extension act.
We can still read books, we can still read CDs and records. Even if we lose that technology in particular, we do not have to face a mathematical challenge trying to prevent us from reverse engineering it when we try to do so.
Finally, illegal copies are already, well, illegal. Prosecute those whom you find to be breaking the law. Copyright affords you that right; DRM is not required for this. In the end, DRM seems to be a race to effectively control and/or lock up what should eventually be our collective "intellectual property" (I am actually not fond of that term). Of course many of these schemes will be broken over time - but keep in mind that none of them are designed to allow unauthorised access once the copyright expires.
You might see things differently.
If it were possible for a computer to know what is legal and illegal, or moral and immoral, then why limit it to a piece of software on a disk? We could just put it on a chip and into everyone's brain to make them only do moral/legal things. And we could replace courts and judges too, since they just enforce the law, and this chip somehow knows the law. There are various Sci-Fi/distopian works based on this concept. They aren't pretty.
1) Optical disks will be obsolete and everyone will have giant harddrives they carry around with them. They will put all their content on the drive.
2) In an infinite supply world the cost of all media will tend towards zero.
3) Any content not fitting on the drive by way of DRM will be ignored.
a) Carrying around a bunch of disks no longer works, as a hard drive is more convenient.
b) The only way to backup a hard drive is with another hard drive.
b) Making media more portable gives it a greater audience.
c) Making media less portable gives it a smaller audience.
d) Getting burned by DRM is a strong deterent against DRM.
As others have pointed out, this is a silly question. There could never be such scheme, since the boundaries between legal and illegal use are so fuzzy, and may depend on the intent of the user. What you are really trying to ask is, "Is this fair-use thing just a smoke screen, and is the real reason we all object to DRM is that it prevents you from committing obvious copyright violations?"
I suspect there's some truth to this. I'm sure plenty of people here download music/movies etc. that they don't really have the right to. I personally wouldn't care so much if I couldn't do this. (Although I won't claim that I haven't). However I do like being able to trade and copy CDs from friends. This isn't really legal either, and DRM such as you described would put a stop to this, too.
In it's current form, though, DRM makes it harder for me to do things I should legally be able to do.
One obvious example: iPods play music. iTunes software makes it really easy to tranfer the music from shiny disks I buy onto the iPod. iPods also play videos. However, there is no legal software that I'm aware of (and iTunes certainly doesn't) that allows me to transfer my movies from shiny disks I buy onto the iPod. This is solely due to the DRM on DVDs.
I think illegal trading has served a valuable pupose: I wonder if without illegal trading, we'd have iTunes today. Without any compitition, it would probably be in the music companies best interest to keep forcing us to buy music as complete CD's.
Even if it were possible to stop people from copying something unless it was for fair use (which it isn't as the device can't tell context), it would still be a waste of people's time implementing such a scheme. The whole point of DRM is to stop people from freely sharing something that is inherently designed to encourage sharing. You can put all the hard work and effort into making the original that you want, but it benefits society as a whole to be allowed to study and improve upon your work. This should apply to everything, be it medicine, genetically engineered crops, or digital media. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would probably mean that governments should fund scientific research, that musicians and actors should be paid for live performances, and that no patents or copyrights should exist. Just a thought.
Would you have a pet unicorn if you could have one. Look at all those idiots that want an imaginary animal. This is a question phrased to come back later and say look at all the people that agree to DRM, even on slashdot. The only way that you could allow all legal uses of DRM protected material would involve tracking every person, every use, every location, time and date of that use, the current holder of the copyright, any lawsuits that have been settled about a particular song.
If a song writer gets sued over a song he released in the public domain, there would have to be a way to restrict the song retroactively. If a song writer gets sued and the song is declared public domain, then all copies need to be unlocked upon release of the judgment. When copyrights expire, the DRM needs to take this in account. When Disney increases the duration of copyright for 10 generations instead of 5, the experation date of all DRM files would need to change. If I fly to a country that has different copyright laws, the restricitions would need to change as soon as I cross the border. How will the cd player know that I just got a letter in the mail from a garage ban saying that I could copy that CD they cut as a demo before they broke up. You have some kind of DRM monitoring device that can tell if I want to make a satire of a copyrighted work? If you do have a magical software package that can determine all these things, how do you keep people from lying to it. If you trust the people not to lie to obtain a free copy, why do you need DRM?
I am against fair DRM on the same grounds that I am against perpetual motion machines.
That is very frustrating and points to a practical reason why I oppose DRM totally.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Once something leaves a bad taste in your mouth you will find you never really like it. Had the media conpanies put some intelligent thought into real world use of DRM and its' affects on people and designed this at the beginning I think it would be generally accepted and well received. By forcing it on people and treating them as criminals and they created the situation where people go out of their way to avoid their products. I dont think it matters much now if they try to rethink there approach, the damage is done. When you lock people into what should be commodity dont be surprise to find no one wants anything to do with it no matter if you put a different window dressing on it later.
Should be "...were available..." or "If a digital medium was available..."
As for this question of magical imaginary DRM,sure, fine, as long as it has no effect on hardware whatsoever.
I don't want to pay extra so that manufacturers can include stuff I don't want to limit what the hardware can do, and I don't want uncrippled hardware unavailable at reasonable prices because everybody is concentrating on making and selling crippled hardware because the majority of the buying public has been conned into buying those devices. 56K hardware modems never came down in price due to mass production because the market was stolen by WinModems which appeared to cost less but required a greater CPU investment and often OS lock-in.
I shouldn't have to pay more for hardware and settle for reduced choice as well just because somebody else might violate copyright anymore than I should have to pay more for a car because they all have to have disabling devices built in that detect whether the vehicle is being used for the getaway in a bank robbery.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
However, such a DRM system -- if it could be created, which is debatable -- might stave off the eventual dissolution of copyright for several decades.
I piss off bigots.
This is of course not a meaningful question. As I belive Cory Doctorow once pointed out, the only way you can build a DRM system that is able to accurately determine whether a copy is fair use or copyright violation is to embed in it an AI simulation of the Supreme Court of the USA.
And by the time that's possible, we'll have dismantled the MPAA, along with all the other non-geek population of the earth, in order to make more computonium. It'll be sad, but I can't imagine we'll pay much attention to our emotion subroutines.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
It tastes awful, but it works - most of the time...
It is a deliberately-introduced capacity for failure. If the copy protection were not there, the corresponding failures would not exist.
It is, to varying degrees depending on circumstance, unethical to manufacture and distribute merchandise you know to be defective.
It also complicates your QA process. How do you know the failure you've encountered is the result of a genuine defect, or one of the fake ones you've incorporated?
You also can't make the case that, in order to ensure an artisan's livelihood, you, as the buyer of that artisan's work, must accept defective merchandise. There is no way to semantically spin a deliberate defect as a fair trade. The "tradeoff", such as it is, is unbalanced and unfair.
So, copy protection is intrinsically unethical, and should be rejected wherever and whenever possible.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
"but subject to a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying)"
If you can play it, you can copy it. End of story. The point of DRM is to limit usage by preventing format shifting, time shifting, or playback on different devices.
The question is based on a false premise - that you can control only illegal copying but allow legal copying. If copying is allowed, legal and illegal copying will occur - and there's no way around that.
What solves the DRM "problem" is for the price point to be *fair* to consumers, rather than based in price fixing and unreasonable usage restrictions. Back that up with legal action (and not the types of crap **AA are doing, but go after the ones who are making illegal copies and selling them for a profit on the black market rather than the grandmothers who don't have computers and can't download stuff via P2P because they don't know what it even is).
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
- am equipped with a minimal amount of equipment in the form of access to a) a library computer with a USB port, an inexpensive USB connectable digital camera/video corder/scanner/whatever, and the cord...
- I am the only person in the right place at the right time and capture some amazing event with world-wide benefit and implications...
- I do not wish to keep the benefit to myself or profit unreasonably from the dissemination of the content, and
- the library auto-encodes my content to the theoretically perfect DRM solution that meets all of the listed specs, but is not open source and is not freely available to run on ALL browser connected systems.
My content is no longer free. It is now controlled by an outside interest that can profit from it's dissemination or alternatively from it's suppression.For example, if I invented a vaccine for one of a number of deadly viruses and wished to publish both the vaccine and the inexpensive production method for use throughout the world -- in the process rendering a highly profitable line of drugs useless. If you can't unlock my content because the DRM is commercially controlled, then what?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Given a choice between buying restricted content and going without, I go without. I own 2 DVD movies, both were gifts and I watched them using xine. No way I'd invest in more given the legal uncertainty over CSS decryption.
I had a switch hooked up to my cable box and the a tech was awestruck when I told him that the macrovision wouldn't affect my viewing because I wouldn't pay for a deliberately sabotaged channel. If I want to convert to S-Video or mult the signal to an old hi-band deck, so long as I'm not redistributing it's nobodies business but mine. Guess I'm in the minority?
Would I accept a DRM scheme that ONLY prevented illegal copying and other illegal uses? Sure.
But such a system could never be built. For me to buy into a DRM scheme they would have to allow me to back up any and all files as I wish. Watch, listen, or read such files on any equipment that would be capable of accessing such information if it wasn't DRMed, and not expire or limit my ability to access the data in the future.
The problem is that with any scheme is that both legal in illegal actions will likely look identical to the system. Let's use music as an example. I should be able to copy my song to my MP3 player, leave a copy on my computer, share the song over a network with other devices in my house, and burn as many CD's as I want as long as I only play one copy of the song at once. How would such a system be able to tell that in one case I'm burning a CD to use in my car, but in another I'm burning one for a friend?
Sure we could require special authentication along the line, but that would require the DRM exist in EVERY device I would want to use. This isn't acceptable as I'm not about to buy new CD players, DVD players, or other playback devices. It also seems to be an invasion of privacy as any scheme would require constant monitoring of everything I do.
So while such a system initially sounds great, implementing such a thing will probably never happen.
-Jthon
Allowing format shifting implies the ability to shift it to an unlocked format (allowing format shifting to locked formats doesn't count as format shifting). Allow that and you might as well not bother with DRM at all. For that reason, the whole question is moot.
So far I have not seen one DRM vendor provide any rationale for usurping my right to a fair trial, and replacing that right with the DRM being the judge and enforcer.
To put it simply, I don't want to pay for development time to design a product to prevent me from doing things. Previously software development costs were to add features to empower the user, not limit how the user uses the product..
Anybody want a peanut?
This is the wrong set of questions for reasons that many people have laid out - no way to define "illegal copying", no hardware to support, no architecture, no mass appeal - DRM appeals mostly to media companies, yada yada.
A better set of questions would be: Have art creators, e.g.,musicians, movie actors, writers, been seriously harmed by the lack of DRM? If they have been harmed to some extent, can they take actions, other than using DRM, to compensate, or even come out ahead? I specifically leave out media corporations in the issue of being harmed because they are businesses and like any other business they need to deal with technological change. Risk is the nature of business, and businesses must change operations, and not legislate their way out of difficulties.
A DRM scheme which allows full legitimate usage is no longer a DRM scheme. DRM can only regulate technical actions, but whether or not an action is legitimate depends on human factors. If a DRM scheme allows me to change formats and move content to any device I want, then I should be able to view content on Linux, re-encode to XViD/Ogg Vorbis, put the files up on my home server, and stream them to the PCs around my apartment. I should also be able to ssh in from work or school and pull down a few songs to listen to at my desk. All of this is legal fair use, because I paid for the content in the first place. If DRM doesn't restrict these actions, then I really don't see how it can hope to restrict doing the same re-encoding and sticking the files on some P2P network.
DRM as it is today is like buying a car with a governor that keeps the speed locked below 20 miles per hour, so that no matter where you drive you'll never be speeding. It can get you around your neighborhood, but by not trusting the user, it prevents you from doing things that you really ought to be able to. If the governor were set to 70 miles per hour, I would still find it distasteful, because the system is still setting parameters on exactly what I'm able to do with it, and the parameters continue to stifle legitimate use (for example, I can drive as fast as I want on a private road).
Basically, it boils down to this: either a DRM system must lock down uses which are perfectly legal, if rare, in order to stop piracy, or the system must be so weak as to be essentially nonexistent and allow everything (including piracy). Trying to design a system which lets you have your cake and eat it too, so to speak, is like trying to design bullets that only hurt the bad people.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Making a DRM format that only ever impedes illigitimate use, but always allows legitimate use, is omniscience-complete.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I reject it because although I buy a "license" for a piece of software, if the DVD is scratched they do not send me another at a nominal value ($1), they charge me the full price. Therefore, I should be able to backup my data.
I reject it because of the lies the industry has told us about HD content.
I reject it because the first HDTV's won't even be able to display flagged HD content.
I reject it because it locks out entrepreneurs from creating middle-ware components.
I reject it because it promotes incompatibility.
I reject it because it wastes our government's, media's, and corporations' time.
I reject it because once again, it limits my use, does NOTHING to stop illegal piracy, and *I* have to pay the additional cost.
I am opposed to DRM as the idea of intellectual property is flawed in the first place. Aside from instructions detailing the construction of a hydrogen bomb, the free exchange of information benefits mankind. The internet long ago made obsolete the business model of the big record companies, and it is time that we stop trying to prop them up artificially. Let artists make a living the way they have since time immemorial, by performance, or creating physical art. Software programmers can contribute to mankind's collective knowledge and ability, and if they don't have anything new to contribute, there are other jobs. Rewriting software that accomplishes the same task with the same efficiency is silly. Open source must be the law. Intellectual property is a ball and chain that our our society must (and will inevitably) shed. The question is, how long will we continue to shoot ourselves in the foot and hold back human progress? There is not one person reading Slashdot who has not copied a tape, "pirated" software, or swapped an mp3. You know you have done it, and you know that you do not feel guilty about it. Stop lying to yourselves.
almost everybody you know != 1 in 100 people.
Unless you personally know 60 million people.
I'm running a pirated copy of Linux.
The question is so flawed that there's no way to answer it. It's like asking, "If you could create something with no volume and no surface area, what color would you paint it?"
h tml
It has been proven that DRM cannot disallow redistribution, let alone make a distinction between unauthorized distribution and fair use.
http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/doctorow-drm-ms.
I have no problem with my satellite TV provider using DRM.
The DRM that they have applied is applied to equipment they own (as opposed to being imposed on my PC). This DRM prevents me from watching the channels to which I am not subscribed, and enforces the "view" part of the "pay per view" channels (by calling home to tell them I need to "pay" and cutting me off if I don't).
The signal that comes out is compatible with my TV. I am not prevented from recapturing it. It is analogue, in the case of the particular receiver that I have, but this is not universally true.
The competing satellite TV network uses Macrovision on several channels to prevent recording. These guys do not.
I do not approve of DRM as applied to media or equipment that one purchases. If they want me to be subjected to DRM, then let them buy me the equipment to play it.
www.wavefront-av.com
If genetically modified crops were available for sale at a reasonable price, but subject to a scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (growing, eating, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (growing a second generation you didn't pay for, cross pollination), would you support the usage of such a scheme? Especially if it meant a wealth of superior food? In other words, if you object to such schemes, is your objection based on principled or practical concerns?
Of course, crops are more important than entertainment, as they can be quite literally a matter of life and death, but both things use technology in order to stop people freely using and sharing them as they otherwise would naturally be able to, because of patents and copyrights.
I think the distinction between "principled" and "practical" is hard to make. I don't object to the three letters DRM. Objections are to what the technology does. So in some sense all objections are practical. If you permit magic, you can come up with a set of specifications that I woudn't object to. But it's hard to imagine a real technology that I would find acceptable. Sure, if all it did was prohibit giving away copies to someone else, I might not have a problem. But I'm single. If I had a family I'd be concerned about other family members. I'm also worried about what happens at the end of copyright. If there are no unencumbered copies, can it get into the public domain? And will any real technology have a long enough lifetime and good enough compatibility to actually meet the requirements you mention. I very much doubt it.
I don't know what the answer to piracy is. But I suspect it's not DRM in the current sense. In a world where it's easy to find illegal copies, the way to sell legal copies is to make them as useful as possible. I can't fathom a strategy based on making the legal copies progressively less and less useful.
No, twice. If media was priced reasonably DRM wouldn't be needed. And I as a customer, or pre DRM customer, don't want to pay for the developement of some badass encryption that can do nothing but cripple me what so ever.
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
"Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again." - Bruce Schneier
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
DRM is just bad for consumers.
Just look at iTunes. You buy DRM protected songs that can only be played on your computer and your iPod.
If you buy a CD, you pay an average of 30c per song in royalties, while in iTunes you pay 70c in royaties. What do you get? A lossy compressed song that is crippled by DRM. Besides that, you are actually paying for the DRM you are using. You pay the licensing fees for the fairplay system.
DRM creates monopolies and it only benefits large companies.
Just the other day, there was a report on the SONY's policy to keep porn out of blue-ray. Porn has always been the testing ground in the U.S. for freedom of speech. You may not like it but you shouldn't prohibit it.
If porn content distributers cannot license blue-ray, what is stopping SONY from blocking other small content distributers?
Maybe they will block next films that go against "family values".
DRM creates vertical monopolies by coupling technology with the content. This goes against the fundamental principle of converging technology: play everything in every device, where ever you are.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Anywhere else such a vastly high murder rate as 1% would get some action.
Whiole it sounds good, this is not possible. What is "illicit copying"? Right, copying that the copyrightholder does not want. There is no way to allow me everything I want to do with that stuff, while disallowing everything the copyright holder does not want.
For example, I cannot do backups, since by its very definition backup needs to be restorable without anuthing that the backup. And it needs to be restorabne to an entirely different system. That is already enough to require unlimiting copying possibilities. I also want to be able to play stuff for my friends. If I now leave for the kitchen for a moment, should the stuff be allowed to stop playing?
So stop this argument. DRM is, and can only be, about the copytight holder dictating what can be done and what not. Since copytight is not a natural right in any way, but an artificial one made to stimulate creation of content (which can also be done in other ways), there is no reason at all to give copyright holders this power.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I don't think anything that PREVENTS possible uses would ever really be palatable unless it had a magic sensor to detect the intent with which an action is performed, so I will always oppose DRM. I don't think I'm determined enough to maintain that position if all non-DRM'd avenues are closed, but as long as there are ethical ways to get non-encumbered content, I don't think that any kind of magic "less evil" DRM would ever get a dollar from my wallet.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be opposed to anything whose sole purpose is to trace infringing content. Some kind of perfect watermarking technology would be acceptable, because the assumption isn't that I'm a bad person that is going to do evil things with the content (as with DRM), instead the assumption is that I'm a good person who will use the content responsibly, but if I don't then I leave fingerprints around that the cops can use to find me.
Geez, I wish I were more coherent. I should probably lay off the booze.
My objection is that this is MY computer - I own it, I paid for it, I run it, and I can pull the power plug on it. I will not load it with software that works against me.
DRM sets up a mini battle going on within the OS/motherboard/applications. I refuse to let that battle happen, because this is my property to begin with. I just will not tolerate the insult of software that works against ME, the owner.
No such thing will ever exist. A digital system can't the difference between legal and illegal copying, and it will stay that way until we have AIs that are smarter than Federal judges. (Yes, I know that's a pretty low target, but AI still hasn't reached it). Maybe there would be a point in arguing about such a perfect, unobtrusive DRM system, but it will never exist, so there's no use bothering. Anything that can actually be implemented is going to be annoying and insulting. So yeah. DRM is bad mmmkay?
If you take a look at DRM from the point of cryptography, you begin to see how silly it really is. Normally in cryptography, alice wishes to send a message to bob, and neither alice nor bob wishes eve to be able to read the contents of the message. This is NOT easy to do, but it's possible if you design your system well enough.
The 'DRM' problem is as follows: Alice wishes to send a Message To Bob, without Eve seeing the Message. Bob however, would like to show Eve the message. In this case, Alice is a Media Producer, Bob is a Media Consumer, and Eve is a would-be pirate. You can't even begin to argue how any system could be provably secure. All current DRM systems are based upon security by obscurity, which cryptographers have known for years doesn't work.
The legal system must accurately reflect the portions of reality which it is intended to govern. The concept of a functional DRM system is becoming more and more an imaginary thing.
My blog
Any DRM scheme that allows fair use can be abused, since it is impossible to distinguish legitimate time-shifting and format-shifting from copying with malicious intent. Therefore, any DRM scheme that cannot be bypassed by emulating the exercise of fair-use rights will necessarily prevent the exercise those rights. And that's why I am against it. DRM's absurd extension of the ability to arbitrarily assert property rights is unethical and fails to balance the rights of the producer against those of the consumer.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
I'd like to propose a DRM scheme which I'm confident is the only one which can meet all the requirements for a non-evil DRM simultaneously -- specifically, it must allow legal copying, but prevent illegal copying. In addition, it must be compatible with all operating systems, including ones that already exist and don't yet exist, and those operating systems that will exist in 500 years or whenever the copyright eventually expires.
Here is how this DRM scheme works:
1. There is a field in the file which specifies that it's copyrighted, along with some details about who owns the copyright, when it was copyrighted, in what location, etc.
2. When you make a copy of the file in a way that might reasonably be thought to infringe a law somewhere (eg. you send it over the network), software should show the following:
"Warning: file is copyright (c) Joe Schmoe, 2007."
"Please verify that the copy you are about to make is legal."
"Really copy? [Copy] [Cancel]"
3. If the user presses [Copy], the copy is made.
4. If the user pressed [Cancel], the copy is not made.
This is the only workable "DRM" scheme which will effectively prevent infringing copies, while allowing users to make the legal copies to which they're entitled.
If you wanted to make it really fancy, you could extend it to Manage Digital Rights, and for example display a link to a site you can go to purchase the right to make another copy, as well as keep track of when the copyright expires.
The funny thing is, all the popular file formats already support this scheme (mp3, etc.), yet for some reason the *AA don't seem to want anyone to use it. I wonder why... Could it be that they don't actually want a scheme that effectively manages your rights and allows you to make use of them as the law allows?
*IF* there were "perfect" DRM, a DRM that did not extend beyond or 'expand' the copyright laws into areas they do not cover, and if that "perfect" DRM didn't remove any rights from either side of the equation, and allowed me to personally listen to music I've bought the right to listen to whenever/wherever I want to, I would have no problems with the DRM in any real sense.
I seriously doubt that such a thing is possible with ANY current hardware/software.
I personally ran into a "DRM problem" last year. The sound system in both my vehicles will play "MP3 CDs" and I have a large collection of DRM protected music bought on-line from iTunes. For long trips I like having "travel CDs" that have hours of music on them so I'm not constantly fiddling with the CD player while trying to drive. iTunes refused to allow me to directly make an MP3 CD with any of those songs on it.
Yes, I could legitimately have converted to full AIFF audio, burned CDs of them (max about 72 minutes each) and then converted those to MP3 and burned a couple of 6.5 hour MP3 CDs for the car. iTunes would have allowed that without objecting, but then I would have all these "regular" CDs I'd burned and didn't want - a total waste.
Instead, I used some third party open source software to directly convert every last protected iTunes bit of music to unprotected MP3s.
Shortly after that, Apple once again made internal changes to iTunes to prevent that software from working - and I have not bought one single iTunes selection since. Hmmmmmmmmmmm...
I don't wish to copy and distribute music to others, I just want to listen to music at home and in my cars. Until I can do that, simply, easily, and without ridiculous extra steps, I won't be buying more DRM'd music.
--
Tomas
Of course, nothing is perfect, that dongle wouldn't be able to allow for the extensions that legislation in the USA creates every time the copyright on the first Disney film is about to expire. Life is a bitch. Or would you say that not everyone agrees to those copyright extensions?
Bits can be copied. Speculating on how to remove their fundamental property is waste of time. Speculating on how to make bits track and implement legislation (laws do change, you know?) is even more inane.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
If an individual or organization wants to use DRM, that's there perogative. But unless it easily and cheaply allows all legal fair use, it forfeits any protection under copyright.
So, if they want to go it on their own, the DRM is their ownly protection. If it gets cracked, to bad. If they forgo DRM, they have the full backing of the law to pursue copyright violations on their work.
In this view fair use is not just a right of the consumer, but an obligation of the copyright holder.
One problem I have is with restricting the copying a media is that what happens when the copyright owner disappears.
I have a list of about 50 or so movies open I try to get, but they are unavailable in any formats anywhere. I managed to get some of them by copying from someone, or from some other *cough* sources *cough*
Copyright was once invented to give artists compensation for their contribution to the arts and society. The basic idea should still be that the artists work becomes part of the common heritage some day
So in my opinion DRM would only be OK if the copyright holder also had a copyobligation ( for a fair price ) if someone requests a copy. And there should be a 'official' way to get a copy in case the copyright owner disappears.
As mentioned before, the only thing DRM can achieve is to inconvienance a copy procedure, not bury it totally. Even if everything in my house had a locked architecture, I could hold a microphone to a speaker or a camcorder to a TV and still record. Only by outlawing and banning *any* sort of recording device would DRM become anywhere near a success, and thats on the assumption that it's uncrackable. Until someone replaces my eyes and ears with digital equivilents (nasty thought, huh?), there will always be an analogue output to any media. The way I look at DRM is thus. I still uphold my right to break copyright to make a CD for my girlfriend or for my car stereo in the same way that I'll drive my car at 110mph when it's 3am and there's no cops on the motorway. Or in the same way that i'll stub a cigarette out on the pavement or (back in the day) buy alchohol underage. We are all guilty of something, so why bother hiding it? If i get caught, then I am a fool. Simple as. Just because it is a law doesn't mean that everyone adheres to it. Being honest, I wouldn't imagine that the powers that be would want everyone to adhere to it. Civil disobedience is the summit of a free society, and the time to start worrying would be when everyone starts doing what they're told.
Question amounts to:
"If something that sucks, could be made to not suck, except for where it would continue to suck, would it still suck?"
Charles Babbage noted:
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Let me add that I, personally, prefer mplayer to watch movies, and usually mplayer or audacious to listen to music.
Others prefer VLC. Still others actually prefer Windows Media Player or iTunes (yuck!)... I prefer mplayer.
Now, mplayer is fundamentally incompatible with DRM, because the only way this would work is if every single configuration I want to play with is covered by your trusted computing hardware. And you can't possibly do that, because what if I want to do some kernel hacking? What if I have custom mplayer plugins?
I reject the DMCA, and I play DVDs on Linux as a matter of civil disobedience. And it's important to keep in mind that if you accept the DMCA, you are saying that anything not covered by the DRM scheme is automatically illegal, because it is illegal to circumvent the DRM scheme.
But, if you ignore the DMCA, it is wholly legal for me to play my media on whatever hardware or software I want. And for me, and others like me, it's not merely an issue of having the particular combination I like now be able to play it, with the feature set I like now. It's a matter of being able to change my mind later, or even hack it or patch it myself -- or pay someone else to do so.
Let me provide a simple example: I rent a movie. I bring it home, and pop it into my Powerbook, and rip it from there, because for some reason, my Powerbook seems to be good at ripping movies. I then copy it over a network to my Linux desktop. I return the movie. Then, sometime tomorrow, I watch the movie, then delete it.
I consider this to be a perfectly legitimate form of time shifting, yet any DRM architecture which would allow me to do that would also be so restrictive in terms of things completely unrelated to music that I would never willingly use it. We've already seen this with Windows, by the way -- pop in a Sony CD, the autorun installs a custom CD driver (or layer, or somesuch) which, if you attempt to tamper with it (or remove it), it kills your CD drive, and if you don't, you can't copy that CD, or even play it with normal software.
Now, I will say that I'm willing to make compromises, sometimes. For instance, most media (movies, music) may be played by all kinds of software, including open source -- it's not as if they ship a player with the media. However, most games must come with their own software, and so already are requiring the main thing I don't like about DRM -- being forced to use their software instead of having a choice. But, since I'm already being forced to use the Source engine to play Half-Life 2, and since that is as it should be, I'm willing to compromise here -- I don't mind that it requires Steam, and in fact, it's nice that Steam lets me do just about everything that's not infringing.
But, with music and movies, such restrictions are unnecessary, usually much worse than Steam, and even if they weren't, it's not worth it to me -- I can still rent DVDs and listen to my local radio station. And I should mention, this station runs entirely on open source (Ubuntu and FreeBSD), and stores just about all their music in Ogg Vorbis ripped from CDs, and the studios don't seem to have a problem with it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
>>Consider that even if an artist was the last of his bloodline, owned all his copyrights, and did not will those rights to anyone, you still couldn't copy any of his works for however long Disney decided they should be extended.
l ). I personally opined that they should go into the public domain, possibly with a grace period to allow for a lost author to suddenly show up before it becomes public property*.
IANAL, but I think that'd be untrue under a couple of legal theories at least:
First, if she had no heirs at all (including parents, siblings, cousins, etc.) then her property would escheat to the State. The practical effect of which (I believe - I haven't researched it) would be to put the work in the public domain. I have no idea if anyone has done any work with this area, but it'd be fun thing to try...
Next, if the copyright is in limbo and no one seems to have any rights to it, it would probably be considered an Orphaned Work. There have been Bills recently in Congress to clarify and codify the status of such works, but none have passed yet (that I know of.) The Copyright Office was soliciting advice from the public on what should be done last year. ( http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2005/70fr3739.htm
*I admit my anti-copyright bias, but I don't think this is unfair. If you want your work to be protected, you should have to put a notice of copyright within the work, as under the old system. And you should have up to a year or so to decide you want to do that (to prevent people copying your expression.) Beyond that, it's public - period.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Exactly. Even when laws appear to be cut-and-dry, they require human interpretation. Is abortion murder? At what stage - conception? at some arbitrary point later?
Copyright is anything but simple. What's a copy, for example? Does a temporary file generated by a web browser count? What if you record a streaming video? Is a photograph of the Eiffel tower a copy? A few frames of network television captured while filming a documentary? Is copying sometimes justified - perhaps because the document in question is evidence of serious problems with voting machines? Is the work in question even in copyright? (There's a clear yes/no answer to that one, but it can be very difficult to figure out.) Is hyperlinking a violation? I haven't even considered fair use.
Code is not interpreted. It is inflexible. It cannot change when society changes - and society will change. There was a time when slaves and women were not "persons". Once embodied in code, the human actions that created the rule become invisible - they appear to be facts of nature. Radio is a mass medium: you can receive, but you cannot transmit. That's just how it is. Well, no: that's a choice that was made when the technology was developed. It could have been point-to-point like the telephone (just as the telephone could have been a broadcast medium - some early providers played music over the phone); it could have allowed two-way communication.
The decisions made in the development of technology cast a long shadow on the future. This is unavoidable. The question to ask then is whether the shadow cast by DRM is a desirable one. DRM entrenches the model of mass communication: of a few broadcasters and many listeners. It limits the potential for speech and participation in a free and democratic society. It reinforces hierarchy, control, monopoly power - in the market, in software, on your computer. Not your control: someone' else's. That's the DRM we are faced with today. If, for argument's sake, we accept that makers of music and video would never distribute their products online (a questionable assertion), would the trade-off be worth it? I say the price is too high: DRM is always bad.
I'd prefer that people call DRM what it is: Digital Restrictions Management. The class of technology commonly referred to as "DRM" works by enforcing (or inflicting, depending on your point of view) restrictions on digital content. Since much of DRM is used to restrict or deny rights, e.g., fair use as defined by copyright law, calling it "rights" management is inaccurate.
People might take more interest in DRM (although the cynic in me doubts it) if it were called what it is, not what the people pushing it claim it to be.
Consequently, my objection to DRM is based on both philosophical and practical terms.
This is one of the clearest posts on this topic so far.
DRM is the responsibility of industry and is acceptable as long as it doesn't reasonably infringe on my ability to use the product in my home at my leisure.
Being from California, I find that most things are more tasteful with some ranch dressing.
The main point of the matter is that they need to 'want' to share it. By making it difficult to use the media you are in fact creating a bias against the DRM provider, and that owner of the brand new unlistenable or unwatchable 'coffee cup coaster' may just choose to get even. The only question that remains is just how motivated this person becomes. Smart idea or not, once the mp3/iso/mpeg is out in the wild you can't put the genie back in the bottle. It only takes one pissed-off geek.
As a technology DRM can only be successful if you can withhold one of the pieces until it is needed or have it locked in the hardware. But even the 'special hardware' does not stand up to a simple soldering iron and a logic analyzer. The major players in the Video black market know how to use, modify, and build electronics that can get around the DRM. They can make a boat load of money dumping thousands of pirated CD/DVD's on the streets, and all that fancy DRM isn't going to be but a speed bump in their way. This is where the laws and enforcement needs to be channeled, not into suing somebody for copying last nights TV show for their little sister who was out late at that PTA meeting and happened to miss it.
And also, define it in all country and all years to come.
Thanks
Yes, DRM is inherently distateful - much in the same way any product-crippling is distasteful. As soon as you put an artificial restriction on a product, preventing a useful fuction that would otherwise exist, you lower the value of that product.
That being said, there are times when I might be willing to buy a DRMed product, if something else about the experience was worth the trade-off - a compelling price, better quality content or presentation, etc. I accept DRM on music rental services - because I'm paying very little, with the understanding that the music isn't mine to keep anyway. It's up to the provider to come up with a product that the consumer finds valuable; DRM may or may not be a deal-breaker, but it certainly takes away from the quality of the product as a whole.
Where we run into a real problem is when laws like the DMCA effectively make circumvention of copy protection and access controls (DRM) illegal - it's absolutely wrong to tell me I can't lawfully do what I want with my purchase, just because the producer of the product tried to limit it.
Let's say the people who make my toaster limit it so that it can only lightly brown bread. They've got a super-dooper- Actually Toast Toaster on the market too, and don't want to cut into its sales. But I know a thing or two about toaster-making, and with $2 of parts from radio shack, I can turn this thing into a Cajun cooking machine. Should that be illegal?
I think the idea or DRM is to make intangible, digital media follow the same rules as physical media. For example, you go out and buy a CD, that EXACT CD can't be copied (the contents can be, the digital part). And therein lies the problem. IMHO, this cannot be done. If, and I stress the word *IF*, there was some way to have this "perfect", dream DRM, yes, I would go for it. I mean, I DO buy CDs and DVDs. So why would I not pay for the same stuff, just even more conviniently delivered? Just as long as there is ABSOLUTELY NO inconvenience(?) to me. But there is something that I have not seen any higher-ups address. And that is "Why?" Why do we refuse to pay for media? Why do we insist on "stealing" movies and music? Because the "lawfully" acquired media is useless. I can my DRM song on all of nothing, and my DVD that i downloaded can only be played on my tiny 13 inch monitor. We can't do anything with DRM. Now this is something that's been mentioned time and time and time again. But if the RIAA and MPAA and all those other idiots had EMBRACED, instead of rejected the new technologies, we wouldn't be in this situation. Then again, the industries involved wouldn't be making their insane profits either. So it's greedy idiots with no knowledge of the real world and real people and real situations who get to make the rules. Great. I guess everyone in the US gets to take it in the ass. Good job! Myself, I'll stay right here in my Canada and enjoy my legally downloaded free music. Maybe in a few years the US will collapse upon itself, and everyone'll move up here to enjoy the freedoms of free music for all!
Most DRM schemes appear designed to make customers pay for the same product more than once. For example, locking material to a specific device means if that device is ever lost, stolen, or broken, you have to pay for the material all over again. While I recognize that copyright holders do have a legitimate right to try to prevent unauthorized copying of their material, it should be possible to do so in a manner that permits fair use -- backup copies, small excerpts, time shifting, space shifting, having a copy available to more than one playback device at a time, etc.
But in order for it to work for me, here are my requirements:
1. I must be able to make backup copies of stuff. By backup copies I really mean backup copies to protect the content in case disk gets scratched up or something, not something folks put on eMule.
2. I must have guarantee that my content will still play 20 years from now at least
3. I must be able to use it on all my devices, from cell phone to DAP to car stereo. Using it on my devices must not require extra effort. Everyone in my family must also be able to use the content I purchase on their own devices.
4. I must have a guarantee that I can re-acquire content in a format that's supported by future players (with CD I can rip and convert or re-burn onto something else)
5. I must be able to temporarily give my copy of content to my friends, like I do with CDs. I'm OK with losing access to the content while someone else has access to it.
6. No region locking, ever, for anything. If you want to geographically differentiate movies, localize them into foreign languages and omit the English audio track.
DRM have two key moral drawbacks:
1) It assumes that the user is criminal
2) It needs to modify the user's terminal to work.
Basically you cannot have DRM without having an electronic big brother resident on your computer.
It is basically the same as having a cop resident in your home, assuming that if you would not have a cop there you would be unable to resist ther temptation of abusing your children.
Just think of the "lightest" DRM possible, that would be a piece of software recording everything that goes through on the off chance that you do something illegal.
It would not actually stop you but just enable the government to punish you adequatelly if you would be found out.
It would be perfectly "user friendly", but you would/should freak out because of the privacy issues.
And you might resent the fact that this "spy" can only be installed on your computer (or player or phone) if the computer has an "approuved" operating system, (since it has to interact with the OS)
This not only destroy any pretence of Free/Open Source option, it also implies that ANY alternative operating system needs to "ask for permission" from the DRM manufacturer.
Well in short DRM are made by people that are evil, and think everybody else is too, and it is not about "fair use" and "protecting the artist" but all about monopoly market control.
Given thirty or forty years into the future, we should be able to decrypt media that has been encrypted with "old" technology with small keys. For example, given today's computing power, not all messages were decrypted by the allied forces during WW2. How much time would it take to crack such schemes now? A.M
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. - HGTTG
First of all, I am of the opinion that our opinions aren't going to matter much in the short run. If some producers of music use DRM and they still sell their music, they will.
As for me, as long as there are places where I can go and buy music that is DRM-free, I couldn't care less about who's selling music with DRM.
My only concern is that there are laws in place that make it illegal for the music sites to sell DRMed music without there being obvious notices in place that they do indeed incorporate DRM in the music they sell. That goes for CDs too. I've seen a few that made it next to impossible to tell. Anyway, that way it becomes merely and exercise in checking every six months or so to see if those sites have abandoned DRM or not. It may take a few years (maybe more than a few) for DRMed music peddlers to change or go bankrupt, but I'm convinced it's going to happen.
Heard any good sigs lately?
Vista will only lock down unsigned audio IF and ONLY IF it is being played at the same time as protected premium content audio. (DVD Audio anyone?)
Vista works great right now with unsigned unprotected 24bit 192khz multichannel audio files.
Vista HAS to provide a method for protecting audio/video content or we will not see PC DVR's, HD content on PC's etc...
I don't like DRM either but don't spread around the FUD paste please!
DRM is copy protection by another name. For years, the software industry has tried copy protection with techniques such as writing their own especially difficult to copy DOS for the Apple ][, making intentionally defective sectors on floppies for the PC, serial port dongles, and the glory days of CDROMs and no CD-Rs and burners. Copy protection could always be broken then, can be broken now, and will always be breakable in the future. Since in principle copy protection cannot work, I object to the waste of money and time on the practicalities-- the many inconveniences to legit users, the unforeseen legit uses that are blocked, the additional expenses of the attempts to create copy protection which are passed on, and the expenses created when copy protection goes wrong.
Most of all, I object on the grounds that supposing there could be DRM that worked, it would be bad for society. DRM is "extreme capitalism", in which every thing, no matter how petty, must have a price, and every act has an additional tax on it beyond the expenditure of effort fundamentally necessary to act, and every idea and bit of info must be owned. It'd be a world where everyone must pay auto manufacturers and insurance companies for every minute they are running a car, pay a broadcaster for every minute they listen to the radio, pay a toll road authority for every meter they drive on any road, street, or alley, and most of all, pay for the huge overhead both indirectly in things like the loss of privacy, and directly for the systems needed to monitor and record all that data (which the subjects might not have opportunity to examine) to assess and collect all those tolls. The neighbor kids couldn't play with your kid's toys without their parents paying the toy manufacturer for a license. You might even ought to pay a carbon tax on every breath you take! That's not my vision of Utopia. That's not even a workable society.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
1. Eat crusty 100+ year old hat.
2. Ummm....
3. PROFIT!!
Consider that one of the long-allowed copyright exceptions is "short excerpts for review purposes".
One thousand "reviewers" each legally excerpt a different portion of, say, Peter Jackson's new release of "The Silmarillion". Each of them legally posts their review with their excerpt. These reviews are not required to have any DRM on them, because they do not individually infringe on the copyright of the movie.
I can now find their reviews, paste together their excerpts, and recreate an illegal copy of the movie.
No DRM scheme can distinguish between me creating this illegal copy, and me just reading those thousand reviews, at least not without becoming incredibly intrusive.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
If someone offered you a perpetual motion machine to generate unlimited energy supply, would you use it?
Here's why.
Suppose that I told you that i saw a working prototype of an audio watermarking system. When someone wanted to download a song, a per-user watermark was injected into the audio stream right before they downloaded it. This watermark was not detectable to the human ears, however, it survived generational copying. Infact, in the demo i saw, computer A played the watermarked file over its speakers in a busy convention hall. Computer B had a mic and recorded the audio (along with convention floor noise). Computer B was able to detect and verify the watermark.
I would say that this watermark was resilient to basic attacks, and would allow for format shifting, resampling, and so on. By the time you had destroyed the watermark, you'd have destroyed the audio quality.
I was describing the demo of this prototype i saw to someone and they asked "wow why aren't companies using it?"
I thought about it for a while, and I'll tell you what I told him.
Because audio watermarking doesn't make them as much money.
Under a DRM scheme, content mogels get 2 improtant benefits
1) They have more control then they are supposed to according to fair use rights. They've effectively invented new distributino terms and opened up all kinds of control schemes.. limited only by their whims. Fair use is completely out the window. Now you can be charged for the same thing 33 times - once on each of your computers, each of your phones, and so on. DRM gives them control, control in a way that is orthogonal or in opposition to the normal protections that content consumers have via exceptions to copyright like fair use or public domain expiration
2) Under the watermark scheme, rights enforcement remains a civil matter. So the RIAA sees "bob.mp3" out ont he torrent sites, extracts the watermark, and matches it up with the Credit Card in their database. Now they go after Joe Blow and sue him in court.
The problem here is that
1) they have to file a civil suit. that costs them money
2) the defendant has all kinds of ways to weasel out of this (someone hacked my PC, someone stole my credit card, etc etc)
But the big problem is that it is so unattractive compared to the alternative:
Under a DRM scheme, for the file to be in any way useful to anyone at all, including illegal file sharing, the DRM protections must be cracked or removed.
This constitutes a violation of the DMCA. Now, as I understand it, a DMCA violation is a violation of Uncle Sam's laws. This means that the RIAA gives the FBI a "tip" and then uncle sam goes after Joe Blow. Making this a DMCA violation means that apprehension, prosecution, enforcement, and conviction are all paid for by the government. And its damn sight harder for Joe to weasel his way out of a criminal charge than a civil one.
So by using DRM, the **AA give themselves more rights than they actually deserve, and they can also offset the cost of litigation and enforcement onto the federal government, and ultimately, tax payers. It's a great example of industry using government to further its own interests at the expense of normal people.
This theory is a little on the tin-foil-hat side of things, but it just sounds so plausible and so inline with how we've seen the **AA people act.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Derivate works, or parodies? If we had full functioning DRM that no one objected to, wouldn't it hurt both of these currently non-copyrighted covered uses?
Doesn't DRM take away the user's copyrights?
My primary problem with DRM is its extra-legality. Enforcing copyright by technological means could result in a copyright regime that totally favors the copyright holder and fails to respect the rights of the rest of us. What happens when a work's copyright expires, but it is still wrapped in DRM? What happens if the law changes, increasing my rights as a consumer, but the DRM still conforms to the old law?
I'll buy DRM when everyone else becomes willing to buy cars that won't go faster than 65mph.
// This is not a sig.
Practical. I would no more object to a properly working DRM than I do to locks on supermarket doors.
But this is a hypothetical discussion, because there isn't a DRM that "does the right thing" and I fear there will never be one.
The problem inherent in all of this is that the legality all hinges on the reason someone is making a copy of something, and knowlege of the future plans of the user. For example, it's okay to make a backup copy CD. Even two or three of them. But if you, six months later, turn around and sell them, suddenly it's illegal (not to have made the copies, but to sell them). So the backup CD's, sitting in their little jewel cases, should know to spontaneously self destruct the minute someone buys them.
Or consider that the original CD gets trashed. Shredded. Put down a garbage disposal. Now one of the backup CD's becomes, in essence, the original. So if I sell the one backup, that's actually legal -- I'm selling my only copy. But how can the backup copy tell that the original was destroyed and that it's okay to sell the backup?
So explain to me how one implements any of that, and I'll discuss it. Otherwise, you're asking for a discussion of the most ethereal of vaporware, and itsn't worth the effort. You can assume circuits, etc. in a new and improved CD that can measure and test anything you care to mention within a 10-mile radius, and you still can't tell in the general case.
So my claim is that your perfect DRM mechanism is in fact the least probable of all vaporware, and discussing it as if it were a possibility only lends credibility to the corporate drones who promote the concept.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
"...How is copyright supposed to be leaky?"
Real "fair use" gives you the legitimate right to use portions of copyright works in various aspects of your own use - i.e. extracts for commentary, satire, scholarly works, etc. (Mind you - extracts - not the whole work or even a significant portion). If DRM locks you out, how is it possible to do this? heck, the DCMA does not allow you to buy or sell the bypass tools...
Instead, we get the anal world of copyrights; where reality and news TV blurs corporate logos and art on the walls out of copyright concerns. Sound is blanked because the radio in the background or the blaring stereo in a passing car is a song for which rights are not obtained. Critically acclaimed documentaries cannot be shown commercially because it contains news photos, film clips, even music from long ago. It is impossible to track some of this ownership to obtain the correct releases, and the liability insurance company will not cover the film-maker without the appropriate releases.
The dream of a permanent online archive of the world's news sources has been fragmented by the court decisoin that the content, purchased for print (and presumably later microfilm distribution) is not licensed for online - requires further negotiation with ever author ever freelanced for the publication.
The "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" original BBC radio broadcast was completely re-recorded for sales releases (record, CD, etc.). The original was "thrown together" using the radio studio's extensive collection of music; for much of it, there wasn't even a record kept of which musicians were used, since it wasless distinctively recognizable older and classical "mood music".
A DRM system that is in no way a hindrance cannot exist. At the lowest level - If it cannot prevent me from putting an MP3 copy of good quality on my simple MP3 Player, how is it going to stop me from putting one on yours? You can then connect to your home devices and copy that again. I can make backups (say, to CD or DVD-R) that I can later replay on my system, even if I've had to reformat and reinstall, even if the supplier has gone bankrupt, even if I'm in a place with no internet, even if your "guaranteed re-download" service is closed, even if I've relocated to another country without 1-800 modem dialing... What good is it?
What scheme could you possibly come up with that would not inconvenience me, but kept your data safe from borrowing hand? Any lock is an inconvenience; the benefit of my locked doors, for me, outweighs the incovenience of lost keys. I like coming home to find my belongings intact. Conversely, DRM provides NO benefit for the consumer that a plain unlocked file cannot do better.
In the late 80's, software companies used to make it difficult as heck to copy their products.In the days before hard disks, they required the key disk. (Try finding that diskette drive now. Try getting a replacement key disk. But I know of applications still reliant on dBase). It was nothing but an inconvenience to the end user, and eventually software companies figured out they risked losing customers to less anal competitors.
Plus, the appropriate laws were being enforced. If you're a billion-dollar company, and can afford to pay your employee $60,000 a year, you can afford to buy him or her the necessary $600 worth of software that lets them do their $60,000 worth of work. And, if the boss pisses them off, the ex-employee would be happy to report their boss for not spending the money.
DRM means at some point in the future legally purchased products may become unusable.
Perfect example is DIVX dvd's. They TOLD you that you would be able to view them forever once authorized.
The problem: After a very short time, they brought down the authorization servers and all DIVX disks became useless plastic.
---
If the government required these fools to put up authorization servers for life (with hefty bonds up front) or have an exit code (so when they closed down they could unlock the content) then it might be okay at the right price level.
It's my same issue with music. If it is a license to play the music, then they should RECORD the license and if my physical copy is broken I should be able to replace it for production cost (since I already have a license to the song).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
DRM would need to allow:
Anyone can publish any content on that type of media, in any format/resolution (extreme examples being video at 2160p60, or 32 bit audio at 384kHz sample rate). All players, recorders, software, or other devices, that can deal with that format/resolution shall do so whether DRM-ed or not. If not DRM-ed, then no copy restrictions exist. There also needs to be a way within the context of DRM to specify that no copy restrictions exist (which sounds kind of pointless but might have verification value).
The DRM must be designed so that an open source operating system (such as BSD or Linux) can act as a gateway between the recorded media or network feed source, and a device that integrates the DRM. For example, instead of having DRM in software, with all the headaches of protecting that software, the DRM could be put in the video card or the display monitor, or in the sound card, or in an external box. Then the software is doing little more than shuffling data between media/feed and the device. For this to be useful, the DRM-ed data stream must be structured so that the frame boundaries and index are NOT encrypted. This allows things like partial rewind in the software before any DRM decryption even needs to take place. An A/V program would be divided into chunks per frame or at least group of frames, with clear index headers as needed, and the rest of the content of that block encrypted. Then very basic software (not needing a bunch of codecs or plug-ins) is all you need since the device (video card, monitor, or external USB/Firewire/Ethernet connected device) can do the real work.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Parent is not quite correct. I agree that "Principled" DRM is completely and utterly impossible, but that doesn't make the question moot, it makes the question simple to answer, because it makes the answer "I object based on principle". If DRM is inherently unprincipled, I object to DRM because it does not meet my principles.
Here's how I see the arguement. I object to DRM because its very nature goes against my principles. Unless I'm being sued or charged with a crime, for anyone to seize control (electronic or otherwise) over my media player of choice is intrinsically an invasion of my privacy. In order to secure a media player so that it will play digitally encrypted files without me being able to remove the encryption, some form of electronic control must be seized. So, I object to DRM that works (keeps me from unencrypting the files) because it doesn't meet my principles concerning privacy rights. I object to DRM that doesn't work (lets me unencrypt the files) because it doesn't meet my principles concerning stupidity.
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
DRM is me taking control of your physical property (your computer) so that I can impose my concept of "information ownership" upon you.
I don't think a content provider should have the option of taking even a little bit of an end-user's control over his own hardware away from him.
If he was just renting the computer, then perhaps the owner of the computer should be able to put some limits on what he can do with it (he cannot, for example, use it as an anchor for his raft). This makes sense, since the computer is honest-to-goodness "stuff," and making another one of it requires the expenditure of honest-to-goodness material resources.
Information is not stuff, duplicating it does not require the expenditure of material resources, and the duplication of information does not impact the provider's ability to use and duplicate it as well. Therefore it cannot be "rented," and as such the provider shouldn't expect that he has some sort of moral prerogative to control other people's property whenever it might be processing a copy of the provided information.
if you are a nobody, how do you get found?
you give away what you have freely. then, if you are talented, you get discovered
when you are discovered, you get famous
now you get what you deserve
when you get famous, all sorts of revenue streams become possible. for a writer it could be a myriad things. talking appearances, book signings, endorsements, paid to write, etc. and what of books? things made of wood pulp: never going away. that form factor is superior to anything electronic. and you can sell a book. you can control access to something in the physical world
same with movies: movie theatres are never going away: you can control access to that
same with music: concert venues are never going away: you can charge tickets for that
etc., for every type of art form
but what can you not control? ANYTHING ELECTRONIC. anything on the internet. anything made of bits and bytes. you simply CANNOT CONTROL IT. get used to that concept. there is no NOT getting used to that concept. that concept is the rock of gibraltar. anyone telling you that you can control digital distribution on the internet is selling you snake oil. point of immovable, undeniable fact
in a world where i can ctrl-a, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, and your 100,000 word magnus opus that you sweated blood and tears over for 2 years is now copied to anyone who visits a website, guess what?: it's not about what is right or wrong, it's not about what the law says. it's about what simply IS
don't argue against me. i'm not imposing my ridiculous philosophy on you. you are not resisting my words. you are not arguing with me, you are not resisting me
you are resisting reality. i'm simply the messenger. go ahead and shoot the messenger, go ahead and smirk at with me your sarcasm. i'm not your enemy. i'm telling you what is happening beyond your or my control, i'm not telling you some wacky ideology i'm imposing on you. i'm not telling you what might happen, i'm telling you what is already happening, out of your control, out of my control, out of anyone's control
welcome to the new reality of the internet. you really need to figure out how disruptive technologies PERMANENTLY ALTER THE WORLD
it wasn't fair when the spanish came with their guns and the incans folded like a deck of cards. it wasn't fair when they refridgeration came and put the ice vendor and his underground caves out of business. it wasn't fair when they adapted oil heat and put the chimney sweep out of business. it wasn't fair when they invented the airplane and put the cruise liners out of business. it wasn't fair when they perfected the internal combustion engine and the horse shoe blacksmiths went bankrupt. on and on and on
it wasn't fair BUT IT HAPPENED. PERMANENTLY. AND THERE WAS NO GOING BACK. EVER
adapt or die
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What a title! Are you serious? You might as well ask slashdot "Is Windows inherently bad?"
It seems to me that DRM contradicts the idea of copyright.
Recall the basic idea of copyright (feel free to correct me if I bungle this): to encourage and promote the creation and publication of new works of art, etc. The mechanism to provide the impetus is (or was) an ugly short-term, government-enforced monopoly on duplication. Think of it as a bargain: the public, and society, gets to enjoy the output of artists, etc, in exchange for giving those artists a limited-time monopoly on reproduction.
With DRM, it seems we have really lost sight of the whole idea of copyright. Now the producers still get their lousy monopoly, but the public are not really getting their end of the deal, because in a very real sense, DRM-protected works are not really published. They are released in encrypted form, so they may never actually make it into the public domain. If the courts were really doing their job, they should say to the producers (of DRM stuff), "Look, mate, you are not really publishing your material. You are in effect making a private contract between yourself and your customers, asking them to agree to all these extra restrictions. If you have an issue with your customers, thats your problem. Copyright doesnt apply here. Case dismissed."
Well I can dream.
My life is an open book ... up to a point.
"If digital media was available for sale at a reasonable price, but subject to a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying), would you support the usage of such a DRM scheme?"
I don't think such a scheme is technically possible. Examples:
I want to copy a 2-minute-long video clip for the purposes of a presentation in an educational setting. But the machine has to prevent me from collecting 60 two-minute-long segments and splicing them together into a complete movie (assume I'm a persistant pirate willing to go through the hassle).
I want to copy a work that has passed into the public domain after its copyright period has expired, and the DRM scheme detects this and allows free copying after the relevant date (no scheme I know of does this yet, even though they should, and calculating it based on the owner's dying day is going to be a challenge). But the machine wants to prevent situations where joe pirate has fooled the computer into thinking it is already 100 years later.
Fair use and copyright expiry are subtle enough that no machine is going to be able to permit all circumstances copying is legally allowed, while prohibiting all other circumstances. It just isn't going to happen. Something has to be compromised: either the security against illegimate copying is limited, or the scope of legitimate copying is limited. In the case of *all* DRM schemes I have ever seen, and ever expect to see for the foreseeable future, content owners choose the latter option, and discard legitimate uses.
How can a machine possibly tell I'm copying something for educational, scholarly criticism, or other such legitimate purpose that would otherwise be illegal? How can it possibly tell when the minute-long clip I want is okay, but disallow 120 minute-long clips that I could splice together into a complete movie?.
It may change the day we have HAL 9000-quality artificial intelligence, at which point the computer can say, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid you can't copy that." Before that, it is a pointless argument.
DRM currently sucks, and it will for a long time. It's better to say "no" to it, and let a human being decide whether the copy is permissible.
go back 150 years, and instead of china flaunting us copyright laws, it would be the us flaunting european copyright laws. and in 150 years it will be aberbaijan flaunting chinese laws, etc.
and your problem is you've moved off target. i'm talking about COPYRIGHT, not PATENT. patent is a design for something you build in physical space. copyright applies to media, ie, anything you can effortlessly reproduce over the internet. they are different concepts. you can control the physical production of physical goods. you cannot possibly control the effortless copying and distribution of electronic bits
and finally, i am not imposing some wacky ideology on you. i'm simly describing to you the REALITY of what IS. there is NO WAY to enforce DRM. not a single way, ever. there is ALWAYS a way around it. why? because the cost of copying say, an automobile in real life has actual real economic cost. but the cost of copying bits is absolutely ZERO
so you are raging against the inevitable. i am only the messenger. go ahead and argue with me. but you're not really arguing with me. you are simply failing to perceive and understand and adapt to a changing reality. disruptive technology permanently changes society. and there is simply no going back
go ask the chimney sweep if oil heat is fair. do we continue to use wood to heat our homes for the sake of preserving the chimney sweep's job?
so what is this nonsense with preserving an economic structure that exists NOT TO REWARD CONTENT CREATORS, BUT SIMPLY THE ECONOMIC MIDDLEMAN
the middleman whose only marginal value existed in a world of physical CDs and tapes and vinyl. where it cost something to make a cd. it costs NOTHING to copy a file on a computer. therefore, the economic middleman is defunct. extinct. gone. as surely as the chimney sweep
the patent system is SAFE: it applies to physical goods, not bits and bytes like copyright. you're off target
and content creators WILL STILL BE REWARDED: concerts, endorsements, other revenue streams
the only one who suffers are the middlemen
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I am not a criminal. DRM assumes that I am. That is why DRM, in any form, is unacceptable.
It's a pointless question, because it's a counterfactual. There can never be a DRM system that allows legal use but not illegal use, at least until we have human-equivalent artificial intelligence, because the boundary between legal and illegal can only be determined by human beings, not an algorithm. In fact, it can sometimes only be determined after several years of legal proceedings, so even a human-level AI couldn't do the job.
The question is moot.
First: There is no evidence, up to this point, that such a thing as DRM that allows legitimate use and only prevents illegal use can exist. How would that be technically possible? How can a DRM scheme be capable of telling the difference between a backup copy, a copy to resell illegally, a copy for academic study, etc.?
Second: Illegal where? Copyright law in China is pretty significantly different from copyright law in the US. Should we have different DRM schemes for different nations with different laws? And what about Sealand?
DRM is fundamentally incompatible with fair use.
You might as well be asking if we're opposed to perpetual motion machines, or lossless compression algorithms that compress all possible inputs on principled or practical concerns. DRM that allows all fair use is equally nonsensical.
It is not possible to design a DRM system that prevents illegal activities while allowing all possible legal activities. No DRM system can tell if a copy is being made for a legal reason or an illegal reason. Every freedom you add to allow more fair use simultaneously makes it easier to make illegal copies. If you allow all fair use then making illegal copies will be easy.
Say I have a media player that only plays media in formats that don't support DRM. Maybe it's a lossless format. Maybe it's the same format you provide DRMed content in, but without the DRM wrapper. You can either block this fair use, or you let me make copies that I can then use to make further copies for infringing uses.
A more complex situation is free software in general. I want to to engage in fair use and play back content I've purchased using an entirely free software operating system and player. I can modify any of those layers to make an infringing copy. Or you can not allow free software players.
So to answer the impossible hypothetical question: assuming you've invented some magical, pixie dust filled, DRM system, sure, I'm all in favor of it. While you're offering the impossible, I'd really like a perpetual motion machine and a lossless compression algorithm that worked on all possible input.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Against it for moral reasons.
But practically the people making DRM today can't forsee tomorrow's technology and laws so whatever they restrict today will most likely conflict with the future. Even today's fair-use often has to be debated in court, DRM doesn't even deal with that. And I've yet to hear of a DRM that removes itself when the copyright expires. You remember that *all* content is suppose to enter the public domain, right?
So "practically" speaking there can be no good DRM.
Half of the industry wanting DRM is to try to continue the trend of format obsolecence (lp->8track->casset->cd->various dl formats, similar for video). It is more profitable to resell the crap content you already own then to make more. So the industry tends to like proprietory formats that can't be easily/legally be converted to something else.
While I fully agree with you on an artist's right to restrict (or not) their creations as they see fit (regardless of the inherently abhorent idea of restricting access), part of your argument above is spurious.
Radio station licenses are a racket. Product bar codes are a racket. Liquor licenses are a racket. Marriage licenses are a racket. The whole "top-40" thing is a racket. The list is long and depressing.
None of these are related to DRM in any meaningful way. Radio station licenses exist in an effort to regulate a limited comodity: radio spectrum. Bar code technology is, as I understand it, open. The registration of UPC symbols may be limited - though it's a For Business By Business situation. Marriage licenses are a formality imposed by the government because certain legal functions depend on the status of whether or not a couple is married. That doesn't make them a "racket" any more than getting a license to drive is a "racket."
The top-40 I give you hands down. It's purly a marketing construct.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
obviously if drm creates no problems for anyone using it, then it will be accepted. but that's not the issue. the issue is in trusting something else to accurately make that determination. I've said the same thing about cars that don't let you exceed the speed limit, or drive drunk. You're ultimately letting the hammer make a decision. If the hammer is programmed to disintegrate before striking your thumb, then you can't use the hammer to defend yourself, or to nail a rubber hand to the wall on halloween. If the car won't speed, then you can't get to the hospital in time. If you can't drive drunk, then you can't spill beer.
drm is the same garbage. if I can't plug in fifty wires and seventy-five devices to get my music to play on my very weird car stereo then that's annoying. and if I can't tranfer my music to my networked hard-drive because, as far as the protocol is concerned, it's the same as a public internet site, then all it's done is restricted the term "compatible devices" -- which it necessarily must do in order to deem my friends hard drive different than my own.
but drm has one more problem. I want to share my music with my children. my children don't exist yet, and are at least a decade away from being born, and so at least two decades away from caring about my favourite jazz vocalist. data is data and while finding old hardware is difficult, finding old software is not. but if my drm'ed music won't support the technology of 2025, then we've effectively thrown out your father's collection of old baseball cards; your mother's collection of romance novels; and your grandfather's old record collection.
I still have my grandfather's favourite hammer, my grandmother's favourite painting, and the portrait of my great-grand-mother taken from a tiny sepia photograph held in my grandfather's back pocket through two wars as a soldier, that I digitally restored myself. Good thing that tiny photograph wasn't drm'ed from 1921 to restrict me from scanning it in 1997.
Is the content on a 2007 era Red Hat Linux box?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
even without DRM, he was already limited in how he could enjoy the media
That's why I've passed up purchasing new albums from artists I've enjoyed for years. If there's a copy warning on it, I can't plug it into the devices I use to listen to my music. Thanks, but I've got no interest in adapting my listening habits to fit what the RIAA wants me to use. There's plenty of good stuff out there.
This is not the bargain the US Constitution permits as "copyright".
Can God restrict copyright protected material with DRM so secure that even he can't transfer it to another form of media?
Suppose that the use of some DRM today could prevent the use of a much much larger amount of DRM in the future. Further suppose that there is not any other way to prevent the use of that large amount of future DRM which is not ruled out by other concerns (for instance, destroying the planet in order to prevent DRM rather defeats the purpose). Now, do you oppose the use of the small amount of DRM today? If you do, it would seem that your opposition implies support of the large amount of DRM in the future.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The question is a bit like:
Would you oppose a dictatorship, even if it's a benevolent one?
Well, my answer is I wouldn't trust it to be entirely benevolent, and even if the dictator is ruling exactly as I'd like, I don't trust that it'll stay that way (power corrupting, succession, etc).
As a programmer, I come down instantly on the "objection due to practicality" side.
Copryright law isn't programmable. It's something that depends strongly on the decisions of legislatures and courts. Until we have a true artificial intelligence that's much more intelligent than any human, there's no hope whatsoever that this can be programmed.
So any software DRM is guaranteed not to agree with copyright case law in any jurisdiction.
And there's the additional question of multiple jurisdictions. Has any DRM software been written that takes into account different copyright law in different countries? I rest my case.
The question is a blatant "strawman" that presupposes something that can't possibly exist in our world. DRM will never agree with copyright case law. And given the commercial realities, it will generally be much more restrictive than copyright case law, whatever your jurisdiction.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It is like asking "Would you support a drug that doesn't cause addiction?" The basic idea of a drug dealer is to make you an addict.
And the basic idea of DRM is to limit your freedom with the content. The idea is to control what you can do with it. The "dream" is still to make content perishable, so you have to buy it over and over.
The fact is that DRM, no matter what shape it takes, limits the way someone can use content. And that way, the content becomes less valuable. Content with a "best before" date is obviously less valuable than content without, simply because you have more time to use it. And as long as the content industry doesn't realize that, they won't understand why DRMified content is no big seller. It is simply less valuable than DRM-free content.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Principle, so no, I would not support such a format. My primary objection: this technology provides no automatic means for a copyrighted item to move into the public domain. If anything it helps encourage and support the idea of eternal copyrights. The Constitution of the US provided for copyrights - "for a limited time" - in order to encourage the production of intellectual property. To that end police power, paid by our taxes, would enforce the copyright with the understanding that when the copyright expired the IP would drop into the public domain, where it would be available for new uses of the property. Immortal copyrights (even the functionally-immortal system we have now) have no such bargain built into them. Copyrights last effectively forever, so police power paid for with our taxes continue to enforce the copyright forever. Why should anyone have to pay taxes to support the profits from privately held copyrights? Why should we all have to pay so Disney and Sony and who-all-else can make more money?
Yes/no tags would be more useful if the editors would be consistent in how they word their questions. The question in the article title, "Is DRM Intrinsically Distasteful?", is the opposite of the question in the article text "Would you support the usage of such a DRM scheme?". Also, it would be nice to see the numbers on yes/no so people don't have to read all 300 comments on a controversial article to gauge the response.
Yes, I'm new here. Why do people keep asking me this?
Like a gate, DRM can be good, bad or ugly. A good gate will keep uninvited people off of your property and keep your cows on it. Good DRM will protect copyrights from infringement -- and nothing else. A "bad" gate may have a positive use, but we must always weigh whether the negative effects outweigh the good, such as whether a very strong gate keeps firefighters away when your house is on fire. "Bad" DRM might be tolerable, such as a limited download intended for you to be able to "try before you buy" new software, or intolerable, such as a timed out movie intended to prevent people from exercising their statutory right to sell, lend, rent or give away their copy. An "ugly" gate would be the one that creates a barrier where no right exists to do so, such as if I were to place a toll booth at the Brooklyn Bridge. In the DRM world, the DRM that gives publishers cotrol over what they have no right to control is ugly, just plain ugly, and should be prosecuted. No copyright owner has the right to control private performances of their works (e.g., how many times you watch a movie or play a song). No copyright owner has the right to require playback using one particular CD player, computer operating system or media player. No copyright owner has the right to regulate whether I rent my movie, sell my used CD, sell a lawfully made copy of computer software to an artist instead of a student, or play my video games 10 years from now. See http://interactionlaw.com/id13.html
Aire Libre
I really didn't think much of DRM. I have an ipod (didn't buy it; won it in a drawing), used itunes, bought a little music on there. Life was good. Then I got fed up with windows XP and switched to ubuntu. Then I didn't like DRM too much. If apple would just release itunes for linux I would probably be content again, but it really highlighted the fundamental problem with DRM: I can't listen to my own music on my computer unless I do something illegal or play by someone else's rules (which would mean using macOS or windows). Unacceptable.
This is the stupidest question I've heard throughout the year.
If this "ideal" DRM you're implying on your question *did really* comply with everything set forth in your initial assumption, it'd still be useless for me.
Why? Because I like to do lots of things with, say, music I have. Remixes and megamixes. Sharing it with my friends. And that's just a corner example, I could recite ten more.
By definition, Digital Restrictions Management is about creating unnatural obstacles to these kinds of uses. These unnatural roadblocks translate into my direct and unwavering unhappiness. Therefore, it sucks.
The whole notion of others controlling things and knowledge in my power is absurd. We as a society tolerate it only because 1) we all recognize there's value in monetary incentive, and 2) we have too many politicians bowing to people in power.
Unnecessary nuisances should be treated exactly like unnecessary laws: shot upon sight.
Rudd-O - http://rudd-o.com/
I've always found the reactions to the notion of a speed limiter on regular cars (they're common on trucks, and the hayabusa is the last production motorcycle that would be able to top 300km/h as all later motorcycles post-2001 are artificially limited to that top speed) interesting.
65Mph is the maximum speed on rural interstate highways. There's always a bit of leeway, presumably to deal with situations as that mentioned by the parent poster. And I certainly wouldn't like cars to be limited to the maximum speed limit for thos reasons either
However.. let's say they put an articial limiter on cars at 100Mph - would you still object? Please note that this is well over any speed required, or even attainable (lest you have a supercar), for you to take any evasive maneuvers and far above the maximum speed limit on any road. I have a feeling a lot of people would still say "yes!" based on principle - without a particularly solid foundation (I guess that's what 'on principle' means) as to what possible purpose / excuse they could have for going faster than 100Mph. What if it was 200Mph?
( "getting away from a crazy stalker with a chainsaw" notwithstanding - presumably their car could also go faster than 100Mph, so you would still be quite screwed )
Just curious, really..
Do you really mean mote or moat?
It's a dumb question. Might as well ask, "If we could eat our cake and have it too, would we get fat?"
It is impossible* to have DRM that allows all legal things and only disallows illegal things. Either I can access the plaintext or I can't, and by the time I have it, you don't know what I'm going to do with it (good or evil).
If the user can access the plaintext, he can do bad things with it.
If the user can't access the plaintext, you can't permit all good things.
(*) When I say impossible, I don't mean that it's hard. I don't mean we lack the technology or ingenuity, like "it's impossible to break the sound barrier." I mean it's as impossible as being a little bit pregnant, or a snake being right-handed, or an album cover being more black than Spinal Tap's black album.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I don't like DRM per se. But I'd be willing to buy a product with DRM as long as it didn't get in my way. This means, I can play the music / video on any device I own. I want to make my own mixes on a CD for my car, etc. Basically, I'd put up with DRM that doesn't interfere in any way with my fair use rights to the media. And doesn't require special software, dongles, replacing existing devices, etc. That said, I've yet to encounter a DRM system that fulfills these requirements.
I used to buy a lot of music to listen to in my car during my commute. The first time I bought a CD I couldn't rip (and couldn't return) that was the end of that. Thank goodness for podcasts and TWiT.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Such a system is impossible; how does it know if the CD I burn is for personal use? Likewise, what if I have a legitimate use for 100,000 liscensed playback devices?
It is impossible to objectivly judge the intent of a consumer; thus content creators need to build a trust-based relationship with their sponsors. DRM inheritly breaks such a trust relationship.
No, I will not work for your startup
IF they could come up with a DRM scheme that only blocked illegal usage, but still granted me my fair use rights, I would support it. My dis-like of DRM is only because all the current schemes step all over my rights as a consumer and purchaser, or they lock me into a single proprietary vendor for devices to access the copyrighted material. Well, that and the fact that some vendors (*cough* Sony) have decided that their rights as a copyright holder far outweigh my rights as a consumer, and that has led them to believe that it's alright for them to damage my property to protect their material.
I'm not against DRM, I'm against having my rights made obsolete by technology, something a copyright holder might also say about their rights.
IANAL... But I play one on
So you're saying, if there was a magical way to make media have DRM, and make it so that it gave me all the freedoms that I think it should have (assuming that we can all agree on what those are), would it be good?
No. Not at all. Would you want to put a magical lock on a gun that would instantly know if it was being used illegally and then have it refuse to fire? No. In order to have a free society, its citizens MUST be allowed to break the law. Otherwise the country becomes nothing more than a huge prison.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
The describe a system which is impossible to create, so the question is pointless. Software can never tell the difference between fair and illegal use. If panels of judges regularly have trouble determining if a use is legal or not, I guarantee it can't be done algorithmically.
"is your objection based on principled or practical concerns?"
Both.
The scheme described in TFA could only be realized by having a copyright expert monitor my use of the media. No technological product could conceivably meet the requirements set forth. Since I would not accept having a representative of the RIAA/MPAA observe my use of the media, I would not accept this DRM scheme.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Thanks. I was trying to formulate a wording to my thoughts on it, but your post pretty well sums it up.
>|<*:=
It's the Criminalization via DMCA type legislation that is our big problem here.
Heh, the captcha says "insights".
The problem that I have with DRM is this: where will it end? I remember back in primary school, out of a lack of knowlegde combined with ignorance, I converted the strange format of an audio file by plugging a 3.5 stereo cable's one end into the line-out of our family computer, and the other end into the line-in. I recorded the sound at a high sample rate in Sound recorder and converted the wav file to an mp3. I realized, if you can play any kind of sound on your computer, you can copy it. duh. So where will DRM end? I'm guessing the DRM architects will eventually arrive at the dilemma that digital music's copyright infringement problem starts right there. It's digital. The era of information's greatest feat is the ease by which information can be distributed, copied etc. and trying to inhibit that will be virtually impossible while still allowing someone to play sound on his computer, or watch video on his TV for that matter. Add to that the fact that even average joe will go to the greatest of lengths just to save a few dollars, and the architects are screwed. Average joe also doesn't care. Don't you cringe when multi-million dollar record companies and millionaire artists who can afford to whipe their asses with $100 notes complain that you are denying them income? Why would you give an artist another $1 when you could get his hit-single for free by copying it from a friend? Remember that time when millions of dollars was stolen from Oprah's bank account and she didn't even notice? You can spend a truckload of money on a new DRM scheme, but you can't make people care. Don't get me wrong. I will support an indie band that actually needs the money.
Yes, if I would be given those allowances and the price actually reflected the reduced cost of internet distribution I would purchase such a product. But I don't believe it will happen, it really isn't possible and the RIAA is too greedy to actually have a reasonable price.
...she'd be your uncle.
Here's the thing. I don't actually want to buy a liscenced copy of the music, with rules on it. I want to buy the music, and have it be mine to do what i will with.
Unfortunately, that is not what the sellers are selling.
But this is where your question boils down for me. Even if all the rules were ones I could agree with, would I want to buy the liscensed copy?
Certainly if given a choice between an (legit) unliscensed and a liscenced copy of the same thing, I'd go with the unliscensed one, because I don't want the headache. What if my situation changes, and the rules I thought would be ok are now annoying?
But given the real world choice of buy what the seller is selling, or walk away: then for things I want more than I dislike the liscensing, yes I would buy. And things that I don't want bad enough, I wouldn't buy.
This actually applies to even draconian DRM... the more I dislike the liscensing terms, it gets harder and harder for me to want the product enough to actually buy it.
If I could guarantee that an absolute monarch would always be wise, never evil...would absolute monarchy still be distasteful? Or how about slavery?
The point is you are still surrendering control against your trust of a corporations promise. For many people it doesn't matter how many guarantees you give they will be unwilling to give up ownership and control to someone else.
...but nowadays all american cars have that restriction. Usually all it takes is a reprogramming of the onboard computer, and presto, it's an increase of 20 MPH or more. And this is not even tuning the engine, it's just removing the throttle/redline limiter.
Rudd-O - http://rudd-o.com/
On /. that's like asking the following question:
Does Windows intrinsically suck?
Huh?
To a surprisingly large group of people, the idea that you can create technical solutions to societal problems sounds reasonable and worth pursuing. DRM is just another example of this bad idea; consider internet filters (save the children!), spam filters, etc. As attractive as the idea may be, it's doomed to failure no matter how eloquently you describe it. There's a class of problems that can be solved by technology, and there's another class of problems that can be solved by human intellect. They're not the same, and they only overlap in a very small area. Trying to use technology to solve problems that can only be described / solved by human intellect is an exercise in futility. So it's not possible to create an internet filter that'll block "illegal" material and let everything else through. It's not possible to create a spam filter that'll block all the spam and let all other email through. And it's not possible to create DRM that'll block all "illegal" actions and allow all other uses. Are those executives pushing DRM evil, or are they just ill-informed. I suspect that they really expect that DRM will do what they want it to do and just don't understand that what they expect is impossible.
DRM is plagued with problems that were never really thought out. The implementations in use today are to solve an immediate need. In most cases, they are failing badly.
I work with some Indie record labels and none of them employ DRM except for what they sell on iTunes. Their CDs are all clean. They have recently come under fire for CMT videos not playing in Firefox, Opera, Netscape, etc. To counter this Microsoft PC only issue, they have now started posting the music videos on YouTube.com also. They had to as nearly 30% of their audience couldn't watch the videos.
But, we come to an even bigger problem. Obsolesence. Labels get bought and sold. Media changes (cylinder - 78 - 45 - LP - EP - CD - SACD - Digital.....) So, it is quite likely that any mechanism employed today won't work in the future and, at the rate of technology evolution, that won't take too long. At some point, the music becomes unaccessible. You paid for it. You licensed it. But you can't listen to it.
We also have copyright issues. Lets say in 50 years the copyright expires and the music becomes public domain. How to you remove the DRM? How does one make the music available to the general public once it is in the public domain? Under DMCA you can't - even if it is for legitimate use.
Finally for historical and archive purposes one would need to keep the playback mechanisms current, licensed and capable for playing old DRM'd content. In 100 years if somebody wanted to do research and study 1990-2010 music of a particular genre, it would probably be much more difficult due to DRM'd media getting in the way. How do you play, restore and repackage the DRM's oldies?
The DRM people haven't seriously looked at the cultural and social long-term impact of DRM. They don't really care as that doesn't bring revenue to their pockets but society does care but society doesn't have a voice or lobby power that RIAA/MPAA/BMI/ASCAP and the other Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) do.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
"adapt or die"?
"don't argue against me. i'm not imposing my ridiculous philosophy on you. you are not resisting my words. you are not arguing with me, you are not resisting me
you are resisting reality. i'm simply the messenger."?
Ever thought of starting a cult? (~_^)
I demand my right to shift materials that I've rightfully purchased onto other media... I have my entire music collection, not to mention a mass of recorded video
Assuming you actually own the recording, I agree with you, but that is often not the case. For instance, if you recorded a TV show off the air with your MythTV, you do not own the recording. Broadcast is intended to be a one-time "performance" and the broadcasters can and do reserve the right to sell recordings via other means.
Sure, I use a DVR too, but if we're gonna use legal hair-splitting to justify doing away with DRM, let's be clear about what we're advocating. "Honest, officer, that bicycle was just laying there unlocked so I assumed it was OK to take it..."
I would object to DRM such as that described in the OP simply because any 'ware that could actually deliver on that promise would be far too cumbersome for practical use.
The key is that it would have to be able to discern perfectly between legitimate and illegitimate use, meaning it would have to know the legitimacy, for example, of every instance of copying and editing any portion of the content. It would have to know that it would be okay to extract the audio of a newscaster's speech for a biography is legitimate use, yet extracting and rearranging individual words to falsely implicate a celebrity in a crime is not. It would have to know that putting an episode of a sitcom on a television in the middle of a piece of performance art is legitimate, but extracting two ten-minute clips of a television show and hosting them on YouTube is not. It would have to be DRM that can read intention and context, and these are challenges that have frustrated people trying to create human-friendly search engines and the "Semantic Web."
Why should I be burdened by having such an intricate and powerful program running on my computer and performing prior restraint while I attempt to create multimedia content?
if you share something, anything, electronically, it will be copied and disseminated. your "glimpses" are permanent and easy to get as soon as they are made widely available. doesn't matter what controls you put in place, it will get out. that's the whole point, a point you still don't seem to understand: you can't share anything electronically on a mass scale and expect to continue to control it. so your "glimpse" gets out there, and STAYS out there. it's pandora's box: if you disseminate it widely and publicly, it STAYS OUT THERE. try to grasp that concept before forming your impressions
then you say you don't want to pay a lot of money to go to a concert. implying that that would be the only way to get new material. it's as if you don't like the idea that you can't get your hands on what goes on at a concert. as if the that DOESN'T HAPPEN ALREADY RIGHT NOW AND FOR DECADES FOR EVERY ACT THAT HAS EVER EXISTED! duh
and finally, your first point is that the artist would never make money because no one would go to his concerts because you can get his recordings for free
(smacks forehead)
idiot: the people who have all of the guys free recordings are the ones MOST LIKELY to go to his concert. the fans. duh! are you implying that people are going to go pay for concerts of people they never heard before? you mean right now people go "i'm not going to this justin timberlake concert... because i already have his cd"
!?
you have some serious limitations on your ability to understand the reality of the subject matter you are commenting on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Did anyone else find it just slightly disturbing that the subject was given a postmortem sex-change operation? Please tell me the name of that mortician, so I can be sure to steer clear of him.
Of course I would: the only way for a DRM system to determine whether a usage is fair or illegal would be to unduly invade the user's privacy. So I wouldn't object to such a hypothetical DRM system per se, but I would object to the privacy invasions that would be required for it to work.
Depends on what the "etc" in the allowed functionality list is. Things I want include
- [a] guaranteed ability to backup media, or otherwise completely hassle-free retrieval of media in the event of loss/destruction
- [b] a guarantee that no new restrictions will be placed on the media in the future
- [c] the ability to play on as many devices as I want, perhaps not at precisely the same instant but with no overhead/hassle for registering/unregistering devices as "valid"
- [d][ when the DRM system fails (like key-finding logic screws up), it allows rather than restricts playback (erring on the side of the consumer), and
- [e] only a single purchase ever required, i.e. no "rental" or "licensing" terms that manifest as multiple payments.
If "etc" does not include all of the above, then I'm probably not interested... really, the only concession I want to make for DRM is that I won't ever give the media to someone else. If "etc" *does* include all of the above, there is some chance I'd be interested.In other words, if you object to DRM schemes, is your objection based on principled or practical concerns?
You tell me. My list above is, IMO, comprised of requests that are simply geared to make my life functionally (practically) easier. I'm willing to suppose that "wanting ease" is a practical rather than principled concern.
But look at item [c]... in practical terms, the ability to play on as many devices as I want means either letting them play simultaneously, or having all involved devices implement the hardware and software required to communicate utterly reliably (and I would not be satisfied with paying any arbitrary additional cost that such hardware/software levied on the price). Due to the technical impossibility of getting such a reliable and cost effective communication technology spec'd out and the probable impossibity of getting companies to agree on the standard (they can't even agree on disk formats, fcs), this probably requires that I be allowed to play on as many devices as I want simultaneously. Would DRM folks stand for this? If not, does this requirement amount to a practical one (because I want my life to be easy) or a principled one (because I refuse to let technological and political limitations prevent me from having having what I want)? If the latter, who's forcing the principle here... me, or the premise of this "Ask Slashdot" that gives a "restricted only in principle" utopia as a premise?
I posit that the foundation of this Ask Slashdot is flawed. There is no bright-line dichotomy between "practical" and "principled" when it comes to DRM.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I would say that there is, in fact, no such thing as "intellectual property" at all, in the sense that an individual cannot have an idea all to or by themselves. A corporation cannot have an idea *at* *all*.
Ideas come to people from their life experiences. Their life experiences come from the world around them.
That is to say, their ideas emerge not just from themselves but from the society they inhabit; they those ideas are, in another sense of the word "property", an emergent property of that world, that society.
Intellectual property, if it exists at all, must be the property of the society from which it emerges.
To my way of thinking, the assertion that individuals or corporations can claim property rights to ideas is an attack on society itself; it is an attack on *civilisation*. Because without the free exchange of thoughts and ideas there *is* no civilisation.
What we are seeing today is a kind of civil war; between those who believe that they can somehow generate and lay claim to ideas just as someone lays claim to a piece of land, and those who believe that ideas are the property of us all.
It has been said that wars of independence are almost always followed by civil wars. Well, the world of ideas has been through a kind of war of independence; with the advent of the information age and the ability to copy things which have value, with no loss or degradation.
There thus ensues a civil war, the outcome of which will set the scene for the future of our entire civilisation.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
In fact, that's the whole business model behind DRM...
You are not to prevent dick from giving a copy to Jane, so much as prevent Dick from inventing a new use before you do that makes Jane stop thinking of you as the only source.
For example, If you are a television media company, you want to do anything you can to prevent someone from inventing a TIVO before you can figure out how to secure a monopoly in that market and control the release and development of that tech - otherwise you may not have a place in the new market at all.
If they do invent a TIVO, you have to do everything in you power to sabotage that new market so that you can regain control with a new, and (apparently) better thing.
Ideally, as a monopoly, you are the only one legally allowed to bring new technologies to market.
I really can't believe this question was taken seriously, then no one just spit out the bottom line:
Obviously all DRM is distasteful, it's whole purpose is to restrain technological human development.
I understand that many people feel that overall human development is not as important as immediate artist prosperity - I disagree, but I understand that view.
But even if I agreed with that view, it makes DRM no less distasteful, just "neccessary".
Finally, I have seen the argument that it is impossible to maintain artistic creation in a society without our current lottery of potentially large financial reward; to that, I say Bu11shit.
I don't give a damn about my right to personally evaluate "Fair Use" compared to my right to develop new uses and technologies from emerging standards!
The entertainment industry wholly gets way too much money by monopolizing content through artist contracts and vertical integration into movie theatres. I can think of about 3 recent movies worth 10 dollars and I can think of zero recent albums worth 17. This industry has been living with delusions of grandeur since the inception of media recording. The wave of novelty has crested and broke. As far as software is concerned I see no reason to integrate DRM into any data format. The CD Key/watermark system has worked fine for the kind of software I support the production of.
Isn't the point of Law to allow human beings to generally operate using their own free will, while at the same time setting boundaries as to what behavior is tolerable by society?
As such, I should be allowed to watch a pirated movie in my basement just as if I decide to drive 80mph in a 55mph zone. I'm succeptible to the consequences, of course. However, my car does not shut down when I speed, and so why should my DVD player shut down when it "thinks" I'm doing something illegal?
I think you bring up an interesting case to declare DRM as unconstitutional. By controlling what I can and can't play using equipment that I own, and otherwise seizing control of my personal property, my 4th amendment right is being violated.
Except how do they know whether it's actually their stuff? For instance, George Harrison and Michael Bolton got burned when a court found that they had accidentally copied songs by Ronald Mack and the Isley Brothers into their own songs, forgetting that the melodies they were using had already been used in a copyrighted work. See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton .
In the 40's, the best and brightest of the German minds created the Enigma machine. These were top-level scientists...and the British broke it. No encoding scheme will ever be break-proof; it's (another) waste of time and millions trying to do it (again).
Remember the cassette tapes? Copying them was a loss of quality...and then the pirates got really good tape decks, and made more. When it came to 8-tracks, trying to keep all the recorders off the market found that these machines, too, were found on the black market. Then CDs. Most of you are young enough to remember all the attempts to make DVDs only work one way, and only from the original.
This is paralleled by the floppy market where a certain sector is damaged (and, in theory un-copyable) to keep people from making illegal copies. Pirates made copies.
Now we're told that all this money is being invested in making motherboards that won't play video without a decoder in the screen...won't output unless there's a decoder in the speakers...and when we buy music, two months later it disappears in a puff of logic, so we'll buy more. I don't cotton to that new world, with a live, grabbing hand in my pocket all day. It's a primary reason I run Linux, after all.
What the music barons need to do is find someone to sell-out to. Just get out of the market- they're not needed anymore, and there's no chance they're going to make billions-per-year on the backs of artists who have to take day jobs.
And don't get me started on how they've destroyed the music; Disco lasted (arguably) four years...for some reason, that was too much. However, Rap starts it's 16th year soon, and that's just not quite enough! No chance of a blind artist (Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles), or ecclectic artists like we had before- the barons feel the need for money, and won't dare risking a single dollar on anything that might rock the boat.
No encryption is permanent. People have GOT to stop telling them different. It's time, like the carpetbaggers, the lamplighters, and the foremen in the buggywhip factory, it's time for them to get other jobs. What they're doing to the music industry is just plain wrong.
Instead, *people* should make the music; "producing" is pretty much some time with Audacity and burning a CD. Venues have opened up for these people in the places the music is played; bars, dances, that kinda thing. When a band has recognition....on it's on merits...it will grow. And they'll get a large share of the box-office when they play in person. That's already happening now, in larger towns.
The music business is one with a bright future behind it. But it's days of free-flowing profits is coming to a middle....and they should continue to the end, without losing their shirts. Cause nothing else is gonna change.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
My objection to DRM is basic; it's an assumption of guilt. Were anyone to seriously accuse me of doing something that I didn't do, wouldn't do, and have a general distaste toward [example: my friend is mad at me because he thought I was humping his pet beagle's right nostril,] then I'm going to react with more than a brush-off. I don't care for being called a thief when I'm not taking a fraggin' thing I don't already own. I don't object to compensating the artists for their work; I just feel it's not fair to slap handcuffs on everyone for something someone MIGHT/will do. It's bad enough from our government; I'll be damned if I'll take that crap from ANY corporation.
Executive Summary: Methinks they're getting too big for their britches...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
"For example, I'm against the sale of automatic weapons to teenagers"
Well, you're in luck. No one can buy automatic weapons, at least not in the United States.
You can rest easy tonight.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
DRM technology is harmless. DRM software is a simply pattern of bits, which by itself can do no harm.
The harm comes entirely from the legal system.
We are proceeding in a very clear legal direction: Some day, it will be illegal to use a computer that does not have the proper "trusted computing" hardware and software installed on it.
The public will accept this, too, because the politicians will convince them that it's a necessary step to "keep the Internet safe". They will exploit the public's ignorance of technology, and they will tell the public that "trusted computers" are necessary to prevent viruses, child porn, and terrorism.
And the public will applaud them for it, because it sounds like common sense if you don't think about it for more than a few seconds (which they don't). As long as they can continue to get their entertainment products, few people will object to the idea of requiring all of our computers to be trusted.
The question is fundamentally flawed.
The whole point of DRM is to prevent format-shifting, because it's indistinguishable from illegal copying.
The scenario presented in the question assumes that the Mafiaa will trust people to perform their format-shifting in a "responsible" manner. However, DRM exists specifically because people cannot be trusted. The question tries to combine these two contradictory worlds together. The resulting scenario simply cannot exist in the real world.
Quite simply, there is no such thing as tasteful DRM. Even IF it prevented ONLY illegal copies, that is still a freedom that is being taken away from the user. I'm an American, often criticized for my stance on gun ownership by my international friends. To me, it has nothing to do with guns themselves, but rights. Even a stupid right is still a right, and I am appauled when they're threatened, or simply trampled over. The same with DRM. It is the place of law enforcement, NOT media corporations, to enforce the penalties for violation of the law. If people were being detained in Wal-Mart by the blue vested employees because they have hands and "could commit theft against us", that would raise alarms that would set the most conservative people aflame. The **AA has no right to restrict me or anyone else, in any way shape or form, even IF I should choose to violate the law. And not until there is proof I've comitted a crime, and I've been given due process of the law, should my rights be taken from me.
A DRM scheme that stops real piracy, but allows everything consumers want is not feasible, and never will be. Would I support giving frogs wings so they won't bust their asses hopping? Now let's stay in the realm of the possible. No DRM will ever be unhackable. Counterfeit movies and music will always be on street corners. All DRM assumes the legitimate customer a thief, and disrespects his or her personal property right, so yes. DRM is intrinsically distasteful.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
You don't have to postulate some magical "moral entitlement" to give creators a temporary monopoly on their works; you only have to posit that people will be more inclined to produce creative work if they have a guaranteed opportunity to profit from them. (Nothing's guaranteed; if nobody buys your CD, your rights under copyright law help you not at all.) Of course, current copyright terms are absurd, and serve to stifle creativity by locking up our culture. Still, it's based on a completely legitimate idea, and I for one don't advocate the abolition of copyright as a whole.
I'd advocate a return to Founder-era copyright terms, heavy protections for fair uses (especially noncommercial and educational ones), and something like for full protection, commercially exploited works must submit to the Library of Congress, to be held in escrow, a fully unencrypted, unencumbered version of the work. But wonky ideas don't count for much when the central question is whether copyright will go from Life+70 to Life+90 in the next few years...
Bah. I wish we had Public Domain Day in the US.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
First, if she had no heirs at all (including parents, siblings, cousins, etc.) then her property would escheat to the State. The practical effect of which (I believe - I haven't researched it) would be to put the work in the public domain.
No. If it escheats to the state, then that means that the state owns the copyright, just like anyone else can. A state could have a policy of putting escheated copyrights into the public domain, but AFAIK, no states do that.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
How about... for commercially-exploited works, or works that sell more than blah-blah copies, or some such thing, an unencumbered, unencrypted copy must be deposited with the Library of Congress. What's that, you say? Someone might copy it? Tough shit--they have audio CDs and books which anyone with a CD drive or scanner can copy. Require that access be restricted to archivists; whatever. The point is that an unlocked copy exists and is preserved.
This works best with shorter terms; maybe 28, plus 28 with renewal, or 14+14. And while I'm at it, I'd like the government to require source code review/escrow of any software running on systems dealing with high-security data. And a pony, damnit.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I read /. a lot on and off, but have never posted before, until now.
The real issue with DRM, or any copy and protection technology is what it's trying to do. Any of you have taken economics perhaps remember a price floor above the supply and demand intersection, and the black market it creates - that's exactly what's going on here. These companies are making more gross dollars by making the problem worse as opposed to lowering the price. It's more profitable, at least for now, to spend big $$ on preventing users from pirating the material, and charging more, instead of just setting a price (more) people are willing to pay, and don't feel the need to pirate. I don't want to pay $20 for a CD for album art, insane post-production, loads of marketing, DRM, and a case. I want to pay $1-$10 (depending on age, genre, etc) for a basic disk, with no fluff, just music.
The issue gets even worse when you go beyond music, to things like vista, HDCP, and other associated technologies. Vista comes with some of the most advanced anti-piracy methods of any Microsoft operating system. Why ? Because it's $400, and people will definitely want to pirate something that expensive. Why is it $400 ? Because it comes with aero, is new, and comes with more anti-piracy technology that anyone can shake a stick at. It has very little, if any technology to make the computing experience better for the end user. There's no way in hell I'm going to buy a copy of Vista. And I'm not going to waste time and energy trying to pirate it. When XP no longer does the job, it's either going to be linux or linux + MacOS. If I could buy a regular DVD for $3 to $10, and a HD-DVD for $5 to $15, I wouldn't ever want to copy one. Hell, at that price, if I cracked my copy, I'd just go buy another, as the blank + my time would end up costing me more. I'd like the legal ability to transcode so I can use my content on a portable device, but if the prices were low enough (a dollar or so?) I'd pay for that, too. Instead, I have to pay $20+, and if I actually want to use my HDTV to watch Hi-Def content, I'll probably need a new one, due to HDCP. Unless someone leaks a key, and I spend hours copying my disk, I have to buy a new one if I crack / scratch it. Games are the same way. There are few games out there that have justified their cost to me, but even that's better, as you get 10-50 hours of entertainment for your $20-$50.
Until companies learn that they need to fix the source of the problem, what makes SO MANY people want to pirate (the price), they're just going to continue to escalate the problem, by wasting our money on technologies that force us to spend more of our money.
Because DRM is like legislating against thought, at least in the case where DRM schemes effectively become government legislation through illegitimate laws like the DMCA.
Put simply, the most essential freedom we possess is the freedom to break the law. When this freedom is lost, we cease to be a free people.
Other than that, such a DRM scheme as you are attempting to describe is something that I believe to be impossible to produce. There is no feasible way of protecting digital content that cannot be broken with commonly available resources (within reason). All forms of encryption known to man are nothing more than stop gaps that buy time to give the appearance of security.
If DRM were simply a choice in the marketplace, it would fail miserably, as it can be argued that it demonstrably *has* failed, despite Apple selling 2 gigasongs. Unfortunately, we are left in a quandary, because it only takes one "free" copy of a digital work to be released to the Network, and left to their own devices, *someone* will see that it is done. You may argue whether or not this is a good thing, but there are many who disagree. Perhaps it is that now that we have progressed so far with technology that an original idea can become known to nearly everyone on Earth in a short period of time and at practically no cost, that original ideas will cease to have economic value.
Red herring. DRM isn't designed to protect data; it's designed to restrict the ways in which data can be used. It's perfectly possible to encrypt hospital data and, for instance, require doctors to carry around USB fobs with decryption keys on them, attached to their belt loops; walk away with your key and the data turns back into encrypted sludge. Or something of that nature, dealing with the possibility of keys being lost or whatever. The point is, your example is utterly irrelevant to the debate at hand. Just because DRM-pushers use the words "trusted" and "secure" doesn't mean it's at all helpful to you, in any manner at all.
Besides, DRM is about assuming complete control of the user's machine, and making it not really the user's. Asking about a DRM system which allows fair use but prevents infringement is like asking about a five-sided triangle; it's self-contradictory in nature.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Actually you're all looking at the wrong target; the media or the hardware. Tie the key to the person; everything that person buys or owns is tagged with that key. Any two identically keyed items can interoperate; a cd you burn will work in any cd player you own, etc.
In a free and open society, artists would be free to use any means necessary to protect their content - and consumers would be free to use any means necessary to crack the shit out them. If the consumer knows exactly what they're getting when they purchase a DRM-enabled device or protected content (e.g. no hidden rootkits please) then DRM is just an enabling technology - it allows a willing buyer to purchase a commodity from a willing seller. If the sets the price too high, or makes the constraints to burdensome, then the technology will die. To those who have a knee-jerk reaction to dump on DRM I ask the following: do you prefer the current system, where private corporations can influence the FBI to - using your own tax dollars - bust you for exercising your right to free speech? My opinion: if you don't want me copying your songs, then either build some real DRM, or don't sell it to me in the first place. It should be the media provider's responsibility to protect their shit, not the government.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
No, DRM is illegal. It attempts to bypass the consumers RIGHT to produce a backup of their investment. The copyright law provides a clause that states quite plainly that consumers are allowed to make one (1) backup for personal useage and that the backup must be transfered or destroyed if the original is sold, traded or given away.
Everyone has forgotten that the companies and service providers SERVE the consumer, not the other way around.
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
I'm surprised that so few have pointed out that to play DRMed media on a computer, you have to use closed source programs, programs that make it impossible to know what they actually do. We know that the programs let us watch the movie, but we don't know, and can never know if they do something else as well. Like making a log of all our computer activities. Who knows? We don't.
I know, this applies to any closed source program, but DRM is different, since it's a very effective way of forcing people to give up their control of their computers, their choice of software and their privacy.
The "glimpses" won't be whole songs. They'll be highlights, like a movie trailer. Designed to get you into the stadium. Artists and promoters will WANT it to stay out there.
Casual fans of Timberlake will buy the CD and not pay any particular attention to his concert schedule. They might buy tickets, but they won't put any effort into knowing his schedule. The CD is enough for them. They aren't specifically avoiding the concert they're just not aware it might be in town. If they can't get a CD, they might pay more attention to the concert schedule. Just like you or I might go to the movie theater when a film comes out rather than wait for the disk.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I think they should be scared of making DRM work properly.
If they really, truly got DRM working then they might find they have a whole bunch of people who don't listen to their music any more, but go looking for "free" stuff instead. Once people start figuring out that there's music outside of MTV then the RIAA could be in even bigger trouble than it is now.
No sig today...
Actually, it would make more sense for your car to be capped at 55 MPH than to have DRM on DVDs. After all, excessive speed with an automobile can cause serious injury and even death. Lack of DRM? Uh.. yeah, the perceived potential loss of some small profit for the wealthiest industries in the world is something we just can't have. Of course.
I would rule out DRM in case it does not allow the creation of derivate works! To me being unable to create derivate works is a limitation of freedom to speak. Enrico
*I admit my anti-copyright bias, but I don't think this is unfair. If you want your work to be protected, you should have to put a notice of copyright within the work, as under the old system. And you should have up to a year or so to decide you want to do that (to prevent people copying your expression.) Beyond that, it's public - period.
You might also want to make copyright libraries workable again. e.g. In order to claim any copyright you must deposit a "plain text" copy in all such libraries clearly labled with the date the work becomes public domain. Acceptable formats, media and labling to be decided by the relevent librarians.
What about the emergency services?
The forces?
They need occasionally to break the speed limit.
So now we either have to have two radically different engines (so what stops someone "sourcing" a non-limited engine" or we have a limiter that is tacked on (and can be removed, so what's to stop bad people breaking the limiter).
In either case, you really don't have an option.
Rental cars and fleet cars that you don't own can use limiters because the owner wants it limited. With personally owned cars, you need the aquiesence of the owner to get this to work. So you'll only stop the law abiding from breaking the law.
And then you need to make sure that the limiter doesn't affect normal usage (if it breaks on the motorway and cuts your engine...).
As such, I should be allowed to watch a pirated movie in my basement just as if I decide to drive 80mph in a 55mph zone. I'm succeptible to the consequences, of course. However, my car does not shut down when I speed, and so why should my DVD player shut down when it "thinks" I'm doing something illegal?
It would be possible to make a car which did shut down. But fortunatly most people realise that cars which randomly shut down are more dangerous than those capable of exceeding some arbitary speed limit.
The problem is that such a system is most certainly not workable.
I include the right to play content with free software, for that I have source code and that I can customize for my needs.
Now any software that can access the data raw, by definition can break any DRM.
So basically, yes I'm all for it. Problem is, that such a thing does not exist.
yacc
DRM, as a technological attempt to create a power balance in favour of middle-men (e.g. the music publishing & distribution industry), is immoral, distasteful and wrong.
Any power imbalance that is created WILL be exploited to drive profits for an industry that adds very little value for the consumer.
Unless consumers actively fight for their rights, they WILL lose out financially.
On the other hand, if consumers are able to act together and negotiate agressively, then DRM-like technologies just might create a new power balance: One that acts in favour of creative content creators & consumers; to the detriment of the middle-men.
In such a situation, DRM (As a power manipulation technology) can protect the interests of the majority & provide a meritocratic framework for future growth.
I.e. just as new peer-to-peer models for file distribution have arisen, so new peer-to-peer financing models could, in future, arise.
An interesting thought experiment that will never be reality. DRM is about control, and no company will ever allow "legitimate" usage, since that's what they're trying to kill via DRM.
I don't know if I'd support such a system. I do know that I support companies that decline to use things like DRM and copy protection (for instance, Bethesda's awesome TES4: Oblivion) if they're at the right price point (~$20-30 for games, ~$10 for CDs from bands like Harvey Danger and pretty much anyone distributing through CDBaby). Otherwise, the shit gets downloaded.
It is probably impossible to design such a DRM scheme, but let us assume that: - You can copy/transfer/access your content whichever legal way you like. Assume a perfect system that enables you to do that, but that doesn't allow you to do anything illegal. If it is simpler, assume that the content is watermarked (in a secure, unbreakable way) so that you can do illegal things as well but they can be traced back to you. - To be allowed to sell DRM'ed stuff, a company's content must also be uploaded in un-encrypted form to a state-controlled agency (a sentralized, digital library) which will automatically release it in unencrypted form once the copyright expires. (Or rather, once you stop re-enforcing the copyright every year, just to release all "comercially dead" stuff If you can't answer a hypothetical question, just stay quiet -- don't attack the current DRM system (we all hate that). Given these assumptions, what then? My personal opinion, given this unlikely scenario, is that DRM is ok. Not perfect, and maybe not necessary, but still acceptable.
.asif
This is a problem with geeks in general, it's all digression all the time. Regardless of weather that is drm, or if it's even possible the submitter asked a straight forward question, and a good one at that. For me, in response to the actual question asked. I don't know. :)
In all honesty I rarely buy content of any kind (and no I don't steal it, I just don't tend to consume things that would come with DRM).
I would do what I did when considering DRM in it's current form...I'd read blogs, I'd listen to what people had to say, I'd read the contracts themselves and arrive at a decision.
"He was a wise man who invented beer." - Plato
Personally, I don't support DRM at all, in the context it is currently used (ie, technologies to restrict usage rights).
What I do support is watermarking schemes, where a given file is permanently but non-intrusively "stained" with a unique licence number, which can then be traced back to its legal owner should copies of the file suddenly appear (for example) on emule.
Having such a scheme in place could revolutionize the industry - give recording artists an outlet which doesn't require the big multimedia companies to take 90% of the purchase price and all of the copyright, and the pay to the artists themselves could easily double even if prices per-track dropped.
-=DaveHowe=-
"If they can get to to ask the wrong questions they don't have to worry about the answers." Why should a person be paid every time a created work is used? Shouldn't I be able to buy a right-to-use once and then re-use it forever without having to continue to pay the owner? But to do this would beggar lawyers and executors and other who live off the creations of others.
DRM is distasteful because it elevates corporate information to the level of classified state secrets. With the DMCA, for the first time it became illegal to investigate something that you own -- for example a DVD. Until the DMCA passed, if you owned a physical object you were allowed to investigate it, dissect it, and ultimately understand it completely subject only to the limits of your own equipment and understanding.
After the DMCA, inquisitive people became criminals.
That sucks.
Would you oppose murder if we had the ability to raise the dead? Doubtless an interesting question, but not of any real relevance, because we don't have that ability.
Would I oppose DRM if it didn't restrict any legitimate activities? An equally interesting question, but given that it seems to be as impossible as raising the dead...
This is a great comment. Not to hijack, but this is an example of philosophy doing its job, which was the subject of this other post of mine
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I'm an iTunes / iPod user. Not because I'm an Apple fanboy, but because that combo worked so easily and reliably in the beginning.
Then my first iPod quit working for some reason, and I had to get a replacement. I sync'd the replacement, hopped on the eliptical machine, and none of my songs would play. Turns out I have to log into the iTunes store in order to activate the replacement. After that some songs play, some don't. It's been a hassle.
My wife won an iPod at work, which we have connected to her laptop and out home PC. Now songs that she purchases on her laptop, then sync's with our home computer won't play on my iPod. I'm not sure if this is how it's supposed to work or not, but it's sure a pain in the ass and I have zero time / patience for iPod troubleshooting. The reason I bought it was because it was "plug and play".
DRM, in my opinion, is just another consumer hostile device put in place by the entertainment industry to maximise profits. The entire industry obviously could care less how well their products work, how much people enjoy them, or whether they are perceived as "bad" people. They want our money, money, money bottom line and NOTHING else.
So sure, I would buy more products with DRM IF THEY WORK WELL. As it stands now I have ripped all of my itunes to mp3, and will continue to do this with any DRM songs I buy. I'm also planning on purchasing a different mp3 player that allows me to manually copy my mp3's to the device with a file manager (no fancy sync mechanism that stops working).
As a consumer, the only thing I want is to put songs (that I have paid for) on my mp3 player and have it play ALL of them EVERY time when I'm working out. Can the consumer hostile entertainment industry ever accomplish that? I doubt it.
any of the millions of artists past and present who either did not or could not copyright their work?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
My brother is clinically insane. He just spent a year arranging his toenail clippings into a portrait of Christina Ricci.
Alas: society, in the aggregate, does not consider my brother's efforts to be time *valuably spent, in the economic sense. Especially as he did this outside, and the clippings were soon scattered to the four winds.
There is a principle at work here: you spend time doing what you think is valuable. Great. Enjoy. But when your work enters the marketplace, your assessment of its value means precisely dick. The relevant economic questions are:
What is the next-cheapest substitute?
Is the difference worth it?
"If my brother spends a year writing a unique book, and you derive pleasure from reading it then you should compensate him."
And I will. Send it over.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The hypothetical DRM you speak of would have a very interesting property: it would be aware of, and enforce *technically, any sort of agreement between the provider of the digits in question and the recipient. That, I think, is what perfect "digital rights management" would do, yes?
Alas, I object, for a pretty simple reason: human beings should be free to break their promises. I don't mean that such people are "good" -- in fact I think that keeping to one's agreements is *the *essential question of character.
A technical measure that makes it impossible to exercise this fundamental right to break promises (and, of course, accept the consequences of doing so) dehumanizes the parties thereto.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
There are situations where DRM is appropriate, such as protecting national or corporate IP and secrets. DRM is NOT appropriate for products one has purchased. IMHO, it is totally inappropriate to encumber a purchased product with anything that can prevent the legitimate use of the product by the purchaser/owner. If I buy a CD or DVD, I can resell it legitimately to someone else. I can play it on any suitable system I have access to. That DRM may, even inadvertently, prevent me from legitimate use is abhorrant to me. Sony has permanently lost any possible business from me for all time (until they apologize for their arrogance, stop all use of DRM in their consumer media products, and make proper restitution for the root-kit fiasco), and that includes going to the theater to view movies they have produced. I even sold my Sony Wega TV and purchased a competitor's.
I don't think it's the government's prerogative to refine "reasonable profit", except in the cases involving public utilities and the like, which are practically socialized in some ways. I much prefer limiting the time-frame in which profits can be made rather than limiting the amount of profit that can be made. If copyright lengths max out at 28 years even with renewal (and if you add a $1 fee to the renewal, which must be performed in the last two years of the initial copyright period, and only if the owner of the copyright owned it in the first two years, you discourage corporations from locking up never-profitable material Just Because), you don't really have the issues we have here.
Problems with "absolutely obscene levels of profit" don't apply to creative works the same way they apply to pharmaceuticals, or to oil. If they're trying to gouge the public, the public can just wait a few years.
But I still feel strongly that the whole thing idea that there should be a limit in profit instead of in time takes away from the whole incentive structure that's the basis of copyright. There's no compelling reason to institute a ceiling; I can't even see how it would help set lower prices for anything other than the highest-selling works. At worst, if the sales-cap was $10 million, they'd sell $9,999,999 worth of the work and then just refuse to sell or license it, locking it up for the rest of the copyright term; it would be worse than the system we have now. I suppose compulsory licensing could help with that problem, but the whole idea still has the issues listed above; it's a kludge, and there are better, less exploitable ways of achieving the same goal.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The question is based on a false premise; namely, that DRM is possible which can tell fair use from illicit copying. As innumerable other posters have pointed out, it's impossible by definition. It's like asking, "if I draw you a five-sided triangle in 2-D Euclidean geometry, can I fuck your sister?".
Yes, Slashdot is populated by geeks, and yes, we're all digressing. We're doing this because we're not a bunch of suckers. The question is a trick; it's to get you to agree that some level of DRM is acceptable, when in reality, it's not. How much shit do I want smeared on my pizza? None. "Not even a little?" None. "Even if it's just a tiny bit?" None, goddamnit!
DRM is surrendering ultimate control over your computer to someone else. That is unacceptable. Period.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Did you miss the part where I said no DRM is acceptable? Did you miss the part where a dozen other posters said the same thing? What exactly are you waiting for? A parade of tags?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
OK -- let me change it slightly. Instead of shutting down, your car just can't accelerate after that point. You're topped off at, say, 55mph. This is entirely possible, and actually in use in some types of vehicles (e.g. a golf course may limit their golf carts to 5mph).
Why do car manufacturers not ensure that all the cars they're selling in a particular country are configured to stop accelerating at the country's maximum speed limit?
I think the answer to that question applies to the argument as to whether your dvd player should enforce DRM at the hardware level as well. In both cases, you're disabling the functionality of the product based on a perceived legal violation -- "perceived", of course, by inanimate machinery.
I guess my point is: it shouldn't be entirely up to the devices themselves (be it a vehicle, a firearm, a dvd player) to determine if what you are doing with them is legal. The water is just too murky.
But only 'benevolent' dictatorship. As long as the person who wields unbounded power over the country is incorruptible, fair, and intelligent I fully support dictatorship as a viable government choice.
Wait, what's that you say? Power corrupts, and that's assuming the person starts out honest to begin with? Most dictators are corrupt, unfair, stupid, or some mix of the three? Because dictators are just as fallible (if not more so) than the next person?
Maybe giving absolute power to a single entity isn't the best choice, no matter how much that entity promises to be good. DRM takes away the users control over their computer, and gives it to the entity writing the DRM rules. That person, who has absolute power over the data that is put into the DRM, is inherently untrustworthy, and any fantasy you dream up about 'fair DRM use' is fiction, beginning to end. Individuals cannot be trusted with as much power as DRM hands them.
The Raven
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
"If digital media was...subject to a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage..." It isn't, and it isn't going to be. I want to be able to do everything with DRM protected content that I can do with a CD-ROM today: listen to it, copy it to my device, lend it to a friend, sell it on eBay when I get tired of it, donate it to a public library, and leave it to my children in my will. Until DRM does all of that, I want no part of it. I've never bought DRM protected media, and I don't plan to. [I do buy CD's and non-DRM tracks online.]