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Fight DRM While There's Still Time
ageor writes "It seems (not only) to me that DRM is about far more than intellectual property. It's also about monopoly and freedom of choice. It's one of those cases where we, the consumers, must decide against accepting the new industry's rules, which care only about control and making money. The whole matter is very well put in DRM, Vista and your rights, where you can follow the subject as deeply as you like through the numerous relevant links."
DRM can't be fought, sorry.
There aren't enough people who know or care. Only a few of us geeks, and we don't make up an appreciable fraction of the market.
People will buy what the ads tell them to buy. End of story. We lose. Want to play the downloaded movie you just ordered from Netflix on Linux? Sorry, no dice.
I don't like it either, but it's reality.
The general population has very little idea about what DRM is or means. Here's an example: The DVD/VCR combo. Albeit anecdotal, several of my acquaintances have bought these products with the naive intention of renting a dvd and recording it to VHS tape, and needless to say, been very disappointed. Or the DVD-burner console, with the same type of intentions. None of them had any idea about copy protection, and certainly their intentions were less than honorable.
But the point is that not being tech savvy, they are clueless as to what the superficial applications of DRM are, let alone the deeper implications. Until more of the general population is made aware of what is at stake, DRM will continue unabated because people buy it. Fortunately, there have been signs that the main stream media are noticing the implications of DRM as evidenced by recent articles in the New York Times.
Probably every single person on Slashdot has received all the "boilerplate" emails that circulate the web eternally it seems. The rocket-powered-impala, the no-headlights-gangsters, the endless new-virus-gonna-format-your-HD warning mails forwarded again and again Aunty Marcia, etc ad nauseum.
But what if WE did the same thing? What if the most articulate amongst us came up with a DRM warning letter, and we forwarded it to all the Joe Sixpacs of our worlds with the a title like "WARNING: DRM THREATENING YOUR PC" and "FORWARD THIS TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS!!" message?
Maybe I'm just idealistically dreaming, maybe I'm being a little rtarded, but how else will Joe Sixpack ever find out otherwise? Broadcast media? Nope. Blogs? Not the ones he's reading. And you know Joe HAS read about the rocket impala.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Fair use is guaranteed by copyright, and I believe that is in the constitution.
Fair Use is a matter of Congressional, not Constitutional, law. (All the Constitution says is that it's Congress's ball game) Lessig's recent SCOTUS case (wherein he tried to have the recent copyright extension thrown out) reinforces this.
As for not being able to use linux for various DRM'd tech -- which really is the only legitimate complaint against DRM on its face -- the right answer is probably "what do we need to do in order to work with Netflix?", not "Netflix must never do that, because it doesn't work with Linux!"
(I'm a big fan of personally identified perpetual licensing. I pay the studio X dollars, I give them my name and a current home address, and they set up a server against which I can authenticate anywhere, download the movie as often as I want, and authenticate that it is me watching my movie.)
The Constitution does not grant our rights, it essentially states that any rights which are not stated that we do not have (e.g., the state may punish you for really evil things, but in such cases you retain your right to trial by jury) are retained by default, but that certain rights which are explicitly stated within the Constitution are inalienable and cannot be revoked under any circumstance, ever. Again, it's the besic jist of the Constitution, now how it's worded, read it through completely and you'll get it.
Unfortunately the "state" (read: Federal government) has succeeded in convincing us that it is the reverse. They even go as far as to suggest that suspension of the Constitution may even be a necessity in certain cases (e.g., natural disasters where FEMA is concerned) and due process may be ignored or even bypassed (ref: 16th amendment never being ratified by the strict process demanded by the Constitution), and that executive orders by the president are allowable and may even conflict with or in many cases override the Constitution.
But having said that, the Constitution does not grant us rights in ANY case; it protects our rights and simply limits them in very specific instances.
Take the time to read it sometime, it is well worth your effort. Also refer to peripheral supporting documents written by our Founding Fathers and you will become pissed off at just how far out country has strayed and at how much our apathy and voting for presidents based on party affiliation rather than character and principle has sold our very liberties out. Go read it though, you will appreciate what our Founding Fathers worked for, and will be very disappointed at what has been going on during the last 18 or so presidential administrations.
Know your basic inalienable rights, and use them; especially the right to vote, and the right to bear arms. Your right to bear arms guarantees your right to vote.
Posting anon since stating the truth often gets one modded troll here.
From earlier in the month, from Usenet, a post from Me. This is what DRM does.
*begin paste*
Alt.Rhode_Island buys music. REPOST
So I'm an Elvis Costello fan. I bought "The River In Reverse" and "The Delivery Man"
The CD for "River in Reverse" wasn't copy protected, but the DVD would only play in my wicked small low-fi portable DVD player that has 1 inch speakers. It craps out after about 5 minutes in anything else. I watched the whole thing. It wasn' worth the effort. They're doing copy protection for THAT?
The first CD in "Delivery Man" is copy protected and will only play in the low-fi DVD player.
I heard mutterings of the CEO of UMG saying that ipods are repositories of stolen music. I didn't figure that he'd be stupid enough to follow through. And good luck figuring this out on your own, as these disks are not labeled as such plainly. The "Delivery Man" cd is labeled as "enhanced cd" on a tiny logo on the back of the package instead of the standard Compact Disc label. In other words, they get around not selling a Compact Disc by not calling it a Compact Disc as defined by the Phillips standard (which gets the manufacturer the Compact Disc label).
I went to the UMG site that describes the copy protection. Apparently if you have a Macintosh you're screwed. They're "working on it" because they say that the only software they have to let you play the cd works only for Windows PCs and it's spotty on that depending on the age and model of your optical drive.
Fine.
I have been hosed for being an honest guy.
I'm not a thief. I will never pay another cent to UMG. This is insane.
You have been warned.
--
BMO
Hmmm ... if there was a youtube movie about this, I'd post it on my blog, link to it, email it to people and so on.
Anyone knows about a good enough movie about this? (a three pages text rant with no formatting won't have the same effect, and doesn't make anyone go "Neat, huh?"; I wouldn't send something like that)
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
I'm assuming that DRM laws will increasingly require hardware manufacturers to build DRM into all hardware, so that upgrades will lock us into copy protection and proprietary, closed systems.
So will any manufacturers step up to the plate and start producing hardware that complies with the letter of the law but that's easy for the skilled user to circumvent? Say by doing a firmware update to the BIOS or something.
Alternatively, maybe some countries that don't sign onto DRM treaties (think Russia and AllofMP3.com) can become the source for more expensive but freer hardware?
That's the problem with pretty much the entire anti-DRM movement. It has no credibility because it only points out problems and not solutions.
I have a pretty unpopular opinion here on Slashdot - I am broadly supportive of DRM. Fortunately I also have great karma and don't care much about losing it, so I don't mind arguing the case for DRM here. One of the things that bugs me about Slashdots DRM coverage is it's full of people pointing out problems, and never solutions.
The basic problem DRM tries to solve is really simple - we want professionals to produce high quality 'creative works' despite us having technology that can replicate such an item for zero cost. The free market really can't cope with that at all, because it makes "supply" in the economic sense infinite therefore price becomes zero, implying that something has no value. That's clearly rubbish, and quality creative works definitely have value to millions of people.
Nobody really knows how to design an economic system that works in the case of zero-cost-copies though so for now, we'll have to make do with what we've got - the free market - and bodge/hack things together until it works. These hacks will always be suboptimal and have lots of problems, hacks always do, but it's the only option right now. Typically this is done by preventing zero-cost copies, which allows the market to set a price, meaning the people who made the creative work get paid.
As it happens, that's really hard. Computers copy information, that's what they do, and unfortunately people can't be trusted to just follow the rules of the system left to their own devices. Instead people do a cost:benefit analysis and think, well, it's not likely I'll be caught, so I'll go ahead and break the law. Who cares, everybody else does it anyway. So it has to be enforced at the technology level, otherwise we just screw ourselves over in the long run when content production just becomes economically unsupportable.
I don't like the fact that FairPlay locks you into Apple, that Janus locks you into Windows Media, and that neither of them run on Linux. I really don't. But I also don't see a real alternative. An open DRM scheme has been proposed by Sun but never took off, because it's not enough to have a design - you must also have code, a commitment to repair it when breached, deals with the people who make the stuff in the first place etc.
The alternatives to DRM that are suggested are usually pretty pathetic. "Make money off concerts" might work for (some) musicians but not for software developers, "make multiplayer games that enforce it server side" might work for (some) software developers but doesn't work for musicians, and nobody really thought about what happens when we perfect the ebook reader.
As more and more moves into the digital realm this issue is just going to get bigger and bigger. It isn't going to go away just because it'd be convenient for Slashdotters, especially because for every poster here who really cares about the ability to write open source viewers there are at least 3 who just like getting free movies off BitTorrent.
When somebody can give me a sound, scalable, generic and implementable economic design for goods that cost money to build the first time but are free to copy from then on, I might start to protest against DRM, because I'd actually have an answer to the question of "If not DRM then what?". Until then I'll continue to argue the case for it, use it despite the inconvenience and who knows, maybe even implement it in future.
"If you have DVI or HDMI without HDCP (ICT set or not), you don't get any video output. You must use an analog connection at this point. You can either use VGA or Component."
Great, so I get to switch my monitor to an inferior connection. Good luck if your video card and monitor don't both have VGA.
Remember, though, that the HDCP standard places the authentication responsibility on the transmitting device. A transmitter is not supposed to send the data stream to a receiver until it authenticates the receiver. Receivers, on the other hand, are not required to authenticate transmitters before accepting a data stream.
As long as the authentication is transmitter initiated, I don't need to care about it when I'm shopping for a new TV, because I can just get a DVI->HDMI adaptor and use it as a big-ass computer monitor.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
They support FLAC and OGG. Basically don't do DRM. And mount as removable storage instead of requiring bullshit applications. Works with all OS that support removable USB storage.
iAudiophile.net fan site
Cowon's US site
I recommend the iAudio X5L. 35 hour batter life. 30gb storage.
A good friend was just telling me a story about DRM that I found kind of funny. He's loaded, and loves electronics. Who doesn't?
This is a list of stuff that he's bought over the last year or so.
- A really nice "Brillian" HDTV ($10000)
- A PS3 ($600)
- A really high-end Sony digital camcorder that records 1080p ($2500?)
- A really, REALLY high-end Sony laptop that can burn Blu-ray movies ($5000)
- A de-interlacer ($3000)
Ok, so he has all this stuff, and he's excited to start recording 1080p content with his camcorder and burning it to Blu-ray disks, and then watching it on his top-of-the-line entertainment system. Every piece of his setup is among the best you can get, and it all supports 1080p. So he records some stuff, finds burns it to disk, and can't get it to play. I talked to him about his setup several times over the course of a couple of weeks... There were so many roadblocks that he ran into, and every single one was because of DRM. It was comical.
The PS3 refused to even play the disks because they appeared to be pirated. This has come up quite a bit in various Blu-ray forums. So he found a workaround for this, but it sucks because you have to use this "special" format that doesn't allow your movies to have menus. Ok, so he burns another disk with the crappy no-menu format, and the PS3 still refuses to play it. Turns out the PS3 can't "authenticate" the TV over HDMI, so it won't output anything in 1080p. So he has to deal with Brillian on the phone to get a firmware update. He finally gets that, and tries again. Still won't play. Now, the PS3 says it can't authenticate the de-interlacer box. So, he still hasn't found a fix for that, but he can finally watch his movies as long as he plugs the PS3 directly into the TV, AND, burns his movies in the special format with no menus.
The net result is that his movies can't have menus, his $3000 de-interlacer is collecting dust, but after two weeks of debugging and tech support calls and firmware upgrades, his $20000 worth of equipment will actually allow him to record and watch movies. Makes you think back to the good old days, when you recorded something onto a VHS tape and stuck it in the VCR.
It's a P5. The processor of infamy. I can't say I'm using it because it's exactly ideal, but it showed up on my doorstep one day. Mint condition. No dust on the fan. Even the original keyboard looks like they took it out of the box yesterday. I wonder what it's been doing the past 12 years? Coulda been worse. Sometimes it's kittens. If it's unloved, it ends up on my porch. All I can think to do with it is use it as music machine. Can't even run my 20th century games on it.
Still, it let me put a bullet through the head of the old Packard-Bell 486 (no, I did not pay for that one either). And it seems to do just fine with mp3s so long as it isn't doing anything else.
This one'll get a bullet too I guess, as soon as I figure out why the Athlon 900 on the bench won't boot or I get around to assembling the NOS Duron 600.
Or maybe I'll just trade it for some kittens and a Yugo
KFG