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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.
Yeah, what's with all the opposing viewpoints lately? We come to Slashdot to turn off our brains, not to actually think.
comma
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.
God forbid we try to actually understand the various facets of the argument! Being a zealot is based on blind faith that your view is right!
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.
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.
Exactly right. If you have a view you better have no doubt, because once you doubt you could be wrong. Which makes your stance untenable. It's like back when God existed. He doubted the logic of his existence and *poof* he disappeared. Do you want to disappear? Then never doubt what you think. Ever.
42
Swi
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.
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.
Based on many past threads and discussions- you are making a bit of an overstatement.
Lots of people here are anti-drm / information wants to be free. In varies from the college student being as ethical as they can afford to be (buy a few CD's and then pirate the rest when they run out of money) to the folks who have absolutely no respect for copyright to people like me that have no respect for the extended copyright periods that I feel were bought by media companies (If it's over 28 years old, I'll pirate away unless i can get it for a *reasonable* price).
For example: I put down $200 smackers five seasons for get smart. On the other hand I ahoy'd some 1960-1966 comics in cdisplay format vs paying $50 for them in hardback format. I'll also download things so I can take them on a trip with me- for example I downloaded Moulin Rouge (which I own on DVD) because I wanted to take it with me and not risk losing my original.
I have a problem with DRM period. I think we have a temporary window where these products are grossly overpriced. I completely disagree that an "artist" should get paid for the rest of their life for a song when the rest of the world gets paid by the hour. The purpose of copyright is not to provide artists/ creators retirement but to encourage them to create works for the public. Given how many artists there are striving to create entertainment today- I really doubt they need any more encouragement.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Did anyone read the open letter to Steve Jobs over at the Inquirer?
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http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
Full Tilt
I'll second that.
If I can't buy a product without DRM, I'll download it from a torrent site, or I'll go without. If I crack the DRM to get a copy in a different format, I'll be a "criminal" anyway, so might as well go the path of least resistance.
Maybe not
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.
"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?
DRM already is in the users hands as is.
The IT guy publishing media on that windows server is a user too.
It goes both ways.
No, it's not "1984" yet. But the technology is now in place... for the first time in our history, there's no practical reason why it can't be tomorrow.
This is push-button book-burning technology, plain and simple, and it's being rammed down our throats.
Those who developed it should be executed.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Wrong. Many here are.
Wrong again. That's just a line used to sell DRM. Artists have been getting paid for ages before DRM existed. This FUD against copying and sharing is the same drivel that was pushed against people sharing cassettes, copying videotapes, or taping television/radio broadcasts.
There is no justification for DRM and your hypothetical well implemented DRM is not possible and therefore will never be created.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
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!
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.
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.
"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
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.
~
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/