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Father of MPEG Replies To Jobs On DRM
marco_marcelli writes with a link to the founder and chairman of MPEG, Leonardo Chiariglione, replying to Steve Jobs on DRM and TPM. After laying the groundwork by distinguishing DRM from digital rights protection, Chiariglione suggests we look to GSM as a model of how a fully open and standardized DRM stack enabled rapid worldwide adoption. He gently reminds Jobs (and us) that there exists a reference implementation of such a DRM stack — Chillout — that would be suitable for use in the music business.
It has already been established that DRM is bad. It doesn't work and it hurts everybody.
So frankly, who cares about this small part of Jobs' argument?
His main point -- that there shouldn't be DRM -- is correct.
Open source... DRM...
I don't know how to feel just now!
What's with all the pro-DRM articles recently? I thought /. readers were generally opposed to DRM. I think that is 4 in 2 days.
When I look at the Wiki, I think of something 'a person' in the security field says time and time again:
"Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it."
-Bruce Schneier
Despite disliking DRM, GSM is the most sophisticated communications protocol that I have ever seen. I have read the standard (dispite getting a headache in 5 minutes) and it is totally locked down using encryption, session keys, etc. Perhaps I am in error, but I doubt the standard itself has ever been cracked- unless via law enforcement with the complicity of the companies involved.
Yet it is the most widely used wireless personal communication standard in the world. Woe are the hackers and crackers who try to attact it directly. But like any encrypted system, the weak points usually lie elsewhere. Those would be the point of attack.
If Steve Jobs gets rid off it. He will be my personal hero and I am buying myself a Mac.
Go Steve, Go!
DRM isn't necessarily evil; it's the unfair enforcement of such DRM that is, which is his main point. He's also saying also that a standard unencrypted mp3 can have DRM merely by being bound by a license agreement; it's once you start employing a digital means to enforce those terms that DRM begins to become intrusive. Chiariglione goes on to talk about open DRM standards and how the music industry should adopt one to promote interoperability. The problem there is that not everyone will adopt the standards, be it for their own personal gain (IE, Apple), or because they're existing technology lacks the capability of supporting a new standard (IE, retroactive compatibility wont be there). This is the main argument for completely open and free MP3 files; anybody with a player since 1992 can play mp3s. Granted, if apple were to ever go DRM-Free, it'd be with unprotected AAC (MPEG-4) files, but the idea is the same.
appleguru.org
"he uses the term DRM without defining it"
.. :)
If I was on Usenet I would assume the OP was doing the meaning of the word shuffle. Pretending to misunderstand what the other fella meant and addressing a made up meaning instead.
"while it makes sense to claim, based on empirical evidence, that protected music does not sell, it remains to be demonstrated that managed music does not"
What's the difference between 'managed' and 'protected' in relation to Jobs meaning of DRM and your version of DRM.
'That would be like saying that the Creative Commons movement is a hollow shell'
False analogy and strawman
"Curiously Steve Jobs restricts his analysis to just one option: how can Apple safely license its DRM technology to other manufacturers and be able to keep its obligations vis-à vis the record companies"
Well he can only speak for Apple after all.
davecb5620@gmail.com
The content industry wants one universal DRM. Everyone thought that would be MS and they were happy. When Apple won the battle, they were not happy. What you are seeing by calls for Apple to license their DRM is this frustration made public and an attempt to allow MS to embrace, extend and extinguish Fairplay. Jobs called their bluff and they realize they just may well be fucked on this. Interesting times.
Security protocols can be proved secure (given a few mathematical assumptions on the complexity of the underlying math).
DRM is provably unsecure, since it implies that one party which shares the secret must never learn the secret.
Mr. Chiariglione suggests GSM as a model of an open standard that everyone has been using for years to perform sophisticated DRM. I don't know much about GSM, but when I enter into a service agreement with a communications provider, I am doing so for live communications. Perhaps the market is morphing to providing content on mobile phones, but the success of GSM was not built on that model. I pay my mobile phone service provider monthly for access to their network, and if my phone was to stop working because my provider locked me out of their network, I would stop paying them. The agreement would be at an end, and there wouldn't be any content locked in the DRM that I want. I'm not paying them for the right to use their network in perpetuity. On the other hand, I purchase CDs and DVDs so that I may enjoy the content FOREVER. I do not pay them monthly to keep listening to the music or watching the movies, and I am not willing to enter into that sort of agreement. DRM on my music or video content is locking ME away from the content I have legally licensed, especially if the vendors disappear. So while the DRM in GSM might be acceptable, it is not acceptable on the content I purchase.
We apologize for the preceding message. All those responsible have been sacked.
People... PLEASE unabbreviate your abbreviations at first mention in an article. To those that don't know what TPM or GSM are (isn't GSM for cell phones?), this article appears completely ridiculous. I thought it was a joke at first.
The author simply uses "digital content protection" where we would use DRM, and DRM as an all encompasing term for encryption, digital signatures, computer readable copyright licenses and probably a bunch of other things he didn't directly meantion. From this he concludes that DRM is both widely used and accepted. Now whether he is trying to convince poeple that the fight is allready lost and we should work on interoperable lockdowns or is just confused himself I don't know.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Slashdot will tell you what to think and how to feel, and you will comply. Such is the way of life at Slashdot.
Interesting article... the author goes into a fair bit of detail in differentiating between the assigning of rights to digital media and the enforcing the rights on digital media. This is rather unusual, since the the most common usage of DRM has always been about enforcing the rights of the creator.
It would have been nice if he had gone into as much detail about GSM, and what specifically in the GSM system makes it specifically suited to DRM. I am assuming that he is referring to the encryption system used by GSM. If that is the case, there is a fundamental flaw here: as with all other DRM schemes this would require that the "keys" be stored along with the encrypted data, and the devices would know how to decrypt the data. It would only be a matter of time that someone would discover a method to retrieve the keys from the media. It works for GSM because, GSM being a communication system, there are protocols for exchanging keys between two ends of the system.
To me this appears to be an advertisement to use their DRM technology.
Is a bag of shit. Most phones only implement OMA DRM 1.0 - forward lock. OMA DRM 2 - I doubt it will catch on. How many phones have implemented it and how many content providers are using it?
If music were priced at its real cost plus the same small profit that all other manufacturing enjoys, it would cost $1.00 an album. After all, production costs have already been recouped for 99.9% of popular music, hundreds of times over for anything in the top 40.
And with such low pricing, people wouldn't even think twice about buying every new album that comes out in their genre. Youngsters have no money anyway, so asking them to cough up inflated prices is just completely ridiculous, and counterproductive since kids create much of the music buzz. They'll eventually purchase all the CDs that they really appreciate once they've grown up anyway --- just have patience!
You wouldn't need DRM not only because very low cost would make non-market acquisition pointless, but also because everybody would have all the music they want --- there would be nothing left to copy, in one's area of interest!
[The argument that pricing music logically would make new music cost hundreds of dollars per album is bollocks: like in all industries, development of a new product should be funded from past profits, and amortized across projected future sales. Music should be no exception, and the fact that currently the income from sales of age-old music is pure untouched profit and not reinvested to fund new production just shows the extent to which greed has distorted the music industry.]
DRM is only an issue today because of the artificial scarcity created by artifically high pricing --- greed.
What should we believe? Microsoft's claims -- that they favor and aim to provide an open platform --, or our lieing eyes, which are currently witnessing a thing called "Zune" which is the exact opposite of open.
is even more egotistical than Steve Jobs.
He pretty much restates the overall theme of Jobs' point, in a manner that sounds condescending because we "stupid" people don't understand that DRM can apply to multiple facets of information and technology.
What a prick.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
DRM on GSM handsets, effective? So far, because there has been little motivation in attacking it - all content is available through other channels.
As a legit user, is DRM on GSM a good thing? Personally I find the prices outrageous for a very short ringtone (2-4 times the price of the full track on iTunes), add to that, that the content you have bought has been locked to the handset, I think that DRM on GSM is a prime example of why content providers should not be allowed to unconditionally control what consumers (you're not a user, remember) are allowed to do.
As a side note, I definetly think that artists and the companies enabling the artists to produce, should be properly compensated. I just don't like to be limited in what I can do, with goods (even intangible) I've bought.
I'm sure I could read up on the difference between protection vs. management.
It doesn't seem like one could be much different than the other.
There are two types of people. The RIAA see's customers and priates. The truth is there are customers and meme-speaders. Most people at times perform both roles. While it's great if people want to buy your stuff, the 2nd best choice is to have your stuff be made popular by the meme-spreaders.
If I want something from a store (brick, "e," or otherwise); I have to pay..
People should be able to copy works.
Copyright notices should be copied along w/ the work (e.g., as in GPL/Linux)
There should be a free or paid (up to the author) system whereby I can compare my "bits" to the original "bits" to make sure my copy is authentic (if that was something I wanted to do).
There should be within the copyright notice a universal resource locator that would allow me to pay and/or donate something for the bits (should I want to).
http://www.hawknest.com/
Sharing of technology is impossible. Open formats? Impossible. It has never been done before. :-)
It would be impossible for apple to share DRM because it is simply impossible. Cant you guys get it?
I find it really funny how the same people that propose open formats for Office, turn around and say that "open" DRM is impossible. A lot of that "impossible" comes from monopoly of largest hardware provider.
It is impossible for Apple to open their DRM, and it is impossible for Apple to use non-DRM music, even if publishers give them rights to do so.
Job's outcry makes very little sense, and industry leaders are calling him out for it. What Jobs is saying is that they can not provide access to their DRM nor can they provide NON-DRM music if publishers allow it. So basically Jobs is claiming that he cant do anything because of the publishers, even if publishers are calling for lesser restrictions.
At the same time, one of the biggest publishers - EMI - is testing non-drm sales, of course not on iTunes, since Apple isnt allowing it.
So it turns out that it is Apple who is now not allowing publishers not to use the DRM.
Did anyone read the open letter to Steve Jobs over at the Inquirer?
7 522
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
Full Tilt
The problem we face is many existing players have DRM or have no framework to allow for new open DRM to be added.
Of course, manufacturers can write new firmware, but I'm sure that would only be done for current models.
The only way forward is to have no DRM to allow for 100% compatibility.
It's a little bit strange that when the head of a company with the most successful DRM platform says "No DRM is better than interoperable DRM", people seem to be getting more supportive of interoperable DRM.
It's also a little bit strange that "the father of MPEG" is how Leonardo Chiariglione is described, rather than the more relevant "father of SDMI".
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Good link.
"Our view is it's our job to provide the weapons and the warlords can tell us what kind of restrictions and policies they want to apply to that." Where's the difference?
I think DRM _should_ exist... but as a user-controlled management solution.
DRM was originally designed to allow YOU, the USER to manage your own rights. It's a scheme to allow you to trust something of your own free will. The power was in YOUR hands.
However, the vendors took over the control of 'rights'. The problem here is that they don't trust YOU and hence, DRM is hated because we lost the ability to control it.
If DRM was back in the USERS hands, everyone would be singing the praises of DRM.
Sweden and a few other European countries are now showing their backbone impling (not saying it outright, they don't want to piss off big business because that means less money for their economy) that business-controlled DRM is bad. Notice that they've never said anything about user-centric DRM...
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
I'm not sure what good such a copyright-only exemption would do, given that defamation law in the UK is much stricter than it is in the United States. There would have to be usable exemptions in both copyright law and defamation law.
Lets examine this from the point of view of the artist. That person or person(s) works hard at making some form of art. It really makes no difference what the art is, it could be music, sculpture, painting, books, motion pictures it really does not matter, lets just assume the arguments.
Now how does that person make a living doing this?
Now I could go on and on but your all smart, I think you get the point. The {___________} {insert the appropriate moniker here }, does whatever they do so they can pay their electric bill, mortgage, buys food, GI Joe with the Kung Foo grip for their kids.
The transportablity of the item by digital means seems to make the difference here. You cant download a sculpture or a painting, you can download an image of the sculture or painting, but not the actual item. A fine paitning or sculpture might very well sell for a very large amount of money. If you buy it, its yours, you own it, but not ALL the rights to it unless that is spelled out in the sales contract. Can you then set up shop, make a mold and make plaster casts of it and sell them? I dont think so. Can you hire another artist to duplicate the painting you purchased for a large amount of money then sell the copies, again I dont think so, that is if you are a law abiding person as I do beleive the original artist retains that right, well unless you purchased it from them I would imagine.
Let us now take the example or say, U2 or Cold Play. These are artists who create a of work of art, in this case its music. They are willing to sell you a copy, for your individual and personal use only, to enjoy their particular art form. Now most people are quite content with that, but there seem to be some people who believe they have the right to then give that to anyone they want to, en mass! I don't think any reasonable person would think that was ok.
So here is my proposal to solve this problem. I know that everyone wants to be able to do is play content, that they have purchased, on any device that they own. I think that a form of PGP is the answer.
Everyone knows that in PGP you have a public and private key. Lets just take this one step further. The private key comes with the content. The public key is something you make up. The part that I think makes this work, is that each device, iPod, Zune, Your car radio, your whatever player all have a unique key of their own. That key gets mashed with your key and creates your personal key, for that device. You buy another device and you create another key for that device. At your computer or whatnot you can either have it read form the device electronicaly ( device is in the cradle ) or you can manualy type it in if the key comes from say your car stereo.
Whatever system you use to purchase digital content with, be it iTunes or whatever knows the Private Key and your Personal Key, but not the key from the iPod, Zune, Phone, whatever. The Private & Personal keys get embeded into the particular bit of music, video, book on tape, etc. Now all of your content will play on all o
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Under United States copyright law as interpreted in the DeCSS cases such as Universal v. Reimerdes, fair use doesn't have to be convenient or full quality in order to be constitutionally sufficient. Line-out is still available.
How do you prevent theft? You don't...
I respect artists. I don't personally trade music, though I know how easy it is to do. As far as sculpture or paintings are concerned it's almost impossible to get an exact copy, but copies of both have been made in many ways. Prints of paintings, and replicas, including full size to scale replicas of sculptures have been done.
Unfortunately, with music and movies, I believe DRM - digital restrictions mechanisms - are at least as much about control of the market as they are about keeping me from giving a copy of that Spears CD to a friend. And all the expenses associated with that need for control are not paid by the organizations that want the lock downs, it's paid by their customers.
I find it repellent that in the upcoming publisher's utopia that I won't be able to record even pay per view venues, such as sports, should they decide that they don't want me to. That if I purchase a piece of music in whatever format that I can't play it on whichever of my devices that I choose. That if I was an early adopter of HDTV that I won't be able to watch a vast quantity of HD content because my set doesn't have the appropriate (*$$#)*@ connector that encrypts the signal all the way to internals of the TV set itself.
I find it ironic that if I want a CLEAN, easily portable source for my entertainment, I have to break any number of laws to get it, instead of simply purchasing a DVD with no encryption on it. Everything I've mentioned was legal with fair use, but now with the DMCA it's the manufacturers and publishers that determine what devices and how many times I may listen to content that I've legally purchased. It's the publishers that are putting out broken, bug ridden - look at non redbook CDs that won't play in many CDPlayers - inferior products than the pirates are. The "content" industries are pushing some of their best customers to "piracy" and other illegal acts because, though the content they're releasing may be compelling, all the restrictions around the content, the trouble that it causes - like the Sony root kit fiasco, the price fixing that they were convicted of, is much less compelling than a clean version of their product one can download from the internet. If they'd simply release the products in an enencumberred format, and possibly reduce the price of the content - something they promissed they'd do a long time ago, then they may find that they have more loyal customers. The contempt that they breed when we see their unbridled greed and grab for power makes us much less guilty when we steal from the mouths of the billionaires.
So, I go the route not many people talk about. I don't purchase music or movies from the companies I don't agree with, and I don't pirate it either. I do without. I do find it a little unsettling that more people aren't willing to go this route. For better or worse, it's not our god given right to listen to whatever we want to, whenever we want to, weather we have the money to purchase the products or not. If enough people would do this, vocally, then maybe the media companies would cave in to consumer demand. The trick, of course, is to overcome personal greed, and to find some way to educate "joe average" about the slow eroding of his rights to do with the products he purchased as he wishes. And the media companies know that it has to be slow, so that we accept the next level of restrictions before tightening things down even further.
I'm not saying I'm a saint. Sometimes I do go out to the movies. I have downloaded content I don't own before, though not much, and I made a decision quite some time ago not to do it, but I think a little personal integrity can go a long way, if we're willing to excercise it. If the media companies really aren't putting out any content you wish to hear, if you really object to the restrictions they're requiring us to endure, then simply don't purchase from them. Or, worst case, purchase used.
MSFT earns revenue from DRM through licensing fees and royalties from Playsforsure device manufacturers and music stores. MSFT has also implemented the Protected Media Path within Vista which will disable or degrade the performance of hardware which does not implement features to enforce DRM protections.
The WMA DRM has the added benefit of a platform lock in for the windows OS.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
It's hard to tell, but he seems to be talking about the DRM that is built into many cell phones (to stop people sharing ringtones, downloaded video clips, etc.) rather than the GSM encryption protocol itself.
This only works because most cell phones are limited-capability devices tied to a particular service provider. Similar schemes can be used with set-top boxes, but not with PCs unless the PC's functionality is also drastically limited so that it becomes more like a phone than a computer. (The iPod is similarly limited, of course. But the DRM problem is with iTunes, and that still needs a computer.)
You would think after 30 years of companies trying to protect their products--be it software, music, movies--via digital encryption of one sort or another, they would realize they're just wasting money. Blu-ray and HD-DVD were "uncrackable", until they were released to the public. How much did Sony and Toshiba waste on developing those encryption technologies? 10 million USD? 50 million USD?
A universal DRM that everyone uses? Yeah, right. Companies won't go for it, it'll cost too much, and it'll be broken in about a month.
I say you want to copy something, copy it. If you get caught, you're breaking the law and you either go to jail or pay a hefty fine. Put a personalized watermark on it or something that's hard to remove, maybe baked into the video or encoded in the music stream and leave it at that. Let the law handle the rest.
worldwide or not ?
we do not care about different drm abilities or possibilities or easy adoption or whatever - we just DONT WANT DRM.
Read radical news here
Chillout seems to be meters and meters (in screen space) of specifications how one might represent various things that one might want to represent. That part of Chillout is complete overkill for what Apple wants.
What it doesn't do is specify (except for a reference to "users using smartcards") how to handle the problematic parts: How do I make sure that someone who isn't a legitimate user cannot pretend to be an existing legitimate user. How can I make sure that nobody can fake a permission to play music. How can I make sure that a device that is capable of playing music with the right permission doesn't make a copy of the music at exactly that point.
It looks to me as if Chillout is a complete overkill solution for five percent of the problem, and doesn't concern itself with the hard 95 percent.
It's the fcuking headphone jack. Cleartext digital audio outputs have been turned off for some restrictions-managed content since Windows Millennium Edition, and high-definition video outputs may be degraded to enhanced definition if they are not digital and encrypted, but this has never affected analog audio outputs to my knowledge. Please cite your sources.
Until recorders recognise the embedded signatures in content of course...But then you really get into constitutional issues. The opinion of the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft stated that without the possibility of fair use, copyright might not be compatible with the First Amendment's guarantee of free expression.
L. Chiariglione got my back up immediately when he defined DRM as "a means to manage rights with digital technologies." Well, no.
The most obnoxious thing about so-called DRM is that it allows content owners to manage any arbitrary restrictions. There is absolutely nothing about DRM to ensure that those restrictions are, in any way, aligned with rights the manager actually holds, and in practice DRM users invariably overreach.
A famous example was Adobe releasing an eBook version of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," which is well and truly in the public domain, with restrictions prohibiting its use with text-to-speech converters... and compounding the error by presenting this with unfortunate wording, which said, not that they were preventing the electronic conversion to speech, but that the user could not "read it aloud."
Adobe has insisted that it was all a mistake, as it may well have been, but nevertheless DRM allowed them to exercise "rights" they did not possess.
Now, since nothing about intellectual property is obvious, and most likely not even a lawyer knows what the law is until there is a court case, there probably is no way at all to implement a technology that actually manages "rights." In practice, DRM manages whatever the content vendor believes or wishes its rights were, not what those right may actually be.
In practice, content rights owners opinions of the extent of their own rights are, at the very least, expansive and optimistic. The RIAA believes, for example, that when I copied my collection of vinyl LP's to CD-Rs, and the moment when I threw away the LPs I lost my right to listen to those CR-R's. Without DRM, such beliefs are no more than a curiosity. With DRM, the content owner becomes judge and jury, and the DRM techology becomes the executioner.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Chiariglione lists various uses of DRM, but there is a difference between, say, using it to protect a GSM user's privacy and using it to lock a user into a particular player (or even OS, effectively) or to enforce sometimes stupid playback/copy rules. In the case of GSM, DRM serves the user, in the latter cases its benefits for the end user a very dubious. So citing the DRM-mediated uptake of GSM phones isn't very relevant. Also, the uptake of iPods is clearly based on NON-DRM files.
You're being obtuse and missing his larger and completely valid point. The company that manufactures a product and sells it gets paid one time for that product, and can only sell it at a price that is reasonable enough that people will buy it (unless they have various forms of monopoly, which are not that uncommon).
What music (and movie, book, and other "content") companies try to do is get paid over and over again for the same product they've sold me once. They're trying to "license" the use of their content to me rather than selling it to me and letting me use it as I like. The only reason they do this is because they think they can -- that is, they think that DRM technology gives them the ability to enforce these so-called "licenses".
What many people are pointing out in their comments are that 1) DRM doesn't actually work, so people can circumvent the dictates of the content companies, and that 2) DRM is both unfair [as it deprives people of their legitimate rights to use stuff they've bought] and therefore actually inhibits greater sales of content.
His point about people getting paid by the hour is that, when you work for a company and create a product, you don't keep getting paid every time a copy of that product is sold, or over the life of that product. You get paid one time for every increment of effort (measured in hours of labor) that you put into it.
Artists theoretically get paid for more than their time, and in fact (and, again, theoretically) can make many times more money for the "effort" (time) they put into creating it. Of course, they're ostensibly being paid for their creativity/imagination, but there's no way to really quantify that.
No one -- as you put it -- "deprive[s] the artists of their profits" faster, more thoroughly, or more ruthlessly than the record companies themselves. The uber-capitalist types always like to claim that copying content cheats artists, but it's actually the companies themselves that do that by signing them to exploitative contracts and paying them a pittance for the "products" (or creativity) that yield the companies themselves millions of dollars in profits.
Most content copiers would happily pay the artists a fair amount ( more than they get from the content companies) for their works, but the companies prevent that, just as retailers prevent people from paying a fair wage to the sweatshop workers who make the stuff we buy. It's the companies that interpose themselves between artists/workers and the consumers, and exploit both in order to reap obscene profits. As technology increasingly lets people buy directly from the content/product creators, the middlemen are scrambling desperately to preserve their exploitative hold on such transactions, as they can't amass fortunes on other people's labor if we are able to circumvent them.
You're all for "winners and losers" in a profit-driven system when it's the workers who get paid by the hour that are the losers, but when those same workers become the winners by circumventing monopolist DRM, and the losers are corporations and shareholders, then suddenly you're all up in arms. You're so worried about the poor companies and the poor shareholders (who contribute nothing to any of this) that you -- like the companies themselves -- are just invoking the artists' rights to the profits from their works as a subterfuge for corporate-capitalist boosterism. If you really cared about artists' profits, you'd slag off the companies that exploit them.
If you think our winners-and-losers system is so great (or inevitable or whatever), then you shouldn't care if the content companies lose. After all, the artists will still be here making their art -- as they were before the corporations took over (and even before copyright) -- and we will still want that art and be willing to pay them for it. It's the companies that are the problem, not the content copiers. The copiers are fighting the corporations, not the artists, and are resisting their own exploitation, not exploiting the artists, and certainly not the companies.
Look, I used to refer to myself as a "hacker". By that, I meant that I was really good at programming. That's what most people who used the word meant. Then people started talking about guys who broke into computers as "hackers" and pretty soon I had to give up using the word the way I was used to.
What Steve was talking about was content protection technologies - restricting the ability of the user through technical means. That's what people mean when they say DRM. Anything you have to say about Steve's letter that doesn't have
to do with that face of DRM is, well, it's got nothing to do with Steve's letter.
Yep, a DRM system that didn't restrict a user's abilities wouldn't get any pushback, Steve wouldn't be writing about it like this, it'd be great, but it also wouldn't exist. The only reason to statically encrypt a published document, song, or movie is to restrict the abilities of the person who buys it. Without region coding, there would be no CSS. Without the restrictions in iTunes music, there would be no Fairplay.
GSM is a red herring. GSM is a communications mechanism. It's not using a broadcast model, the call is point-to-point. Using encryption for authentication and privacy has nothing to do with anything the music industry wants out of DRM. Take out the restrictons on the end user, and there's no point to it.
I'm happy to *choose* to support artists. Hell, at least once I cracked a game and then paid for it--some small-time shareware game; I was having fun and didn't want to wait to be sent the code to keep playing. It was just some guy selling his work for a few dollars and I respected the work he'd put into it. I even emailed him my crack with an explanation of how I did it.
But as you can see, I'm no fan of "moral rights" to art, nor of copyright in general. Hell, I'm the type of person that releases my own work with only the stipulation that I *NOT* be given any credit for it! So I'm not going to put up with DRM. When it gets in my way, I will hack it in some way.
That said, I really prefer Free software, where I don't have to put up with that crap.
The main thing is that DRM is a pain in the ass. Instead of whining about it and cheering on various socialist asshole countries that try to hamper capitalism by forcing e.g. Apple to change their business model I just don't buy shit that's DRM'd unless I can crack it or do what I want with it. See how simple that is?
God this country (and the world) is getting more and more full of assholes with serious entitlement complexes.
Um, if you keep paying a manufacturer for the same product they produced and sold to you already, you haven't bought it, you have rented it. If I buy a laptop, car, or hamburger, I can do as I wish with it and never pay the manufacturer again. If they want me to pay them again, they have to make me a new one. If I go home and manufacture my own burger, no matter how similar to a Big Mac it might be, I do not feel that I have deprived anyone of a way of making a living.
In fact, I believe that most media companies are committing fraud as a standard part of their business. They keep "Selling" products to customers, and then after the sale, they claim that you did not buy the Music/Movie/TV show, but instead only paid a licensing fee to view it under specific conditions. As far as I understand the term fraud, knowingly entering into a financial transaction that you intend not to fulfill the terms of is it.
Heck, just last night, I saw an ad that specifically said "Buy an episode of Battlestar Galactica". Now, I highly doubt that they are actually selling the episode. I believe that what they are doing is trying to trick the public into thinking they are buying something, but will tell them later that they don't REALLY own it. They only 'licensed' the right to view it. If that is not fraud, I don't know what is.
I believe I have the right to listen to my copy of "Only Superstition" even if:
- A hardware problem forces me to reformat my hard drive and reinstall iTunes more than 5 times.
- I forget the password to my iTunes Music Store account.
- I don't have Internet access.
- The iTunes Music Store goes out of business.
None of this has anything to do with "theft", even in the loose sense of "violating Coldplay's copyright".You do not have to be in favor of theft to oppose DRM.
And encrypting the music that I've downloaded from the iTunes Music Store won't prevent theft in any case.
- The CD version of "Brothers and Sisters" is not encrypted.
- FM radio is not encrypted.
- The output of my stereo is not encrypted.
- The version Coldplay sells through eMusic is not encrypted.
That means that if anyone, anywhere in the world, has an internet account and access to any of these unprotected sources... they can start handing it out on the Internet just as easily as if they had cracked the encryption on the iTunes Music Store version.DRM does not prevent theft.
Now most people are quite content with that, but there seem to be some people who believe they have the right to then give that to anyone they want to, en mass! I don't think any reasonable person would think that was ok.
No, there are some people who believe that they should retain the ability to do that, because it's not possible to create a system that will prevent them from doing it without preventing them from doing many things that are far more important abnd entirely legal and desirable.
Not even the one you're proposing, not without:
- Preventing me from listening to my music if I lose my player.
- Preventing me from recording MY OWN music and giving it away.
- Preventing me from recording evidence of a crime and publishing it.
- Creating a police state in which it's illegal to write software without a license
And I'm not prepared to put up with that for Coldplay's sake, especially when they don't seem to care."We must hurry to create the prison cell we think is comfortable for fear that someone else will create a prison cell we don't."
This is a false dichotomy, as in both cases we end up prisoners.
Instead of "rushing" to create or accept a single form of Illegal Prior Restraint (often misspelled "DRM") we need to rush to prevent any such Illegal Prior Restraint.
A side effect of this Prior Restraint is that, when combined with the DMCA (in the U.S. and its puppet regimes), is that even as we speak "technologists" can create untested, arbitrary technologies which, at them moment of their initiation have the force of law. That is, if you read the law it basically says "anything created within [these bounds] immediately functions to create a new body of criminal estate, and in so doing may immediately and retroactively reclassify existing technologies and inventions as illegal."
Consider, I produce a tool that does stenographic analysis on images; this tool specifically analyzes an arbitrary image to identify the best ways that the picture _can_ _be_ used to store hidden information. (That is, it identifies the best places and means to encode information. e.g. it tells you that you _could_ fit 2kbits in the sky-part, while you could put 8kbits in the ocean part of a given image before the image is degraded enough to start showing visible signs of manipulation.) This application is completely legal. Then some guy produces an "effective content protection mechanism" that uses the "album cover" image as a Illegal Public Restraint key vector. When he does that, my existing program is "automagically" reclassified as a criminal-grade circumvention tool. It's legal magic!
So, again, here we are being encouraged in a race to the bottom, fueled by technologists who think that just because a thing can be done (half-assed-ly at best) it really ought to be done.
Just say NO to Illegal Prior Restraint and any technology that is being sold to you as a "kinder, gentler" IPR.
Whenever someone proposes something outlandish they are just hoping you will fight them back to "a reasonable compromise", which will seem "not so bad" but which if you mentally went back to before the whole debacle you would see for what it was. A Really Bad Idea.
Enough Already. The continuous questions of the "what if we make it shaped like a bird? What if we make it taste like pancakes?" form are just telling them how to focus their marketing while lulling you into a sense that there _simply_ _must_ be a configuration that you could live with. It's emotional manipulation. You begin to feel unreasonable because you don't want IPR "even if" thy go to the trouble to make it strawberry shortcake IPR with medical care attached lovingly by your grandmother.
You don't want it. You really don't. No matter how palatable they try to make it.
How bout this? I'll cut off your leg and use it to beat your children to death. But I'll give you ice cream... how about that?
IPR is just as self defeating.
The ONLY REASONABLE ANSWER is NO Illegal Prior Restraint.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
He also put his reply on Bluray. But the problem was not everyone had a Blueray drive, say they called muslix64 to crack the drm to drive the point home. DRM is bad!!!1
"In practice, DRM manages whatever the content vendor believes or wishes its rights were, not what those right may actually be."
This caused an interesting thought to pop into my head. What if we tweaked the law such that anyone protecting more rights than they have with DRM technology has all their copyrights convert to copyleft?
That might give them an incentive not to overreach.
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
If you can hear IT, see IT, IT can be duplicated. IT can be cracked. 1000 engineers work on a DRM "scheme", 100 million hackers crack it. DRM is a waste of money for the providers and a pain in the a$$ for law biding music/movie lovers. Itunes music can be copied, burn and rip, thats all, no protection.
I am shocked to see this statement so highly moderated ! You are obviously not qualified to comment on the GSM standard. GSM is riddled with flaws and makes use of particularly weak ciphers that are known to be so poorly designed that communications can be decrypted in a few seconds with a stantard PC.
~ Er, .. what exactly was so 'simple' about Leonardo's way to "skin the DRM cat"? While he supplies clear definitions of exisiting systems and issues, he still doesn't address how the issue can be *solved*.
And, in my opinion, the DRM of the GSM system is not quite the same apple as an MP3. Artists and Record Co.'s stand to lose if people distribute music freely. User experience cannot be closely monitored and people will complain if, for instance, they bought a perfectly encoded mp3 (m4a) from the iTunes Store but listened to it on a Zune or a Creative Zen player!
How often are customers complaining about GSM because their cellphone reception quality is bad? They'd either blame the network provider or the handset manufacturer not the underlying DRM/ software!!
A closer comparison, in this case perhaps, would be the 'Visa' / 'Mastercard' systems. (Note that sometimes customers still do have troubles when they shop at a store that only accepts one system).
So in the end the "innovativeness" or the extent of services offered and the friendliness is going to determine what DRM system will prevail and Apple does have a stronger culture for offering a much more friendly User Experience and technology.
Ultimately though, if DRM is totally done away with, as Jobs suggests, the iTunes/ iPod market will expand itself to accommodate those Users who want to shop on iTunes Store but use other mp3 players [than the iPod] and further to customers who want to own an iPod but not necessairly shop on iTunes Store. The user base of iPod/iTunes will remain fairly steady (because,let's face it, it IS a superior product/ service experience). None others, in the industry, have come close to offering such a clean experience.
Steve Jobs is probably right in suggesting that abolition of DRM should not affect the Records Companies adversely and that it may, in practice, stand to improve sales and customer satisfaction. In my [humble and not-so-business savvy] opinion though, it may only improve the sales only marginally but i do think it will be a positive trend for all.
~
preventing copyright theft
For the record, what they're trying to prevent isn't copyright "theft," it's copyright violations. There's a difference. If you copy a CD and give it to your friend, you didn't steal the copyright from the record label who produced the CD, you violated it; they still have their copyright.
It's the difference between trespassing (violating someone's right to enjoy/exploit their property) and swindling them into signing over the deed to their house (actually stealing their property).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Also, Chillout isn't the only open-source DRM project, Sun has (had?) their DReaM [wikipedia.org] initiative. But none of these attempts seem to be gaining any traction.
I think it's unfortunate that this whole discussion has gotten hung up on the same old issues, because I was really interested in hearing about "open source DRM" in general. I'm glad you brought it up (even if it's now 2/3rds of the way down the page!).
It seems to me, that such a thing can't possibly work. All currently extant DRM systems depend, fundamentally, on the difficulty of reverse-engineering and modifying binaries that are run on a user's system. If you had an open source, easily modifiable DRM system, it would be trivial to produce a cracked version of it that didn't actually enforce anything.
I can't think of ANY OSS projects that include DRM, and I don't think it's just a political/belief issue. A while ago I remember reading some (heated) mailing list theads about one of the big OSS PDF viewers. I think it might have been xpdf, but don't quote me on that. Anyway, the PDF spec includes some very rudimentary DRM -- basically, "no print" flags can be set on files, which then tells the viewer not to let the user print it. It's impossible to really enforce, since you could just do some screen scraping and get the raster anyway, but it's there. The author of the PDF viewer, for reasons I never quite understood, felt strongly that the program should respect this flag. Many other people disagreed. The program was built with the restriction, but almost instantly was forked to add an option to ignore the no-print flag.
I don't know what ended up out of that debate, and whether mainstream distros today use a PDF viewer that respects the no-print flag or not, but the point is that anyone who wanted to get rid of the no-print "feature" could do so trivially. If there was a big user demand to print "unprintable" PDFs, the software would be written, and it would be distributed, and that would be the end of it.
So I don't see how you could ever make an 'open source' DRM system, as long as there are a lot of talented programmers out there who would defang it as soon as they got their hands on the source code. So you'd either have to radically alter the definition of 'open source,' or you'd have to convince a lot of people that such a scheme was a Good Idea, to make it work.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
No, Leonardo, the DVD CSS system is *not* transparent to the user, especially if you are using a Free Software operating system. I agree that the region-coding is sucky, and several multi-region settop boxes exist, but you didn't go far enough: the DVD CSS scheme (and the DRM schemes on HD-DVD and on Blu-ray) are NOT transparent to all users out there.
Let's continue...
Well I did some digging on the 3gpp FAQ and I think I found some answers (although if someone wants to correct me or do some digging, I'd be very appreciative.So again, no, Leonardo. GSM is *not* an Open Specification that anyone can implement. It is encumbered with patents.
Continuing, we have:
Yes, I think that the "personal" music and video revolutions could have happened without the specific MP3 and MP4 standards. Having a standard enables people to share audio and video, true. But even if those standards weren't ones that were patent-encumbered (such as MP3 and MP4), the revolution would have taken place once the hardware (iPods, cell phones, digital cameras) were small enough and portable enough for people to take with them everywhere.
Actually, I think it would be easy: Let people license their files however they want, but don't encrypt, watermark, or otherwise f*ck with the contents of the files. That is to say, take the "restriction" out of DRM.
Leonardo Chiariglione sounds like a smart guy who is trying to work on creating international standards, and for that I applaud him. But I'd like him to go a bit farther and to make TRULY OPEN standards that anyone can implement, for any reason, on any hardware, without paying anything...that's what a standard should be -- not something locked down with encumbrances that prevent people from using it.
coding is life
Really Steve has explained in his article: I do not know why so many people can’t get it.
In the current PC architecture, the video and audio cards expect non-encrypted data. That means, in order to feed data to it, you have to decrypt the DRM'd data in main memory and transer them to the video/audio cards. That means, it has to be crackable, esp. when DRM is done in the user land. When done in the kernel, it will be more difficult, but still you may be able to get all the data on the hardware interface or by hacking the kernel.
That already implied two ways to ‘enhance’ DRM. You may choose to encrypt all the data going through the hardware interface, and you may choose to sign the kernel modules and use TPM to establish and chain of trust and verify the OS kernel. And you can do both. The second approach is quite difficult for general-purose OSs, but works fine for embedded systems (thus TiVo). The first approach is already used by Windows Vista.
So as far as we are not talking about special DRM hardware, there is no such thing as open DRM. DRM cannot be open, and that is very nature. At least before the days when standardized DRM hardware are dominant....
as it really is a much under-appreciated standard.
I have a tiny little SIM card.
I can shove it in practically any handset I want.
People can dial a number and talk to me, practically wherever I am on the planet.
Whilst you can bitch and moan about roaming charges and our fan-boy attachment to particular handset manufacturers, the just the basic idea of voice calls anywhere is amazing.
Telephony was a breakthrough - but on a global scale took decades to rollout - and even now most of the planet doesn't have a copper connection to their abode. GSM like most technologies hasn't just expanded onto a subset of what went before it - it's claimed it's own larger footprint.
Whilst I might have a warm feeling as my phone pops online at every airport I pass through, the image of a Maasai tribesman chatting on a Nokia handset in the middle of nowhere is quite simply amazing.
If you randomly selected two people of the face of the planet and tried to work out the easiest and fastest way to get them to communicate, GSM would definitely feature.
Just to come back ontopic, DRM is merely going to be a blip and it will go soon (for music at least). CDs aren't going anywhere. Whilst we have CDs, lossless 44.1kHz music will be available without DRM (both legally and illegally).
The simple truth is that digital DRM gives the customer nothing currently. CD is the same price, CD can be ripped onto anything, CD isn't going to break when you install Vista, CD isn't going to vanish when your HD crashes, CD doesn't restrict my next portable player choice, CD gives you better quality and if iTunes indulges your instant gratification button - then limewire, torrent, nntp etc can all do the same for less.
If DRM is to succeed, then it needs to give us something other than restrictions:
Better sound quality than CD
Streaming access on any client device I own
Time limited access to next album from somebody I've already bought
Basically there are unlimited options that could be given to me with 'digital music', but so far the best I've been offered is 'What you get from a CD + a load of restrictions'
DRM is bad, period.
It's the equivalent of a bible with a quarter slot. When the time runs out, the bible snaps closed.
(yeah, I saw it in an old Simpsons episode..what was it? oh yeah! "Homer gets a gun" Hey perhaps Gun Control advocates should change their bill to "Gun Rights Management". Eat your hearth out, Karl Rove.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Here's a summary of his argument:
"DRM IS NOT BAD ... if you redefine "DRM" to include stuff like Creative Commons licensing and xpdf's implementation of the PDF permissions system."
http://outcampaign.org/
One thing that should be a glaring point to be made to almost all Hollywood and RIAAA studios is this simple thought:
If preventing duplication of electonic content were so successful and could legitimately be enforced through technical means, it would be software development companies that would have the most successful and the most experience in trying to prevent the duplication.
I see the motion picture and recording industry going through the same cycles of trying to protect their content that software companies tried nearly 30 years ago: Scrambing the content, requring special "hardware" keys, messing around with the distribution media format and more.
If you look at a piece of software (distributed by somebody other than Microsoft), you will find that most software publishers gave up on the idea of trying to prevent software duplication decades ago. All it seems to accomplish except perhaps on the most exclusive and most expensive software packages is to piss off customers and push them onto their competitors.
I would say the jury is still out on Windows Vista and how successful it will be with the incredible DRM restrictions. I've heard recurring problems with Windows XP where people with legitimate "licenses" are suddenly discovering that Microsoft has crippled their operating system, forcing them to buy yet another license even though they were assured that they had a completely legal version of XP from the store where they bought the computer. And it even worked for many months until the warnings poped up.
In the long run, these attempts to control electronic duplication simply don't work. Instead, you have to put the duplcation of the software into your business model, and add services that would justify paying for the extra "seats" if you want to have people pay for each copy of the software/music/movies seperately.
For movies and music, ease of distribution and quality of content are something that can be offered to be superior to something you would pull off of a P2P network, and would therefore be something of value that people would be willing to pay for. Blatant copyright violations can and should be dealt with as well... if copyright is even a policy that is even valued at all for society.