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Jeremy Allison On Why DRM Will Never Work
eldavojohn writes "At the ZDNet site, Jeremy Allison (a well-known employee of the Google corporation) goes on a hilarious rant against Digital Rights Management. He compares the access restriction technology with underwear gnomes & Star Trek while ending with: 'Believing in a DRM business model is like joining Star Fleet security, putting on your red shirt, and volunteering to beam down to the new unexplored planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Someone will be coming back from that mission, it's just not likely to be the security guard. Always a true engineer, Scotty had the good sense to stay safely on board the ship.'"
When Scotty did go down to the planet in Wolf in the Fold (for strippers, as a good engineer should), he was accused of murder. Lesson learned!
I know this was full of of nerdy references, and bashing evil stuff(tm), but I still didn't find it funny..
So I will hand in my nerd license and resign.
I always felt this comment was a little rich coming from a series where spaceships travel using a magical warp drive, have inertial dampers that prevent acceleration and a device that allows them to teleport from one place to another.
The whole premise is based on changing the laws of physics.
The largest problem with DRM as I see it (except the impossibility issue) is that the paying customer gets worse service then the pirate.
Customer goes and pays $10 dollars for his album and notices the can't play it on any machine except the ones approved by the company that sold the album and he can't backup the album in case it breaks so he has to buy it all over again if it does.
The pirate on the other hand happily buys a cheap cd for $1, goes online and downloads the album, burns it to cd and now has a cd that can be played on any machine and be backupped easily.
The basic idea of successfully selling anything is to provide better service then you can get for free.
When it comes to music/movies/games bought online I propose that you let people download the items as many times they want at high speeds. This means that it will be alot faster/comfier then doing it illegally through the relatively slow pirate networks.
I'm currently enjoying this to a great extent with games I've bought through EA. After a format or whatever I just need to tell the EA downloader to download the game for me instead of me having to hunt down the bloody cd that is forgotten in some bookcase somewhere.
I think downloaded music/movies should do it similarly so I easily can move my collection between computers without any fuzz at all making all my movies/music basically immortal. Good service at a good price is better then pirating.
Easy answer: Attacker and receiver being the same person, and (and that's at least as important), one side of the deal, the receiver, does not want encryption to happen at all.
/., so I'll make it brief: Encryption relies on sender and receiver having the keys, so when the person receiving is also the one attacking, it's quite trivial to hack it.
The first part has been explained time and again at
But it all would not happen if the receiver at least had some kind of benefit from the encryption. If it's only that his neighbor can't "steal" his pay-tv, some would already welcome the "feature". But that's not even the case. I should be kinda thankful that the content industry has been selfish enough so far to make DRM a tool that only they benefit from, with no gain whatsoever for the receipient.
Hard to market something that gives you a decisive advantage over your business partner.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Time to go to work. Code all night. Building DRM, hey. We won't stop until we have DRM. Yum tum yummy tum tay!
Really, the answer as to why DRM (and such things) are doomed to failure lie in the hacker to security programmer ratio, which is probably something like 1000:1. Simple attrition overwhelms the code eventually. Not to discount either that some of the hackers are very good.
He compares the access restriction technology with underwear gnomes
Step 1 : Make an underpants gnomes reference
Step 2 : ???
Step 3 : Hilarity
You just got troll'd!
Why is it the editors never seem to notice what they're posting. I mean... just put in the summary that this is Jeremy Allison of the Samba team... not just Joe Blow Google Employee #3248 writing the article... sheesh.
Oh, never mind it was Zonk.
I always envisioned DRM as a technology that people will get used to. Make it ubiquitous, and people will take it for granted. That is why the RIAA and others are trying to introduce DRM concepts into early childhood classrooms, so that people grow up thinking that it is normal.
You must be new here :)
My Babylon
You can download a lot more TV shows without DRM than you can with. The biggest difference is that the distributors don't get paid if you download the ones without the DRM. Hopefully, iTunes Plus will start providing evidence soon that people are willing to pay for DRM-free content, just as the original store showed that they were willing to pay for digital content.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If it wasn't for money, you wouldn'tbe able to download TV shows.
DRM does nothing to prevent someone from copying the content.
This issue is about society and the rights of citizens, not about one person.
It has become very clear, that people will pay for content, even when that content can be had for free.
iTune has sold over 2.5Billion tracks, all of which can be found for free.
The people selling to the market ned to provide it convienantly, and at the price the MARKET is willing to pay, not what they want the market to pay.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know that in a few minutes, this response is going way to the bottom because your post will be "0, Flamebait", but you bring up a good point regardless. First of all, why criticize DRM and not the consumer practices that necessitate its use? Second, what counts as "working"? People seem to have a MASSIVE change in their definition of what it means to "work" when talking about DRM. Laws against murder "work" even though murder still happens. Windows still "works" even though it has numerous security holes. For DRM to "work", it's not necessary that it make piracy impossible, only that it reduce it to sufficiently low levels that the production of the work is still profitable.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
"First of all, why criticize DRM and not the consumer practices that necessitate its use?"
You mean the fact that media companies won't make their products easily available to the public to download at a reasonable price?
"For DRM to "work", it's not necessary that it make piracy impossible, only that it reduce it to sufficiently low levels that the production of the work is still profitable."
But it can't work, because only one person has to crack the DRM on a file and put it on the Net, and the rest of the world's population can download it. We're not living in the 70s when people had to borrow records and tapes from their friends and neighbors, you know.
The only way I can see in which DRM can possibly 'work' is by totally crippling all the computers on the planet. Some people might just consider general-purpose computers just a little teeny bit more important than record company profits.
Which would be a good point if all Mr. Allison was saying was "DRM is evil". However, that isn't his point. What he is saying is that it can't work, it's never going to work, and that trying build a business model (or an economy) found on DRM is a deeply irrational act.
The problem is that for DRM to work you have to hand the customer the encrypted data, the encryption algorithm and the encryption key. If you don't the DRMed work cannot be accessed. However, if you do, they have everything they need to circumvent the DRM.
But if the DRM has a fundamental logical flow, then the problem is DRM. That's the point.
A lot of people would agree with that. The two main approaches offered seem to be either move to a gift economy, or indoctrinate school kids to believe that copyright infringement is a Great Evil on a par with Rape, Murder, Genocide, and Britney Spears. Personally, I can see problems with both those strategies.
In the meantime, DRM still isn't going to work any time soon, and any exec who proposes spending serious money on it wants his arse kicking. Not for Being Evil, but for Being Stupid.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Kirk: Uhura, can you patch into their signal?
Uhura: I'm trying, sir, but they're using some sort of signal encryption...
Kirk: Mr. Spock, analysis.
Spock [leaning over viewer]: It appears to be a primitive form of encryption, Captain. It will only take me a few moments to break it.
Uhura: Sir, we're getting a signal from the alien ship.
Kirk: On audio, Lieutenant.
Voice: This is the RIAA vessel Enforcer ordering you to cease and desist your efforts to break our encryption. Our signals belong to us and you have not paid the appropriate fees to access them. Cease immediately or we will be forced to beam our lawyers aboard your ship!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
And if software engineers were true professionals with a professional code of ethics, they probably would. At the very least, it is their ethical responsibility to attempt to the very best of their ability to make management understand the futility of DRM.
...The personal accountability of consultants and technical experts is especially important because of the positions of unique trust inherent in their advisory roles. Consequently, they are accountable for seeing to it that known limitations of their work are fully disclosed, documented and explained."
For example, consider the ICCP code of ethics:
"2.5: Integrity: One will not knowingly lay claims to competence one does not demonstrably possess."
It seems to me that an engineer who, knowing that it is impossible to create a DRM system that does what it is supposed to do, nevertheless accepts an assignment to create one, is implicitly claiming competence he or she does not possess and is in violation of this point.
"2.7: Accountability:
"3.4: Statements: One shall not make false or exaggerated statements as to the state of affairs existing or expected regarding any aspect of information technology or the use of computers."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If digital ever becomes unbreakable (yeah right) then people will resort to analog recording.
You know that Google has an inordinate amount of pull on Slashdot when an article summary like this comes out:
"a Google employee goes on"
A "Google employee"? Really? He has a name... it's Jeremy Allison. You know, the same Jeremy Allison that was described as "The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame)" when he resigned from Novell.
Hell, he was still Jeremy Allison only a couple of months ago when he wrote an advice piece for young programmers.
Now? He's a Google employee.
Yeesh.
DRM is going to KILL legal downloads of commercial video. Talk to people who've purchased and downloaded movies on-line. Or read reviews of legal download services. Certainly, there are satisfied customers. But all too often you'll read or hear about people who've paid money, spent the time downloading the video, and it won't play. Or it won't transfer to the Ipod (or other portable device). Because of faulty DRM. Legal commercial video download services are just getting started and they can't afford to alienate the early adopters. But because of flawed DRM (redundant), that's exactly what's happening.
[Insert pithy quote here]
in the 1960s, a bunch of geeks invented a system to interconnect computing systems that could survive a nuclear strike. they did this by making it flexible and redundant
while not actually tested with a nuclear strike, their system has been tested by another form of damage: your DRM. we are happy to report that the Internet is still flexible and redundant. it has survived your DRM, and has successfully routed around the damage
please make note of your coming extinction. the internet as media distribution system is infinitely superior to your schemes, and is not yours to control. some of you apparently are not aware of this reality. you should try to be
the aztec and incan ruling classes were not happy at the arrival of new technology and unseen phenomena like the gun, the cannon, heavy metal swords, heavy metal shields, the horse, syphilis, and smallpox. the arrival was unplanned and overwhelming. but however unhappy they were at the arrival of such things, it did not change the fact that it spelled their quick and certain doom
so it is with you, dear media middlemen
all the best,
media consumers
xoxoxoxoxox
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Rights management can be made to work better than it does now. Not perfect, you understand. Just "improved". But only subject to a number of caveats. Let's assume I'm talking about a high-def film:
1. The medium on which the data is shipped to the customer must not be readable on any standardised hardware which is sold with an interface to plug into a PC. (See also: Sega Dreamcast GD-ROM).
- This immediately eliminates the percentage of the hacker world whose expertise doesn't stretch as far as "taking a hardware player to pieces and following paths".
- It implies that the design of the player is encumbered with so many patents that even if you did build such a drive, you'd have a hard time selling it in much of the world.
2. The device which plays the data has no output except for a built-in screen. Rationale: You can't trust anything you plug into the device. (See also: Portable travel DVD players).
- This prevents anyone from exploiting possible issues in any security which may be attached to output data.
- For best results, and to minimise the impact of the analogue hole, the screen should be sized such that lining up a camera is very difficult and even if you did it would be impossible to get very good results.
There's only one minor issue. I've just invented the Sony PSP, which we all know has been a runaway success as a media player and movie releases tend to hit the PSP first. </sarcasm>
>>It seems to me that an engineer who, knowing that it is impossible to create a DRM system that does what it is supposed to do, nevertheless accepts an assignment to create one, is implicitly claiming competence he or she does not possess and is in violation of this point.
All software can be hacked. All software has bugs. People just have an expectation that it performs at a certain level. Should everybody working on operating systems be deemed incompetent because there are still security issues?
After reading the article (which is akin to blasphemy here on /. ), he hits upon a real concern about DRM: The effort to turn the US into a risky "IP economy", relying on DRM to protect our interests while outsourcing actual manufacturing and labor to cheaper countries.
The Pollyanna dream that western countries will be able to sit on ivory towers as "idea centers" while trying to sell DRM'ed Intellectual Property to newly affluent laborers in sovereign China and India is extremely misguided. Especially when these places are used to cheaper (and often better/unhindered) knockoff copies of movies/music/games already.
{ - Generic Guy - }
First of all, why criticize DRM and not the consumer practices that necessitate its use?
... zip. Nada. No music. It was one of those dreaded CDs that don't play everywhere, because they don't conform with the standard.
Let me tell you a quick story about a friend of mine. It was the Summer of 01 or 02, and he bought a CD. Like he used to do. He didn't know much about the 'net and he didn't download songs, he went to his local store and bought CDs. Simply because he didn't want to deal with P2P, considered it a hassle and didn't even want to look into it. What for? He bought a CD every few months, who cared that they costed 20 bucks? He can afford that.
He slipped his brand new CD into his car-hifi and
To say the least, he was pissed. He came to me and asked me what to do. Now, I didn't have any idea how to copy the "protected" CD to a CDR so he could play it in his car, but I knew that there are services where he could download what he bought. Funny enough, that was legal here back then, he had the "right" to "own" that music by buying that CD.
So he went and installed some P2P software. Was surprised how easy it is and within a few hours he had his CD on the computer, burning it to a CDR that works in his car was trivial.
From then on, he started using P2P more often and buy CDs less often, if he only found one good song on the disc, which is pretty much common today.
Conclusio: DRM was what turned him into one of those pesky pirates. He didn't (and still doesn't) care about the 20 bucks such a CD would cost him. What he does care about, though, is that the content works the way HE wants it. He doesn't want to distribute it, or remix it, or anything else the content industry fears so much. He just wants to listen to it. He just wants it to "work" as intended. That's his primary goal when it comes to content, being able to use it the way it's meant to be used.
He didn't care about DRM until this moment when his CD didn't work anymore as expected. They don't want me to copy? Cool with me. Don't wanna copy anyway. But what he wants is to be able to use his content. Such is the vicious cycle. DRM is deemed necessary because of the consumer actions caused by DRM.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Maybe he just worded that wrong, but if you can derive the secret key like that, you're messing up. Maybe he meant that messages can be encrypted and sent with the public key, and decrypted with the secret key.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I invented something like that when I was 8 years old. It consisted of unscrewing the shell of a cassette, mounting a small piece of ceramic magnet somewhere downstream of the sound head and replacing the screws. The tape could be listened exactly once; on its journey to the take-up spool, it rubbed against the magnet, which realigned the magnetic fields of the ferric oxide molecules uniformly. When rewound, it was all quiet.
Unfortunately, there was one tiny flaw in this plan. And I sincerely hope I do not have to point out to anyone here what that flaw was.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Even if it worked flawlessly, you'd still be left with a copy that is inferior to what is available for free on the P2P networks. When people who pay for your product get less than people who do not, you're business plan is in some serious trouble... you are essentially hoping to sell people on some sort of convenience.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03E68F6599Q
And yet, that is exactly what is happening.
Eben Moglen said once that the wealth of nations in the 21st century will not be measured by how much steel they make or how well they make it, they will be measured by how much software they make and how well they make it. Presumably he was talking about software which had some purpose, not Quake.
How we know is more important than what we know.
His argument is not that there is no market for DRM protected content (that's another story). His argument is that DRM is not actually possible, and that trying to control a market using a technology that violates the laws of information theory is probably a bad idea.
I've been downloading DRM-free TV shows for a while now. And not paying anyone. I get them with HDTV quality, and at a speed of about 12MBits/second per show, all without tying up my internet connection. It's even legal, though the MPAA has been trying to change that.
Granted, there are disadvantages; rather than getting the show on demand, I have to wait until they schedule a "push". But generally the show is "pushed" before it is available through on-demand channels anyway, so that's not a big deal.
DRM is like Speeding Tickets. You can slow some people for awhile, but not forever. You can even get extra money out of them if they break the rules, but they'll view that as a small price to pay for doing what they want. You cause most good and safe people to slow down who could otherwise enjoy going faster and doing more.
But, in the end, everyone will see it for the profiteering racket that it really is.
libertarian: (n) socially liberal, financially conservative; neither left, nor right.
I watched a recent broadcast on C-SPAN of a House Science and Technology Committee meeting on P2P file sharing. I recall there was a recent Slashdot article on that same meeting (proof positive that few have ever watched C-SPAN, let alone that particular program) that I think is also relevant to DRM.
While I watched, two things struck me. First, that the committee members (some of whom sit on the all-powerful Judiciary Committee) invariably said, with a conviction typically reserved for occasions where one is required to place one's right hand on the bible, that they were very strong believers in intellectual property protection. The silence in the room seemed to suggest that the issue was a black and white one, somewhat akin to being against flag burning, or safe streets and neighbourhoods, or fighting terrorism, and the act of making such statements conferred patriotic bonus points on those who stood up to do so.
Second, despite the fact that all of the panel members (the IT heads of various universities) unanimously agreed (and went on at length to describe the reasons) that technological solutions could offer no guarantees of success, they were pressed upon by more than one committee member as to why they weren't placing a greater emphasis on technological solutions, given that it did offer at least some measure of success, even if it was temporary. After a series of "yes buts", the committee and the panel members agreed to agree that a coordinated technological/enforcement solution in conjunction with an education/policy-based approach was the ideal solution.
That last bit reminded me of what typically occurs in communities where crime is a problem and someone comes up with a New and Improved approach. The enforcement approach hasn't worked, but the police are asked to implement a crackdown. After enough heads are hit or enough people are arrested, the New and Improved solution is gradually put into effect and everyone feels good. It's worth remembering that people who vote typically vote for "law and order" candidates, and elected candidates who concentrate on law and order issues stay elected, irrespective of whether their actions have results, positive or otherwise. The scenario isn't unlike George Bush and his recent surge. The military approach hasn't worked, so the solution? More troops.
It would be satisfying if simplistic to state that DRM is a technological solution that's doomed to failure. You can be sure that the issue of DRM is discussed in boardrooms of media companies, in government, and in the board rooms of any technology company that has an interest in the matter. At those levels, the issue becomes a political one, and people are held accountable for what they do or don't do. Put another way, everyone needs to be seen doing something, even if that something has prior art in the form of a Dilbert cartoon.
So if DRM isn't working, the solution will ultimately be more DRM. Followed by a phased in New and Improved approach that, surprise, most likely won't involve DRM. In that regard, we can say that Steve Jobs may be the only smart guy in the room.
Very, very simply, here is the premise behind DRM.
1. I know a secret
2. I want to tell you the secret
3. I don't want you to tell anyone else the secret
4. I don't trust you
Perhaps you can see now why there's no solution to that scenario.
If I make a car and sell it to a dealership for $50k, and someone won't pay the $50k to the dealership for said car, that's not car theft, that's business.
If they dealership manages to sell the car for $40k after months of trying, that's still not car theft or thievery, that's business.
Car theft? Give me a break. It's simply a matter of the consumer demonstrating the product wasn't worth that price to them - no more, no less.
"DRM ensures that software is only used by people who are allowed to use it: Those who payed for it."
Can you name one piece of mainstream software which can only be used by those who paid for it?
"Instead, encourage DRM that works."
There is no DRM that works. The only kind of DRM that comes close to working is something like Steam, which provides real benefits to the users (e.g. download to any computer, auto-patching, easy purchasing)... and I believe that's been cracked for those who don't want to pay for their games.
Companies have been foisting DRM on us for decades, going back at least as far as the absolutely retarded 'copy protection' scams of the 1980s which required nonsense like sticking a prism over the TV screen to read some corrupted text. I'm not aware of a single DRM scam which hasn't been broken, and the 'toughest' have often been rapidly broken precisely because they were so freaking annoying to users who paid for the software.
Surely after trying and failing for decades, smart people would accept that the whole thing is stupid and move on?
Claiming that [DRM] can ever be made secure ... is like believing you can create a secure bank vault by drawing chalk lines on the pavement, piling the money inside and asking customers to "respect these boundaries".
That might work in Canada. How do you get a bunch of Canadians out of a swimming pool? "Excuse me, would everyone please get out of the pool?"
There will always be an analog hole. There are only two things they can do about that. One is to degrade the analog quality. But this also degrades the user experience. That ultimately can't work. They can certainly go as far as making sure no analog connections exist between the playback source and the display. But to see it, you have to have a display. And that's a hole right there. The other thing they can do is restrict the ability to capture from the analog hole. But this ends up crippling devices that inherintly have to be analog, such as a camera. Watermarks are their best bet, but these have to be very subtle to avoid destroying the user experience. And the more subtle they are, the harder it is to make technology that can detect it in a variety of cases, and fit into a cheap consumer digital video camera made in China.
The real cause of the problem is not that content comes to us digitally. That's actually an advantage for the content providers. It's the fact that once a copy has leaked into the pirate world, stripped of its DRM encumbrance, there is no further loss of quality as there once was when everything was in analog.
Back when everything was analog, people put up with horrible quality just to get a movie cheap, or see one before they were otherwise allowed to for some reason. The fact that even today people try to sneak cameras into theaters to copy a major motion picture shows just how low a quality a lot people are willing to accept. Sure, some people today want their pirated copy to be perfect original digital reproduction. But the mass level of piracy will be quite happy with just the one generation of analog lossage that we have today.
The focus on stopping piracy needs to be at the distribution, not at the original capture. It only takes one leak and it's all over the internet. DRM would have to be 100% perfect to make a dent in piracy. It simply cannot do that. It won't work.
What DRM will do, however, is stop casual copying. It can prevent someone from making a copy for a neighbor. Now the neighbor will have to go to the internet to get a "real pirate copy". It will also cause people to have to buy more copies than they wanted, to be able to play on a variety of devices, of the most intrusive of DRM comes into being. But that is what the content producers are really wanting in the end, which would drive up sales because of this deprivation of fair use. That is ultimately what DRM can work for, and is what the content producers want.
DRM will also cripple many ways people can even play or watch the content they legally buy (or would legally buy if they knew they could play it). The number of such people affected is still small, and may well remain small (e.g. die hard BSD/Linux users). Because these people are affected, some of them will (and most of the rest will support) find ways to crack the DRM directly. So basically, DRM itself creates motives to crack DRM even among those willing to pay for everything they have (e.g. are not tha freeloader minority). So DRM will always be under attack. And big corporations have continually shown they are unable to make perfect technology, especially that involving encryption.
DRM will fail. But the prospect is that it could take as much as 20 years for big corporate executives to realize this. They are slow learners (as the internet itself has shown on a massive scale).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This is what happens when technology moves faster than the wealthy and powerful move.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
The failure of DRM (and the content industry altogether) is that they didn't realize how the market works. You cannot force someone to buy. You can only encourage.
When I buy a TV set, I have additional value compared to a stolen one or one that "fell off a truck". When the TV fails, I can claim warranty. I can go to the dealer or to the manufacturer and trade my faulty product against a good one. With other "hardware", you get other benefits. Often you have access to various services (support, installation, in case of computerhardware drivers...) or other added goodies that you simply would not have when you steal it.
With content it is exactly reverse. The stolen content has a bigger "value" than one bought. The value of content is determined by its usefulness. And you can't argue that content is worth more when it is restricted to one medium, impossible to shift and bound to malfunction when used with certain display devices that the manufacturer of the content doesn't approve. It doesn't even have the same "value" as content that allows me to shift freely and display in any way I deem appropriate.
So stolen content is "worth more" than content bought.
And that's the big fallacy of the industry. Not only do people save money by stealing it (which would be the same for stolen "hardware"), they actually get content that is more valuable than when they went and bought it.
And here's the big problem. It's not that people wouldn't buy content, despite it being overpriced IMO. What makes them copyers is that copying increases content value. Not in terms of its price, but its usefulness is vastly increased by removing restrictions.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
First off ... or course DRM can work. You know it, I know it. You just need to start with the *hardware*, and make sure that people who buy a computer cannot gain access to OS internals without first having to hack the hardware. And that's no cakewalk. Just remember that it took the resources of an MIT computing lab to hack the hardware of the XBox (see this link http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/proj/anatak/xboxmod .html. Lesson learned: solder the BIOS chip on the motherboard for maximum security.}
That's called "trusted hardware". Really, does nobody remember Microsoft's Palladium scheme to make Windows work with "trusted hrdware"?
If the entertainment industry needed anyone to make the case that "trusted hardware" is really really necessary to protect their precious content, then this is it. What will your friendly neighbourhood lawmaker say when the RIAA / MPAA wave this rant under their noses and say:
"Told you so ... it's either mandatory Palladium and Trusted Hardware or we're dead. Now think of what that will mean in terms of your campaign contributions.
So here's the deal. We don't need you to actually outlaw non-compliant computer hardware, just to make "trusted hardware" and Microsoft's Palladium the standard for *all* Government applications. And make it mandatory for anything connected to the Internet that handles financial transactions, especially including anything that accesses Ebay or can order airline tickets on-line. That's all we ask.
The department of Home Security ought to like that, all banks and credit-card companies ought to like that, and we will bring out our content *only* for trusted hardware. We'll even throw in a 5-year price reduction on content for Trusted Computers. What's not to like eh?".
Crowing about how Joe Schmuck will be able to crack any DRM to illegally copy videos, songs or whatever is of a depth of stupidity that I never thought possible. Much as I respect Jeremy Allison for his work on Samba, there are some people in the Open Source software development that I would gladly do without. For example when they spout this sort of idiocy. Let him go back to writing code instead of trying his had at prose.
And doesn't he realise that with his rant he is indirectly positioning MS Windows as the *only* platform that the content industry can trust to protect it's content behind DRM?
Seriously ... doesn't he realise how close we have come {and the danger still isn't passed} of having "trusted hardware" shoved down our collective throats? Palladium anyone? Think that can't happen anymore??? Think again. Just look at Wikipedia and read up on trusted computing {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing}. It's not dead yet.
There's a book about this future - "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge. It's fiction.
You have no sense of history. Remember the "Clipper Chip" ? People were frightned of that
for the same reasons you list here, and now all phones must come with an embedded Clipper
chip. Oh wait.....
You want to live in fear and think you can hide from a scary future by not talking about it.
I refuse to live in fear.
If the only way Windows will win is by being legislated, then I'm happy to be on the losing side.
Jeremy.
It wasn't meant to be "funny", it was meant to be an entertaining read.
:-). When I submitted it to /. I didn't describe :-). I
/. - they never run my submissions :-) :-) :-).
That's not the same thing
it as a "Hilareous rant", as it wasn't funny and not a rant
described it as "musings on DRM and Star Trek".
But hey, this is
Jeremy.
Great rant, but a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of DRM, probably deliberately I might add, in order to highlight the fundamental misunderstandings of industry senior mgmt.
;^)
DRM is not implemented to end piracy, or prevent it. There is precious little that can stop that.
It is implemented to keep Joe Blow from handing out freebies to his Toms, Dicks and Harrys.
And that's all.
It keeps copying from being a *trivial* operation, and forces him to associate with absolute criminals if he wishes to get something for free. Most folks don't want to do that. Many don't make it past all the porn popups, in fact.
So DRM works, but should always be simple enough and unobtrusive. Anything more is a liability.
Trying to design a "watertight and unbreakable" DRM, of the kind discussed in this article, is the perfect way to end that balance and hoist content providers by their own petard. (c.f.: Starforce, Sony rootkit)
So that's the kind of thing engineers should be saying "no" to, for the sake of their own company's continued profitability.
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Toro