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The DRM Scorecard
An anonymous reader writes "InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe put together a scorecard which makes the obvious but interesting point that, when you list every major DRM technology implemented to "protect" music and video, they've all been cracked. This includes Apple's FairPlay, Microsoft's Windows Media DRM, the old-style Content Scrambling System (CSS) used on early DVDs and the new AACS for high-definition DVDs. And of course there was the Sony Rootkit disaster of 2005. Can anyone think of a DRM technology which hasn't been cracked, and of course this begs the obvious question: Why doesn't the industry just give up and go DRM-free?"
Just because the ability exists to crack it, doesn't mean that the average Joe on the street can do so.
It discourages casual copying, nothing more, but I can't imagine it was intended to do any more. Nobody's that stupid.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Frivolous lawsuits. Until the RIAA finally realizes that its lawsuit tactic isn't working it's the only attempt at DRM that hasn't been made completely useless yet. Unfortunately I don't see that happening unless/until they lose bigtime in multiple court cases.
I have this massive pile of digital rights that I really need to manage. Yet every fucking piece of management software I download has been hacked. There's not even any patches for this shit. How the fuck am I, as a concerned citizen, supposed to manage my rights?
I don't think DirecTV's DRM has been cracked since they replaced it a few years ago.
Is Blueray. That's going to last another decade.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Can anyone think of a DRM technology which hasn't been cracked, and of course this begs the obvious question:
Which of course, is that it's obvious that DRM is flawed because it is constantly cracked.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The best DRM is rot13.
No one has ever cracked that yet in nearly 25 years.
Once the RIAA finds out about that one, we're all doomed.
I don't use HDMI, so I may be wrong on some of the details, but doesn't HDMI have some sort of copy protection/encryption? Has that been cracked?
The same effect has been observed in software for years, Windows XP had an activation thing built in, anyone who knew what they were doing would bypass it, anyone who didn't (and didn't know anyone who did) would eventually go and buy superfluous copies of software they already owned.
Okay, let's try Alex Wolfe's argument in a different context:
"When you list every major law implemented to "protect" life and property, they've all been broken. Can anyone think of a law which hasn't been broken, and of course this begs the obvious question: Why doesn't society just give up and go law-free?"
DRM doesn't have to be perfect to do its job, anymore than law enforcement has to be "perfect". It just has to be effective enough to keep Joe Average from copying the file. Whether or not DRM is actually "good" or "bad" for media producers is a completely different argument, but Wolfe's sophomoric reasoning does nothing to address it.
we (geeks) can do it because we are prepared to go through the many steps to remove the DRM
the average joe needs a (free) really easy (integrated) app that strips the DRM, no command line stuff or blind them with options
and (in|un)stallers hell i bet they dont even know what DRM is other than the dialog in their player saying "sorry you dont have a license"
just a simple
no need for finding keys or running multiple apps to crack it just a press button and joe can play his file again
the easier it is to do something the more people will do it
Can anyone think of a DRM technology which hasn't been cracked?
Straight from TFA, "The one major online music DRM technology about which I couldn't find any definitive cracking information is Rhapsody DNA, used by the RealNetworks' subscription music service."
It might not be an overwhelmingly popular format, but its DRM is still effective.
A voting machine with a paper trail. I am saying this jokingly as a challenge to all the complain about media under DRM, and that are challenging all efforts to use electronic voting, insisting that the only reliable "DRM" is a paper trail.
Is that rally the only option? Any CS with a better "DRM" for a voting machine than a paper trail?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
but as far as this goes: "However, like true Brits, they're soldiering on and releasing it, possibly convinced that it's not much use worry about what those stupid Americans are up to with their software schemes, anyway." I think they got it pretty bang on.
The article says fairplay has been cracked, but the Hymn project haven't updated in a long time, and the old versions do not work with Apples current implementation of the DRM.
Of course some other project may exist, and I would be very happy to be proven wrong.
No one ever expected DRM to stop all copying. That was never it's purpose. The purpose of DRM was to curb copying, which it has done. Everyone realizes there will always be a way to get around DRM (or anything else really) if you really want to. But if you can implement DRM and stop 50% or 75% of copying, that is a big improvement. That is exactly what they did. They implemented a solution that will reduce copying by the average person, which means more money in their pockets since less people are copying CDs and giving them to friends (and no, I'm not claiming every person who copied a CD would go and buy it, but certainly some of them will).
DRM works under the same concept as locking your car. IF someone really wants in, they will get in. But it certainly cuts down on the casual person who will take an easy opportunity, but doesn't care enough to put in the effort to get around the measures you put in place.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Last I looked Cable HDTV DRM still hasn't been cracked which sucks if you want to use a myth box. You can only get an HDMI with HDCP signal out which I also don't think has been cracked. I really hope they do crack it so I can watch the HDTV that I pay for on my computer whenever I want. As a side note I once talked to my friend(who works for comcast) about driving a GNU/Linux driver for the CableCard. He told me it would be hard and was 100% sure we would be taken to court. The CableCard apparently looks to make sure the hardware using it is certified. Cracking that shouldn't be to hard but apparently the deal that at least comcast has with the content providers is that if there DRM is cracked they have 30days to fix it otherwise they have to recall all devices with the DRM capability and destroy them. Then they can issue new ones with newer DRM, otherwise they risk losing that content.
DRM is just "an electronic lock".
There's a well known saying "Locks secure you against honest people" (or words to that effect).
The hard-core/organized/professional criminals have the skills, technology and motivation to bypass these "security measures".
Remember people, locks aren't about making you secure, they're about making you FEEL secure.
s/locks/airport security screening procedures/
s/locks/the department of homeland security/ (well, that and political empire-building and creating a police-state by stealth)
Smokey The Bear Says: Only YOU can prevent the violation of your civil rights "in the interest of National Security".
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Exactly. I doubt anyone other than geeks know that there isn't a foolproof DRM method. However, upper management in these companies aren't geeks, and it doesn't help that the people who make the system market it as foolproof.
Even if the music/movie companies (or any other company) acknowledges internally that DRM isn't perfect, it still stops a large majority of customers from cracking it. Better yet (for the companies), consumers rebuy content when it isn't compatible with their new phones.
What's nice is that in this article they are actually using the term 'hacker' properly. After all, 'cracking' DRM is about having a problem or a goal (copying music/video files) and finding an ingenious solution to solve/achieve that problem/goal. Considering some of the crazy things that people have to do to break stronger and stronger DRM, 'hacking' is a very proper term.
from the little reading I have done, it seems as though getting free satelite television is impractical.
A mechanism that is difficult to crack (whether that is a physical lock or DRM or password) makes it harder for the cracker and reduces the likelihood of someone actually doing the cracking. That removes casual crackers from the equation.
It also makes the cracking act more deliberate and makes it far harder for someone to claim: "That diamond got in my pocket.... I just found it on the sidewalk and thought it had been thrown out." or "Oh that music on my MP2 player... I thought it was free!"
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I don't rember ever seeing DIVX ever being cracked. The fact that it failed in the market and you could get the exact same content off of a non-DIVX DVD aside, I don't know of a crack for it.
But everything that has been in use for a little while or on successful product? Yeah, it's cracked. The article doesn't even begin to mention all the software protection schemes that are no longer effective.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
TOR
Plausible deniability
Analogue hole
What we miss is a file sharing program that makes use of a TOR like network and stores the files in a plausibly deniable container by default (i.e no need to be a computer geek) so that everyone can use it. Such a program would essentially be a tactical nuke against the record label's business model. Some time ago I may have considered promoting this immoral, but after I had a night ruined by region codes ( my girlfriend* at the time had bought me a present while visiting the states ) I sort of want to see this bullshit fail as much as possible. Unfortunately I don't know shit about designing a decent network so I can't write the stuff myself, but if things continue the way they do it is only a question of time before somebody does it.
*Yes yes, I know I'm not supposed to have had a girlfriend and post to slashdot... If it helps maintain the stereotype I could disclose that I'm nocturnal, skinny and still living with my mother...
I think it's rather simple: buying music and videos legally online has become more convenient to me than either pirating it or stripping the DRM. I'm pretty sure that if I needed to remove the DRM I could, but why? It seems like a lot of hassle to get out of paying one or two dollars, and I get to support the artists that way, which makes me happy and less worried about my favorite shows getting canceled. Whether it's because people are unable to remove the DRM or simply don't care to, it's working because not everyone takes the time to do it. I buy stuff from the Apple Store, keep it on the two computers I own and put it on my iPod... there's really nothing else I need to do in order to enjoy it, so I don't feel restricted enough to bother stripping the DRM.
Perhaps this has already been mentioned, but the dongle systems that protect many Mac music applications and plugins seem to have held up so far, as in either iLok
or some of the Synchrosoft dongles. Logic Pro 7 is not really something that has been cracked yet either, to my (admitedly limited) knowledge.
From what I recall reading, when H2O did manage to [k] Nuendo, it took them so long that I think they said
they were not going to bother doing it more, as the process was just too annoyingly time-consuming.
Theoretically, these systems could probably be made to protect anything which is a software-based application. Not sure if this qualifies as DRM, rather than just some 'copy-protection'
technique but certainly it has helped ensure that many small developers of quality audio plug-ins survive because their creations cannot be cracked.
Z.
I don't remember DIVX (rental DVD DIVX disks from Circuit City) ever being cracked. Instead, everyone just avoided them and if failed as a product.
It's impossible for them to trust consumers not to rip them off if given unencumbered music - never mind that they've been doing so with every previous media up to an including the still ubiquitous CD without the ever-predicted imminent collapse of the commercial entertainment industry. I suppose the reason behind the reason is that since, as an industry, they live largely by appropriating the value of the work of others, they naturally expect everyone else in the world to behave likewise towards them.
Pathetic, no?
It's called Videocipher. "The Videocipher-RS system (RS for Renewable Security) is the Videocipher II Plus system with a slot in the back of the decoder module to where a card could be inserted to upgrade the security if the VCII Plus system were ever breached." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videocipher
As far as I can tell, the Videocipher-RS system has been on the air for years and hasn't been cracked.
There's only one copy protection system I know of that hasn't been (meaningfully) cracked, and that's MediaCipher, created by Motorola for the cable TV crowd. Ironically, it was one of the first ones ever created. (Of course, it helps that the boxes implementing MediaCipher are only rented -- never sold -- to end-users.)
Copy protection next showed up in a major way for computer games, most notably for the Apple ][ computer. This fetish briefly spread into applications software as well as games, until the users thundered, "No Fscking Way." It took about four to six years for this to shake out.
Despite the fact that there is no conclusive evidence that copy protection has any meaningful impact on sales, anti-copying measures are still used extensively, but by no means universally, throughout the games industry. In particular, Unreal Tournament's initial anti-copying measures are little more than perfunctory, and are later dropped entirely.
Near as I can determine, copy protection advocates claim as axiomatic that unsanctioned copying will depress sales to livlihood-threatening levels. They cleave to this axiom with a fervor usually associated with religious fundamentalists. However, every time this axiom is honestly examined, mitigating or even entirely contradictory evidence is discovered. Yet the myth persists.
It's not the technology we need to combat (since Turing proved it can never work). It's the defective thinking.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Was someone a little strapped for cash?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Unfortunately, the analogy doesn't quite hold. Breaking into bank vaults is more like performing a brute force attack on a DRM scheme, every time you wanted to break it. DRM schemes don't work like that. Typically once a scheme is compromised, it becomes possible for anyone subject to it to break it almost instantly. All it takes is for someone to write a quick tool that automates the cracking process and all the barriers presented by the DRM scheme pretty much fall away.
I'd say that DRM schemes are like having one giant bank vault. Yes, it will eventually get compromised, and once it is, everything inside is trivial to take.
Why do stores have security guards and cameras? Are there any stores theft proof? To limit theft. This is such a retarded argument. OK we steal music. But using this analogy to defend it is kinda retarded. Wasn't it reported yesterday that ITMS sold its one billionth song.
Last time I checked, you can strip the FairPlay DRM from iTunes music files pretty easily, but nobody has released a tool that does the same for video files purchased from iTunes.
So ya can't yet burn that episode of "Lost" you bought on iTunes to a DVD.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
That does not "beg the question" at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beg_the_question
Its a delay tactic until they can get all the laws on books that they've been working on.
Look at analog cable which, aside from some cheesy filters, has no DRM.
And, if I'm not mistaken, there are some pretty strong laws and penalties.
They're trying to ban any equipment that would allow you to copy anything that has a copyright.
And, unfortunately, it's the same technology used for material no copyright.
Let's start from the presumption that we're all guilty and go from there.
_____
Yeah, yeah... anonymous coward... blah, blah, blah...
I'm just tired of registering and keeping track of every f*cking forum that I want to post to.
The natural length of content protection should be as long as the DRM lasts. As soon as it gets cracked, the content is under the public domain. Simple as that.
it's hard to copy this.
What annoys me is that while current versions of QTFairUse strip the DRM off audio files just fine, nobody as of yet has put out a simple tool to strip off FairPlay from Apple's video files. If it's the same DRM scheme you'd think they'd just extend FairUse to do video files as well, but they've just not done that. I guess there must be some issue with the exploit they use that precludes using that hole for video as well I suppose...
It's been what, 2+ years since Apple started selling videos and still no crack?
one definition of insane is doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting different results.
The original DivX has not been cracked.
Although a rather unusual case when it comes to the world-wide status of DRM, the BBC has a reason for implementing DRM.
As one of the few British channels to make their content available online they have fine line to cross. The commerical channels funded by advertising offer a week or so's worth of TV to download for free with popular shows having a minimal fee (£0.99 to rent or £1.99 to purchase). This is all well and good, but the BBC cannot operate under this model. Either they release their content for free or don't release it at all to the British public.
There are few paths the BBC can take. At the moment for their online streaming media they use Geo-Targeting and attempt to restrict access to the UK public (although this can result in false negatives/positives) but provide the content itself for free. If they make it available to all for free they are breaking several points of their Royal Charter. They can either show the British public the shows for free and without advertising or broadcast it to foreigners with either a charge or adverts, but they cannot show it to the UK audience with adverts or a charge. This is where the problem lies.
The BBC's iPlayer has recently come under fire for being Windows only and DRM-riddled, but what can they do? They can either implement some form of UK-based DRM or not attempt to show programmes online at all. The BBC often doesn't own the content the broadcast in full and therefore aren't able to make their content available without caveats, and many of the companies they produce media in conjunction with require this. Coupled with their charter they are stuck with no online media at all or some form of DRM inbetween. I'd prefer the DRM version then to wait for some form of non-DRM equivalent to be implemented!
The industry isn't trying to make uncrackable DRM. They're trying to make DRM that's just annoying enough so that the majority of users don't go to the trouble. Expert users will always crack whatever they put out. That wouldn't be a problem except for the ease of distribution BitTorrent affords and other P2P services afford. The same principle applies w/ the RIAA lawsuits. They're not trying to sue everyone who pirates music. They're just trying to get enough publicity so that people start thinking, "Gee, if I download that song then there's a chance, however remote, that the RIAA is going to sue me. Even if the law is on my side and I win, that would be a colossal hassle. Maybe I'll just buy it instead."
I've never heard of an MMORPG that was cracked to that you could play for free (on an official server) or even play without purchasing the client software.
My idea of a cracked DRM is one that allows you to use the product exactly is if the DRM was not included. I think starforce which is used for gaming was never fully cracked. At least not the latest version. I remember seeing a crack for a game (I forgot its name, go figure) which used starforce that required you to physically unplug your dvd drive from the motherboard in order to work... Starforce was such a violent protection that even the game companies themselves decided to ditch it. It would do havoc to your machine and I even heard several cases were a DVD drive was rendered useless because of it.
As someone has already mentioned, no DRM is uncrackable but some of them require a lot of work. The DRM's of popular products will always be cracked because of the demand but there are many people who use niche products that are usually not worth the effort for the skilled crackers. These will just have to take the pill and suffer quietly.
To read my post please enter the first word from pages 6, 27, and 32 from the manual.
Digital content is as plentiful as water. In my neighborhood, the tapwater is excellent. It tastes fine, and is purified to the highest standards. If that isn't good enough, I can filter it even more. The best part is that it's virtually free, and delivery requires no effort on my part beyond turning a faucet handle. Nonetheless, there is a thriving business for bottled water, with water trucks making daily deliveries. Everyone I know buys bottled water at comparitively outrageous prices. Some of that water is pumped directly from springs, but a good portion of it is simply another municipality's tap water. Strangely enough, there is also water that is bottled halfway around the world, then transported over the ocean (more water) and sold at astronomically high prices in area stores. Are you ready to be stunned? In my neighborhood, water actually falls out of the sky. I'm not kidding! We call it rain. It's entirely free for the taking, but that doesn't stop anyone from buying water.
Digital content is pouring down on us like rain. I'm sorry, but I don't have the time to determine if I have the right to enjoy it or not. Frankly, I'm having a hard time filtering all the content being streamed at me at any given time in favor of a single stream I'd actually enjoy (or even silence, for that matter). I can guarantee one thing, though, and that's that if people will buy ordinary water in designer bottles at outrageous prices when it's available for free, they'll do the same for DRM-free digital content.
As someone who might have...had friends...who spent time in the 80's attempting to circumvent copy protection on Apple II software, I've always wondered why companies have even bothered in the first place. Back in the 80's there were many companies utilizing all kinds of crazy software techniques to keep the pirates from copying software. As far as I know, there wasn't any software on the Apple II that didn't get cracked. Heck, I even see some of the stuff my friends cracked still imaged on the internet in places.
Now its over 20 years later, and companies are still trying to find a way to stop copying. And to top it off, they're still spending big bucks to stop copying media, where any device with an output is a potential way to digitize the media. As we've seen, there are people out there who will take the time and effort to circumvent and digitize *ANYTHING*. Have you seen some of the crap on Usenet lately? I can't believe someone bought it, let alone took the hours to digitize and upload some of that crap.
I noticed some of this arguments on this thread that DRM wasn't meant to stop everyone, just the common guy. However, that argument falls far short when we have a generation of kids who are raised on computers and have no money. As a teen, I spent a lot of time copying albums and CD's and tapes onto tape. As an adult, I now realize that, if I had had the money, most of it I would have bought. These days, I don't bother to steal things because I don't have time to sift through Usenet or BitTorrent for crap, and because I can afford them. I also buy the music I like, the games I want to play, the books I like. I do this for a simple reason: I want to hear the artisans (of any type) make more music. Like the system or not, I buy CD's and books and software because without that money, the people making those things can't do it without the support of my money. I'm voting with my dollars, so to speak.
I'm also surpised that no one has made a fuss about sneakernets. I've heard of far too many people who have burned CD's for their friends and family. Seems to me, this was extremely common at one point, although probably less so in the IPod generation of today.
I'll bet money that any protection scheme will fail. Never underestimate collective human ingenuity, even as we bash the collective stupidity that has brought us infinite copyright and lawsuits over downloaded music against people without computers.
Bill
NDS VideoGuard sattelite and cable TV encryption
Super Audio CD copy protection
DVD Audio copy protection
Starforce copy protection for games (actually I don't know how far the latest work goes in cracking it)
Some seem to miss the point. It's not about creating unbreakable DRM which will serve RIAA/MPAA faultlessly till the sun goes nova. It's about throwing enough obstacles at the casual copier and as much as they can at the professional pirate to keep them at bay for the next few years, till the next great media format and DRM tech come along.
The purpose of DRM isn't to keep dishonest people from copying music.
The purpose of DRM is to force honest people to repurchase music every time the format changes.
Once you understand that, the obsession with DRM makes more sense.
The cake is a pie
I guess one "advantage" of DRM (from the industry's POV) is that it places legality in the forefront of the consumer's mind. That nagging thought that perhaps piracy is *shock*horror* illegit.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Earlier versions were cracked (some requiring you to physically unplug all your IDE optical drives), but recent versions seem to be fairly tough. According to the wiki, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (the best in the series, by the way) resisted cracking efforts for well over a year. Some StarForce games have never been cracked, and some that have are unstable. Of course StarForce is incredibly intrusive and as a result (of potential boycotts and even lawsuits) some of the studios have moved away from it.
No one has even come close.
Egyptian hieroglyphic were only solved after the Rosetta stone was found.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
The answer to the question is the same for "Why are drugs illegal?"
Vote Libertarian
Fundamentally, you're spot on. It is a hell of a lot worse than bank vault security. You can't have the party it's secured against also the one it decrypts for. It just makes no sense! All DRM is crackable by definition, they know this, they just want to make it as much of a hassle as possible.
No, it's flawed because it CAN be cracked easily: The decrypting key is in the firmware contained in your DVD player.
In cryptography, we have an explanation using Alice and Bob. Alice is communicating with Bob, while Eve (eavesdropper) tries to decrypt the message. Alice and Bob have the key to decipher the message, but Eve doesn't. She wants to decrypt the communication *without* the key.
A --- E --- B
Alice in this case, is the Digital Media producer (or encrypter), and B is your DVD. You're Eve. The problem with DRM is that Eve *HAS* the key. By cracking the DVD software (some disassembly, debugging and you're done), Eve can obtain the key from Bob.
A --------- B E
This is the problem with DRM. It's flawed by design. The DMCA is a legal "patch" to this algorithm, punishing Eve if she gets the key from Bob. The problem with DMCA is that the punishment doesn't apply to all countries, and trying to enforce it results in attacking freedom of speech.
a bank vault on the other hand, has more then just a lock keeping you out.... that's one of the WROSE anaolgies i've ever heard.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It only serves to keep out the innocent. If anyone knows the trick to opening a Master lock, it's ridiculously easy...yet those with morals will think twice about cracking it to take something inside.
What about sacd? I thought this hasn't been cracked ?
Most games have been cracked, within days actually. There's a grand total of two games yet to be cracked.
I don't think anyones cracked 'Open Magic Gate', Sony's ATRAC3 DRM scheme/D&D spell. Please, feel free to correct me, with detailed descriptions and links if you don't mind.
There isn't a door lock that can't be cracked by the most humble of clerks working at Home Depot, but that hasn't stopped the door lock industry. Next time you walk into the office, look up and imagine how many offices could be entered by simply removing a set of $2.00 ceiling tiles that stand in the way.
The fact is, humans need these reminders. They give people who know what is right permission to do the right thing.
The more you scare people.....the more they will pay.
"this begs the obvious question: Why doesn't the industry just give up and go DRM-free?"
The entire entertainment industry is so consumed with greed that they are no longer able to think clearly. The failure of DRM is so painfully obvious, but the MPAA, RIAA, BSA, etc. are so blinded by greed that they can't see it. To them, the failure of DRM is proof that they need bigger badder DRM along with bigger badder laws to punish people. This is what greed does to you.
The secret to success is simple: make a good product and sell it at a fair price. But when you are bkinded by greed and convinced that you're losing billions of dollars to "piracy", you think that the secret to success is to control your precious "intellectual property" with the most draconian iron-fisted methods possible.
Until he gets caught.
Joe Average leaves a trail. Joe Average isn't judgment proof. Joe Average doesn't get free legal help. He doesn't become the next poster child for the EFF.
Joe is the guy who settles out of court, structures his new debts and begins writing checks.
You will excuse me, I trust, if I part company with the geek who lays traps for the unwary - and is vain enough to think that he is doing them a service.
Ed Felten took a whack at this question a while back that stuck with me in the context of HDCP DRM.
...
First: Why is the weak system worth spending 10,000 gates for? The answer doesn't lie in platitudes about speedbumps or raising the bar -- any technical bumps or bars will be obliterated when the master secrets are published.
So temporary piracy prevention doesn't seem like a good explanation.
A much more plausible answer is that HDCP encryption exists only as a hook on which to hang lawsuits. For example, if somebody makes unlicensed displays or format converters, copyright owners could try to sue them under the DMCA for circumventing the encryption."
Because if there's anything a tech mogul hates worse than his own customers, it's his competition.
DRM in a Nutshell:
An encryption system is a way to deliver information securely, even through the hands of the thieves.
A DRM system is a way to cut out the middleman, and deliver information securely into the hands of thieves directly.
See the problem?
Confusing the thief for the customer is why DRM can never work.
Confusing the customer for the thief is why DRM can never sell.
It's absolutely bizarre--it keeps getting broken, but they keep trying it. Why bother with the time, energy, and expense? If I ran a bank, and my safes kept getting cracked, I'd probably stop bothering with them and start thinking about other solutions.
If DRM keeps getting cracked, or winds up being a bigger security threat than the piracy to begin with, then clearly DRM as a system is a failure. Time to think of something else, fellas.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
Laws of Thermodynamics have not yet been broken.
Actually its good point.
We have for a long time been breaking laws of Nature with cool experiments and thus improving our understanding of science. Escalation and evolution of DRM seems as natural as our efforts to attack it. Our species has risen to a new level of evolution.
Can anyone think of a DRM technology which hasn't been cracked?
SACDs - Super Audio CD's - the BLU-RAY to DVD-Audio's HD-DVD.
DVIX - the original dvd-lite, not the codec.
Analog Hole doesn't count as a "crack" since it is not bit perfect, unlike the cracks of CCS, AACS, CPPM, 5C, Fairplay, WM-DRM, etc.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Has DRM'ed WMA files been broken yet? I got a song for free, and I have been unable to find any tools to crack it. I had to use TuneBite to record it from WMA to MP3 via analog (loses quality) in Windows. Also, none of my Linux media players can play DRM'ed WMA files. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
>> Why doesn't the industry just give up and go DRM-free?"
Because the only mindset the labels have ever had is to maintain a vice-like monopoly over distribution channels. They've been doing it for so long they can't think any differently. Anyway they're middle-men. They add no value to the product itself so can only justify their large cut of the profits by bullying.
In a bizarre coincidence, the industry will go DRM-free right about the same time people learn what "begs the question" actually means.
The issue DRM is trying to solve is really a "social problem", in that the geek has to have a reason for wanting to 'share' what he has hacked. Yea, they want to show off and that is the 'proof', but sharing IS the problem. The hacker mind set is somewhat like the 'gunslinger syndrome' in that they feel challenged by the RIAA/MPAA and their seemingly feeble tactics that the hacker then feels justified, even obligated, to share. Crackers always think they need to prove they are smarter so they take the challenge and show proof of their success. The want to share, just for the prestige of being 'the one' I personally hack what I need to, when I need to, but only to get around my own fair use issues, and I would never share the content, ever. Not all hackers are dishonest. Some of us actually work for a living and understand what it is like on the other side of the fence.
If you can read it, to play it, the game is already over.
Why don't 7-11's just assume they'll be robbed and put the money on the front doorstep? I have to believe that 100% functional DRM is possible if you alter your expectation of the "rights" you wish to "manage." That said, even a simple system is effective against wholesale infringement. Apple Fairplay may be cracked, but it still prevents everybody and their brother from assuming that it's legal to make unlimited copies and pass them around. (and and no matter what the typical slashdot poster thinks, it's NOT legal)
I'm sure we've all heard of write-protecting disks, but what about READ-protecting. It's perfect! If there's nothing to crack then no one can crack it! [grabs a few grand out of Ajax Can Safe and runs to patent office pantsless]
Bad analogy. You see, digital media can be copied for zero cost. Physical objects cannot. Therefore, as long as one person cracks the DRM, then essentially everyone has because that one person can the redistribute the DRM-free media for free. In fact, its even worse than that because not only can that one person distribute, but every person that the first person gives it to can also redistribute, and so on and so forth.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Seriously. Sick of hearing about how "hard" it is for average users to do things. Maybe you work in technical support and get all the idiots calling you but the vast majority of people really don't have any trouble using programs like DVDShrink or Roxio.
How we know is more important than what we know.
QTFairUse removes FairPlay DRM no problem.
I dont like the analogy of a bank vault at all. Its not like people are breaking into a video store and stealing videos. These are usually people who have lawfully purchased a video and want to use it for their own private purposes but this has been restricted by DRM. DRM circumvention is often an attempt for a consumer to simply use something they legally purchased for their own private use, such as making back up copies or playing it on their computer, or copying to their ipod. I dont see any problem with that unless they are distributing it to others, Once a person has legally obtained some work, it should be theirs to do as they please with it for their own private use.
We already have copyrights to protect the producers of works. DRM is going too far as it restricts the users rights to use something for their own private use, for which they have legally purchased.
and I don't thinnk ANYBODY has the balls to open their fucking eyes.
The various **AAs will cling onto their methods because that's all their capable of thinking up.
I seriously doubt that they'll come up with a single original thought on their own. (They have done so in over a hundred years.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
dongle systems suck... seen many time were they fail at critical times
Place I work for part time got bitten by this on a location recording site Nuendo decided to say it was not a valid dongle.
lucky he had a hdr24 as a back up system to transfer the recordings from when he got Nuendo working again.
I avoid all programs that have a dongle the package I use does not have and works great for me.
I can also use it on two machines provided i own both.
The program is Traction
doesn't matter what anyone says, neither my mom or my dad, nor my three sisters, nor any of my cousins know how to use any tool to remove drm. and i doubt they ever will. most of my cousins and sisters can handle the likes of limewire though.
1) It only takes ONE person to "crack" and copy music, a movie, etc. and make it available to all the average Joes.
"Available" is a relative term.
For your average iPod-buying Joe, it's easier to find a desirable song by buying a CD on the way home or to search and download it from the iTunes Store, than it is to find a reliable and spyware-free Gnutella client, search for the song, eliminate all the junk matches, find one that's good quality, and download it.
I like using the iTunes Store to download singles because it's MUCH more reliable and usable than browsing for free MP3s, as long as the iTunes Store actually carries said singles. It's also much, much faster at downloading movies.
For the non-geek, legal DRMed media files are generally easier to find, easier to download, faster to play, and usually have their metadata tagged properly too. The only downsides are that you can't give it away to your friends and it costs more. But like Linux, cracked multimedia files are only free if your time is worth nothing.
The big companies know that trying to protect their content is extremely difficult to impossible. They have several significant factors to deal with including not stepping on the user's rights (Sony rootkit anyone?), compatibility across a wide market of hardware with limited to no ability to change (I'm thinking CSS and now AACS), and allowing physical control of the medium (people believe that if they can hold it, they own it, and can do what they want with it).
As I see it the point of encryption isn't really protect the content against everyone, just the average joe. A DRM system isn't really useless until the easy to use tools are available to defeat it. There will always be an elite group out to break the encryption and given enough time and access to an unchanging medium, they will succeed every time. So if this small group is able to constantly rip content and share it, they will never be any match for the millions who can do the same with a one click wizard. In addition, sharing of some content is slowing down due to the immense size of data (Are you really willing to wait 2 months for an HD-DVD iso?).
I'm just waiting for the day that content companies start to A. Start taking advantage of the p2p bandwagon and adapt or B. Stop selling content, and start leasing it instead. Of course option B is broken too until we trust the magic black box beaming the content directly into our brains, due to analog recoding.
Ok, maybe this isn't really "mainstream" but what about all the movie releases to theaters that are being done digitally? You would think that a lot of pirates would love to get the STUDIO QUALITY MASTERS that are being distributed to theaters digitally. It would be trivial to make super-high quality DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray, 5.1 audio from this material. Also you'd get the built in XML formatted sub-titling. First run movies are being sent repeatedly to movie theaters in places like China and Thailand (a place in Bangkok was called the "world center of software piracy" by the NYTimes).
Still, I haven't heard of a single incidence of any one doing this. Is it because no one tried? Couldn't get access to the digital files on the server? (although that doesn't seem to stop people from getting film prints from projection booths). Are they afraid of the watermarking? Or couldn't crack the triple DES (per frame?!) encryption with a secure link to the projector?
Good show, sir. You've made my day.
blog & fiction: jd87
It is all about enforcing a monopolistic distribution channel, a walled garden. They are trying to get all of the pie, not just a chunk. I went into more detail here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29161
-Charlie
Chuck Noris listens to Britney Spears on his MP5 all day long.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Every DVD player included in any Linux distribution decrypts CSS (unlicensed, i.e. cracks it) transparently, on the fly. The only thing you as the user see of that is the commandline notice "this might take a little while".
VLC and some other players on OSX and windos do the same.
Joe Blow decrypts CSS all the time, he just doesn't notice.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
mp2 would be more advanced than mp1 Layer 3 (commonly called mp3)
> Even given the proper tools, it's a major pain in the arse for Joe Blow to decrypt CSS for example.
There are any number of ripper programs you can buy for $20 that do it literally in one click. DVD decryptor is another one that's easy to find, and it's free. On Linux, you just mount it, and Slysoft makes an app that makes that happen (decrypt on mount) on Windows too (works on AACS too, though that won't necessarily work forever)
You're missing the point. That whole post was about the misuse of the phrase "begging the question".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"Why doesn't the industry just give up and go DRM-free?"
Well if failure is your metric? Then why continue to write and debug code knowing it will never be error free? Why continue computer security measures? Knowing eventually all will be broken?
Maybe the question isn't "why should the industry go DRM-free"? But "why is everyone so set on breaking it"?
I have my theories but none of them are particularly flattering to humanity.
For the same reason FOSSies keep making the GPL more and more insanely restrictive to commercial developers: protectionism.
DRM users fear losing control of their music/movies/whatever, even to the point of unreasonable and unrealistic infringements on fair use. If someone wants to steal a song, they are going to do it. What's to stop someone from connecting a digital recorder to their speaker output? No DRM is going to circumvent that basic, electronic method. The same thing can be done with a DVD: once you have physical possession of the media (or file, in the case of digital purchases), there's absolutely no way to stop it from being copied... with or without DRM.
The same applies to the GPL. It's fricken FREE, it's OPEN SOURCE. Any "control" over the code is an illusion. How are you going to stop a company or something from throwing your code into their application? You aren't, you can't. If it's free... LET IT GO.
As it stands now, small companies can't make money off FOSS, so that means big companies like Sun and IBM are making the lion's share of money to be made on FOSS... and the greatest thing for them is- they aren't paying a freakin' DIME for any of it.
And then, of course, there is the way Lunix and FOSSies are being cleverly positioned by the Apple monopoly in order to try helping them weaken Microsoft. They are both failing terribly, of course, but it's not for lack of trying.
Moral of the story: let it go, and focus on doing what you do. With music, just make music: people aren't buying the CD for the music, they are primarily buying the artwork. If they just want the music, they could have just purchased it from iTunes or something (and skipped the shitty songs).
FOSSies, if working for free is your thing, just write your code and give it away. Stop trying to hold on to it: all it's going to do is stress you out and ultimately piss you off. Just because you can't figure out how to profit from your work doesn't mean everyone else should be prevented from doing so.
Locks. .....and the list goes on.....
Multi-tumbler locks.
Multi-tumbler, multi-barrel locks.
Circular-type locks.
Locks with electronic chips in the keys.
Remote-controlled locks.
Card-swipe locks.
SMART Card locks.
Security locks.
Key codes
Validation codes
PGP
DRM
WEP
Digital Watermarks
Digital Licensing
Digital Certificates
Firewalls
Gatekeepers
Secure routers
Illegal Numbers
Voice recognition
RFID
SecureID
Multi-layer encryption
Anti Virus utilities
Biometrics
They only thing you get when you build a better mousetrap is a smarter mouse.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
It's just a way that the owners of an archaic and dying business model dream of making their customers pay over and over for the same crappy product that is slowly losing the artificial value it once held. Distributing music is dirt cheap now. Suing college kids will only generate so much cash before some law students settle their hash in court once and for all.
Bye bye RIAA. It sucked knowing you.
DVD43, which I will not in any manner explain how to get thanks to the unconstitutional DMCA, also magically decodes DVDs without any work at all. Any fool can install it once, and it will sit in their system tray completely unnoticed, and they can treat CSS-encoded DVDs like any other DVD and copy whatever video files they want off of them.
Although DVD video files are still rather unwieldy for tossing around networks and stuff, and they usually want some sort of transcoding.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Which is exactly why they feel they have to make it harder to copy. It doesn't cost anything, so the only thing they can do is throw the law around while simultaneously making it more difficult to copy.
Now, obviously the honor system doesn't work. If DRM vanished tomorrow, most Slashdotters would still keep downloading. It provides something to bitch about more than anything. The fundamental problem is that Slashdot has decided it doesn't like the media industry's business model. It doesn't actually have anything to do with DRM in the overwhelming majority of cases--precisely because every single kind of DRM has been cracked. It's not a real deterrent to Slashdot. But it's good for the go to pretend that it was supposed to be and you beat "the man."
The only real deterrent is the law, which is why there's all the sabre-rattling here. You don't want to pay for the content. You've all but declared it every single time this issue comes up. There aren't many people here who carve a rational balance. Most of you will continue getting it for free because a) you can and b) you don't think they deserve money in the first place (or "not as much as they charge" in the truest mob fashion). Rationalize all you want, but that's all it comes down to.
There need to be massive changes in the media industry. Lots of things which are fundamentally clear have become confused in the fiery rhetoric and the balance is wrong. But if you won't come to the table, why should they?
"The secret to success is simple: make a good product and sell it at a fair price."
Guess Michael Moore's movie must have been a bad product at a hugely inflated price then.
Even the stuff that's not yet for sale.
Good thing that only happens to games.
I was encoding MP2 files on my Linux box back in 1996-7. The MPEG reference source code compiled fine on Slackware. The conversion was horridly slow back then on my 486-33 though.
I probably still have some of those MP2 files stuck away on a CDR somewhere...
Sure there is. A correctly employed OTP is completely, mathemathically proven, uncrackable.
But there is no uncrackable DRM-technology. There can't be. By nessecity the users machine MUST contain all the information needed to decode the media. If it didn't, it couldn't display it. If it can display it, it fundamentally CAN also save it in an unrestricted format.
Yes, it may be more or less tricky to get at the keys. But it'll always be *possible*.
"However, every time this axiom is honestly examined, mitigating or even entirely contradictory evidence is discovered."
Interesting how this "evidence" comes from the very organizations slashdot professes to hate. Hope you all don't blow a mental seal chewing on that.
"It's not the technology we need to combat (since Turing proved it can never work). "
Did Turing have stock in Motorola?
I'm thinking of a few dongle based audio applications that are not cracked yet.
For example: Steinberg Wavelab 6 & Cubase 4, Apple Logic Pro, and several other audio apps are incorporating dongles... one of the Arturia soft-synths has it too and remains uncracked.
Now there once was a crew called H2O which cracked the Cubase v3 dongle and it sounds like that was a serious bitch and a really tough nut for them to crack. So IMO these dongle based protections may in fact be raising the bar for copy protection. Not that they are uncrackable, but it sounds like the amount of time/effort/brains required is now prohibitively expensive. And thus several of these applications remained un-cracked. Nobody has been willing or able to successfully pull it off.
From the descriptions of Blu-Ray's protection, it sounds like if a movie/disk is cracked, that crack will only work on that one movie/disk. I think we may be moving into a new era where cracking is so challenging that nobody wants to go through the effort/trouble due to the level of difficulty and complexity.
I guess it remains to be seen. I don't think I ever would buy a dongled application. And I'm generally willing to trail the bleeding edge now. I'll accept lesser quality, or older stuff, for the sake of cheapness, either getting stuff used/discounted, or downloading, etc...
If these big corps can force the majority into paying if they want to use the product, then I'm almost cheering them on. It may bring people to demand more fair changes in the laws back into consumer/masses favor. Or it could spawn more development in the areas of creative commons and linux. Maybe that's part of why people have been so lazy and uninterested in copyright and patent laws. If stuff is so easy to copy up until now, who cares? They get it anyways for free and buy a little bit here and there...
DTCP encryption and it's correspondent M5 cipher hasn't been cracked.
And unlikely that it will.
And DTCP is the DRM of choice over high-speed digital buses such as 1394 and now over ethernet with DTCP-IP.
This may be half-correct .. but Sony's Connect Store DRM as used originally for their own ATRAC formats for Minidisc, HiMD, and their current Walkman line of products has never, to my knowledge, been cracked.
It *has* been bypassed by various means [at the cost of a single generation loss in transcoding] but again, to my knowledge, it has never actually been cracked.
There could be many reasons for this, including the dismal sound quality of the Connect store's LP2-encoded [132kbps] tracks, the rather small audience compared to any other major form of DRM'd media for sale, or the fact that Sony eventually relaxed their DRM on self-created or recorded tracks to the point where it's basically nonexistent unless you actually tell it to be turned on yourself.
I say all of this as a user of HiMD for location recording. Mind you, I now use a 24-bit PCM flash recorder most of the time instead.
Just ignore the fact people have to download and install software if it makes your argument easier. Pfffsh.
has not been cracked, but the only reason for this is, that there is no real incentive to do so, because all the movies are on DVD anyway, which is by now an "open" format.
Despite the what you may believe, most of us started "at the table". They stepped away when a fringe group of people were making a pretty small dent in their sales. They not only made sure everyone knew about it as an option, but they also made sure the honest people paid for it. Then they crossed the line with the lawsuits, which is when I stopped buying work supporting the RIAA (I try to avoid the MPAA(?), but sometimes I'm weak). I can live the rest of my life with my current CD collection, stored on my hard drive and easily transfered to any device in my home or office.
In theory, donglization can be "uncrackable." Essentially you put part of the program in the dongle and make the dongle smart enough to run that code too, so it never leaves the dongle - just takes input from the host and returns the computational output. As long as no one can extract the code from the dongle and run it on the host, then the software is effectively tied to the dongle because it *is* the dongle.
But, at that point you start to leave the realm of wide-scale feasibility because you are effectively distributing a computer along with your software.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
OK can the folks buying DRM please remember all technology is fallible and that security is a process NOT a single solution.
That's not really the case. Everyone got caught up in the filesharing craze--it was novel, easy, and fun. The funny part is that it would actually have been legal if people could exercise restraint. But many can't. It's how riots start and how people don't feel guilty for exploiting a flaw as long as someone else made it (the ATM issue recently, for example).
Honest people always, *always* pay for "it"--health care, vandalism, piracy, you name it. That's why it's in society's best interests to minimize problems. The lawsuits are serious mistakes and massive blows to any shred of credibility the industry organizations may have been clinging to, but they're not the only people involved. They're also only tangentially harmed by any counteractions. Ultimately, it's only the art and artists that are hurt, because no one is willing to engage a more complicated mechanism to deal with the actual problems.
There's a difference between not supporting these *AA dumbasses as you appear to have done and stealing from artists to "stick it" to them as huge tracts of Slashdot seem to think is appropriate.
Locks are a good way to keep honest people honest, but they should be simple and unobtrusive. The reason why we have key locks on our front doors instead of complicated biometric systems (this may be the wrong audience for this comment) is that they are simple, cheap and less prone to failure.
Remember the front door is public, the lock is public but only the owners have the key. The front door system works because not everyone who can get to the door has the key. DRM simply doesn't work because you have the content, the lock and the key.If this were really happening, what would you think?
Not trying to be a troll. But I strongly disagree with the hive-mind about DRM being as hopeless as the comments proclaim.
Frist off, digital piracy isn't that different from brick-and-mortar piracy -- sellers will always try to find ways to prevent theft, and those who want to pirate stuff will always find ways to circumvent the checks. This is human nature and the it'll probably never change.
Second, while we (rightly) think that the RIAA could save itself a lot of effort by revamping its model, that argument doesn't scale to other media. For example, movies. Movies are expensive to make, and don't sell in the same volumes as songs. The RIAA might easily solve its problems by moving to an AllOfMp3-like model, and pricing structure. But the MPAA won't be able to do the same -- charging 10 cents a movie will mean that they need to sell about 150 times the volume to make similar profits. Charging even $4 a movie will be enough incentive for people to go back to bittorrent. So clearly, its a never-ending tug of war, and while we think the RIAA/MPAA should in good faith adjust it's pricing model etc. the MPAA (at least) can't rely on the same good faith from its customers.
But of course, the RIAA and MPAA are not blameless. And neither are Apple and MS and anyone else creating DRM schemes for multimedia formats (in fact, perhaps the Apple and MS folk are more guily than the RIAA/MPAA. Thier real sin is, they are trying to exploit a side-effect of DRM by not openly licensing thier DRM schemes and not making them interoperable/platform-agnostic. They have seen the side-effect of locking in customers by not licensing thier DRM schemes and by using proprietary formats, and they're frothing at the mouth with the possibilities of locking in customers, and getting duplicate revenues from those that do defect.
At one point, I was actually willing to give MS some props for trying to rally the industry around a single DRM scheme (PlaysForSure) and keeping the API for it open. The lack of PlaysForSure on Macs and Linux is a big problem, and using WMA is a bigger problem, but the real sin was when they came out with yet another DRM system for the Zune. (Unless their PlaysForSure contracts made it a necessity by stipulating that MS will never come out with a PlaysForSure device or something like that - I wonder).
And Apples fault is in how they choose to license FairPlay. They seem to have some arbitrary 'coolness factor' that needs to be met before they license FairPlay (which they do license out). For example, it's clear that the Xbox ppl have given iPod integration a lot of importance, and they must surely have approached Apple to license Fairplay so that even protected songs could be streamed to the 360 from a PC/Mac or iPod. The fact that this doesn't work today can only be because Apple did not license FairPlay. A terrible sin, for what would have been a very cool and easy to use feature. They did not think about the benefit to their users first -- they thought about lock-in instead.
This is really what's wrong with DRM today. Companies are having a field day with trying to lock in consumers, and not giving any thought to enabling them to use thier property in as many fair ways as possible. The focus is completely on lock-in, and disabling, rather than enabling, and maintianing an audit trail without hindering.
The solution might come from the market, in time. But for that people need to be very vigilant about shunning DRM schemes until these companies learn thier lesson and start inter-oprating with each other. That doesn't look like its happening anytime soon -- what with iTunes downloads crossing the 3 billion mark the other day. Consumers only have themselves to blame if they endorse DRM in this manner.
The solution might come faster through litigation. Either through class action lawsuits (iTunes customers who want to migrate so a non-apple mp3 player, who get pissed because thier collections are now worthless), or Congress (ve
DRM mechanisms used to protect movies and music have two major flaws.
1. Most are offline protections, so every information needed to crack or circumvent them is usually right there. Encryption doesn't work, if a single person is sender and receiver at the same time.
2. Even if the authentification is made online (like video-on-demand sites), an old rule applies - as long as people can hear the music and see the movies, they will be able to copy them. So even if they continue to develop new DRM systems, people will always at least be able to make an analog copy by putting a recorder next to their speakers or using a camcorder to film their own TV, in a worst-case-scenario.
Software is a bit different, but offline application like the mentioned Logic Pro 7 have all been cracked up to this day to my knowledge. However, if you equate DRM with authentification, then there are lots of well protected applications like Web2.0 sites that require paid subscriptions or online games.
The latest version consists of two exes. You click the first one and hit the only button on the interface. Then you click the second, select your media, and click the decode button.
*BAM*...un DRM's media file, in about 30 seconds from start to finish.
I agree that stealing the music to "stick it" to them is very counter-productive. The most powerful thing that could happen, were it possible, would be for music downloads to dry up at the same time as CD sales took a sharp decline. If we could collectively say "we'd rather go without than accept your terms" then they'd change their terms. I admit I'm part of the problem in that I'm much more active in my "boycott the industry" campaign to friends and family than I am in my "live with what you have" one...
I do think you are making the same mistake the industry made, considering download activity to even correlate with lost profits. Sure, people went crazy with it. I knew guys who had hundreds of CDs worth of MP3s, but they never listened to them and they never would have bought any of that content. It was just neat to download and share it. Those were a few people, not everyone, who accounted for most of the file-sharing, and they really weren't taking anything from anyone. The industry lost money, no argument there, but not a significant amount in the long run. They stood to gain far more than they lost by taking advantage of all the work people had put into the concept of file-sharing, but instead they saw the death of the CD as a bad thing and acted accordingly.
Also, as an aside, I think they artists ultimately stand to gain here. The current generation may hurt, but that may sway future artists away from the big labels. With a strong grassroots distribution network available to them, artists could charge a lot less for their work and still bring home more money per album than they do under the current system. The power to cut out the middle man is becoming available to them. Barring some seriously oppressive laws, I think it's going to be a whole new era for music 50 years from now.
"begging the question" is a fallacy where someone assumes the truth of some conclusion in the premises of an argument. As a result, the argument doesn't demonstrate anything. People who think using "begging the question" to mean "raising the question" makes them sound more intelligent need to realize it just makes them sound dumber.
I dare to say I speak for many when I say, I don't mind paying for content. But I insist in being able to use content I pay for.
I buy my music. I also buy my movies. I don't want so many that I couldn't afford it, and likely I wouldn't buy enough to make the industry survive. A handful of movies or music discs a year isn't really making or breaking it for them.
But I do want to use those items in the way I intend. I want to be able to hear that music in my car, I want to be able to watch those movies on my computer. If this isn't possible, the item I paid for is not what I want. Now, the licenser can dictate how I may use the item, that's his right. But he should at least inform me about it, so I can avoid wasting money on it. If the DVD tells me it won't play in my computer, I won't buy it. The product does not match my requirements.
Unfortunately, this information is not given. All you get is "this item is protected by copyprotection technology", which can mean pretty much everything from "it won't work in anything but our own players" to "it's just CSS encrypted, so all you need is a player that can handle it". I won't know 'til I slip in the DVD into my drive.
Now, the opened medium is more often than not impossible to return. No matter what you do, the store won't take it back. I checked with my lawyer, and they even have the right to do that.
So, consequence? I feel wronged. I feel tricked into buying something that I cannot use. Consequence? I don't give a fuck about copyright laws and remodel the disc to do what's intended with it: Giving me access to the content I licensed.
So far, no problems with my conscience at all. I paid to see the movie, so I feel entitled to do what's necessary to see it.
I can see that it's only a minuscle step from here to "why the heck go through all the hassle and even spend money on it, when you can get it free and hassle-free through the net?". I can see why people take that last step, too. Actually, I can see that a lot of people even got wind of this way of acquiring movies that way:
1. Buying a movie that doesn't play.
2. Lament with their "clued" friends and ask for a way to see that movie.
3. Friend tells him about P2P.
4. People stop buying and start downloading.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not if his friend shows him DVD Shrink it isn't. Put disc in drive, click on backup and 30 minutes later you have a burnt copy ready to play.
If kids can work out how to put up a MySpace page, they can copy a DVD.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The fundamental problem with DRM is that attacker and receipient have the same information, they are the same person. How the heck should this be securable?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hmm.
I propose Xbox 360 DRM.
Essentially un-hacked after all this time. Interestingly enough it's been possible to run warez for long time but ONLY if it's right region and no modification whatsoever is possible (cheats etc)
However, homebrew software, cross-region mods, or any modification to the games: Big Ix-Nay.
Yes, if you go to extreme lenghts and took the necessary steps long time ago it's possible to change the region code of the console. The kernel vulnerability was patched and there's no way to un-patch unless you exploited the vulnerable kernel to obtain one of the encryption keys. Or in other words, if this is news for you, forget about it.
The entire entertainment industry is so consumed with greed that they are no longer able to think clearly. ...
The secret to success is simple: make a good product and sell it at a fair price.
And the price that I'd consider fair for really great product for me is zero if the copying cost (including legal considerations) are zero. Who cares if the musicians and other creative types gets squat? Why? Because I'm just as greedy as the industry. And many millions of users are just like me.
Also, Iomega Zip drives came with software to create MP2 files....
Beats me. Beats anyone with half a brain and even a small dosis of crypto-knowledge. Beats people with more than a small dosis of crypto-knowledge too. Bruce Schneier says it like this: "Trying to make bits non-copyable is sort of like trying to make water non-wet."
Wrong. Every DVD player on Linux can use libdvdcss to decrypt CSS, they do not do it themselves. (VLC may be an exception, I don't use VLC so I don't know). libdvdcss is not always included in Linux distros. I recently installed Ubuntu, and to get DVD playback working, I had to install a bunch of libraries for dvd playback and included with one of those libraries was a script to download and install libdvdcss and the script had to be run separately. I understand it is done this way for legal reasons, but this is not as easy and simple as it could be. I also know that libdvdcss could be installed automatically if I used packages from a different repository, so you don't need to point that out. I am just stating that it is not as simple as you suggest using a default setup on Ubuntu.
DRM doesn't exist to stop the big organised cracking groups who release media online (they try to do this with lawsuits).
Nor does it try to prevent the street sellers, who mostly buy their stuff from the above, mass duplicate and sell cheaply.
What it's intended for, is to screw more money out of the average consumer.
When i was a kid, my parents would buy me music on vinyl records, and record them to audio cassette for me to play, because being a kid i would invariably ruin the media at some point. When that happened, they would make me another copy. Similarly, they would make copies to play in the car (tapes often got damaged if they were left on the dashboard in hot sunny weather, and i doubt there are many cars which can play vinyl).
DRM will stop these law abiding citizens from making their own personal-use copies, and force them to buy multiple copies of their media, and there are even more reasons to format-shift now:
CDs - to play in the car
CDs - for kids to destroy
Digital files - to play on a media center
Digital files - for an ipod or cellphone
Ofcourse, those who pirate media will continue to do so, and will be better off than those who don't. Eventually more of those people will choose to pirate media instead so that they gain the benefits of drm-free media.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
http://www.indicare.org/tiki-read_article.php?arti cleId=172
I myself have and will continue to refuse any form of DRM controlled content and more importantly, the devices. I am certainly not alone in these feelings. They all have one thing in common, and that is complete failure. The scorecard really just states the obvious. Any DRM method that has not been cracked is not a testament to its strength, but its market penetration. I personally feel that DRM in its entirety is a worthless enterprise that I am being forced to "pay" or give value to. The fact that there are laws to support its failure is a true testament to stupidity and corruption in the government. Adobe is a great example. They make a secure product, which is of course not secure at all, and when it is broken they use the FBI and the law to suppress the knowledge of and ability to do it. DRM has many aspects that contribute to its failure and nobody seems to address them all. DRM prevents people from making copies for their own use, inhibiting their ability to enjoy intellectual property that they have already compensated the owners for, which really pisses them off. I have yet to meet the person that loved to be told what to do with their property, bondage addicts aside. Make no mistake either, once someone has paid for something, they consider it their property. Its not on loan from the RIAA, and they certainly don't feel compelled to call someone up and ask, "Hey you mind if I listen to the song i bought in my car too? Oh, can I also burn it to a cd and play it on another device too? What about my vaction home or timeshare?". Even when someone rents or leases something they dont tend to refer to it as belonging to something else. When someone asks me if that Infiniti is mine, I dont say, "Ummm, no. It actually belongs to the dealership, but I am allowed to use it with certain provisions". Its all about perceptions of the consumer. The arguments that DRM prevents copying thereby protecting or even increasing sales is ludicrous. People that are going to purchase IP, do not do so becuase they are forced to do so. They do so becuase they have the money and ability to purchase it in the first place. When I was younger, I did not have the money and I certainly did my fair share of Piracy. Probally more then my fair share actually. However, I now purchase everything and I actually have gone back and purchased things from the past. The Command and Conquer anthology is a good example. I purchased 2 copies of it. One for me, and one for my little brother. When I see a game that i used to play, I just buy it now for the memories. I dont think I am alone in this either. I have the ability to get any content I want for free, I now choose not to. Piracy and bypassing DRM are really 2 different behaviours that can have completely different motives. Grouping them together is simplistic and not all people that bypass DRM are pirates. I see so many arguments about DRM in which people that make intelligent arguments against it are simplistically accused of being a pirate and therefore morally bankrupt and any argument that is made must simply be wrong. The RIAA is certainly guilty of this as they use Piracy and lost sales to bypass other serious issues about DRM. From a technical viewpoint it is naive to think that any group of people could create a system that could not be cracked by the global community. It is thousands of people at best going up against millions of determined people. Those millions have proved time and time again that their collective intelligence, immagination, and resourcefullness will trump any proprietary solution of even the biggest and most sophisticated companies. Making the fruits of their labor available on the internet, a global communciations medium is also trivial. The aformentioned perceptions of the consumer that content is theirs to do with what they want without any control or monitoring, coupled with the global hacking community creates an environment in which DRM is doomed to failure. Quality is also a problem with DRM. DRM is not a quality product. Purchasers
Ordinary Joe Blow is inconvenienced/enraged when the DVD for their kids
a) stops on the "you're a pirate" page
b) wanders through a half-hour set of adverts
c) reiterates the "you're a pirate" page
THEN finally gets to the main show whereupon, because this is the original copy and played a lot for the kids, is scratched and falls over.
However, fire up a filesharing program, find the movie and burn to DVD/CD means they
a) have no wait through the "you're a pirate" page
b) no wait for the ads to finish
c) no wait while it goes through another "you're a pirate" page
and, because this is easily copyable to disk, even if this is scratched, you still have another copy.
When DRM makes your life more difficult, cracking yourself becomes doable. When P2P means you never have to crack it if one person cracked it, there's no contest.
It was called Iomega RecordIt - that's actually where I remember first hearing about MP2.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
All DRM has been cracked because of the fundamental weakness that the "secret" message has to be "viewable" by the end user. The end user is given an encrypted message but also the key with which to decrypt it.
I don't believe it is the media companies that keep insisting on new DRM schemes.
Instead I believe technology companies keep presenting the next DRM scheme to the media companies and promising this time it is unbreakable.
They should just use good old fashioned snake oil on the media and save a bundle!
That's it! Exactly, any on one Zip drive you could store about one CD. 10Megs per song as I remember. The advantage was that the encoding was quite fast. I remember having to wait hours to compress a WAV to an MP3 on a Pentium Pro 200. Granted it was the original Fraunhofer codec on the DOS command line, so I suppose it wasn't really very optimized.
No. Nope. Uh-uh. It does not beg the question.
Orange whip? Orange whip? Three orange whips.
Mind you, that's because the DRM isn't on the iPlayer for technical "stop anyone copying it" reasons at all. It's there because the BBC are contractually obliged to "protect" the files, because the rights they've purchased from the production companies don't include handing them out over the internet decrypted.
Nobody is going to bother downloading a file for the iPlayer then stripping the DRM off, because it's all programmes that have been broadcast some time in the last seven days over the air to any and all Freeview-compatible devices (including PC cards and PVRs) as unencrypted MPEG2 streams anyway. Helping yourself to that, or to a torrent from someone else who did, is much simpler.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
It's very wrong to imply that Windows Media DRM is cracked. What has been done is that if and only if you have a valid license to something protected with Windows Media DRM, it is possible to remove the DRM. If you don't have a valid license, then you can't remove the DRM. If I give you a Windows Media file protected via DRM and I don't give you a valid license, that file is totally protected and you can't do anything to remove the DRM.
BluRay discs will very soon have a new form of protection that is different from AACS and because of the way this new system works at the disc level, some have theorized that it may be uncrackable. I suspect if it is cracked at all that it will be only because the implementation was botched. If this new system is properly implemented, it may be the first DRM success story for the industry and will no doubt lead to similar methods for other media.
... been cracked, and no, it wasn't for lack of popularity. The original Divx security was never broken. It was as close to a perfect system as has been deployed in that it did not rely on information burned into the player and information burned on the disk. It actually updated its crypto keys every time it phoned home. The security processor was not part of the parent player - it was a separate, tamper-resistant gizmo with self-destruct tendencies. If you didn't pay your bill or the box couldn't phone home, it wouldn't play any Divx disks.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I can't think of any protection scheme that hasn't been bypassed/broken/cracked. If it hasn't, it's because nobody cared to try. As for why they don't make it DRM-Free, well, software is protected for about 2-4 hours after release by whatever copy protection they use. Music, any tape recorder can record the live sound output from playback, whether it be on a pc captureing from the line out jack, or simply a microphone. Books have photocopiers. TAPE/DVD/Blue Ray can all be recorded, in lesser quality, or exact duplicates on pc with the right software. What they should do, if they're really serious, is to make a format that can not be written to. But even then lesser quality version copies will proliferate. I think it was Sony that lost the video tape recorder case - ever since then they're fighting a losing battle. If it hadn't been for the first tape recorders, then it would have turned out differently.
Oh, so it's a "business model", now, extending copyright into perpetuity and charging for what belongs to us all.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
they still do it because people still buy the crap
stop buying drm media and speak with your wallets - that seems to be the only language they understand.
No, the issue is that only *one* person is required to do all of that and open his torrent client to share it up.
And it's at that point that the torrent copy has more features than the one in the shop.
Kinda Sad that it's getting less and less appealing to actually buy these products.
No, he really can't.
Copyright law says that you can't distribute copies of a work. However, Fair Use provides for all the noncommercial, personal copies you want. Under the law. And there's nothing the copyright holder can do about it! The only way they can take that right away from you is with a separate contract—and unless you've actually been buying CDs with shrinkwrap EULAs, they don't have one with you (and it might or might not be legal even if they did).
You're already falling into their trap, equating music & movies with software, thinking of them all as "licensed" to you. They're not. You own that copy of the music, and you can do anything you want with it except as prohibited by copyright law, which says you can't distribute it, sell it, perform it in public at all or private for profit.
That's why they need DRM, because without it, they can't prevent you from buying just 1 copy and listening to it on your CD player, on your computer, on your MP3 player, in your car, in the shower—wherever you want. With it, however, they can sell you a separate copy for everywhere you want to listen to it. And that's what they want.
Don't let them make that happen. Don't fall into their trap. Don't think of music as "licensed". It's not: it's owned with restrictions.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I think your post might be falling into a variant of statistical sampling fallacy.
(Snark) (Written from a Pseudo-Industry viewpoint)
1. "Sure, I can't copy an HD-DVD(*), but that's ok coz I'm not going to bother buying an HD-DVD until I can play an HD-DVD using Free software (which ultimately means the DRM would have to be cracked)."
--- Report to CEO: According to this user, there is no Free Software that plays HD-DVD under these conditions. Therefore our DRM is effective enough to stall this user from his form of copying.
2. "It doesn't make good economic sense to stop 100 people using copies if the means to prevent copying also stops 200 people from buying it in the first place."
--- Report to CEO: According to this user, DRM *IS* slowing down the expected demographic from copying. However, our models do not agree that an addtional 200% of the audience still remains to be captured, and therefore we consider his logic flawed.
3. "As far as I'm concerned, if I buy a CD (for example), I have the right to play that CD on my computer, rip it to Vorbis format, etc. If the publisher designs the CD so that I can't exercise those rights then it is useless to me and I will get the content via some other means in a DRM-free format. If the publisher makes sure *all* official formats are DRM'd then the only choices I have are to either do without the content, or download the content illegally - either way the content producer doesn't get their money."
-- Report to CEO: The technical knowledge displayed by this user falls within the outlier range past the two-standard-deviation range. We consider losses like him to be acceptible business loss since we have regained the rest of our projected market.
(/Snark)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
There is a much more significant flaw in the DRM comparison with bank vaults.
What happens when a random person goes to Best Buy, buys a DVD player and a DVD, goes home, and watches the DVD? Everything works the way it should. If the DRM blocked that viewing, then it is broken and the consumer would most likely return the merchandise as defective. Comparing DRM to a vault is simply too flawed. It is better to compare DRM with the interaction between trademark, copyright, and patent. Unfortunately, these ideas are also too hard for most people to understand.
Report to CEO: According to this user, there is no Free Software that plays HD-DVD under these conditions. Therefore our DRM is effective enough to stall this user from his form of copying.
So what you're saying is they would be happy if there was no way for anyone to use the HD-DVDs (and thus noone would ever buy them) since that would prevent copying?
According to this user, DRM *IS* slowing down the expected demographic from copying. However, our models do not agree that an addtional 200% of the audience still remains to be captured, and therefore we consider his logic flawed.
No, that's not what I said. What I said was that you have prevented 100 people from using copies and at the same time you have also reduced your total paying audiance by 200 people. I made no mention of a percentage of the total audiance.
The technical knowledge displayed by this user falls within the outlier range past the two-standard-deviation range. We consider losses like him to be acceptible business loss since we have regained the rest of our projected market.
Ok, look at it this way - I have the knowledge to circumvent most of the current copy protection on CDs. Which means that, if I so wish, I could choose to buy a copyprotected CD and still use it. On the other hand, an unknowledgable user isn't going to be able to do this, so as far as they are concerned the CD is just "broken". The unknowledgable user does, however, probably know how to drive LimeWire and download the CD illegally. So the unknowledgable user has a choice:
1. Buy a CD which is no use to them since they can't rip it for use on their computer/mp3 player/whatever
2. Do without the content
3. Illegally download the content.
Which option do _you_ think they will take? I'm betting (3).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Which is exactly why they feel they have to make it harder to copy.
That's exactly the point I'm trying to make — that making items more difficult to copy doesn't do anything because as long as a single person can crack it, its as if everyone has cracked it.
Also, it is impossible to make something absolutely uncrackable with DRM because, in the end the message recipient and the attacker are the same person.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I bought a gigabeat off ebay. I really like it. But I had a problem, no sync software for linux. :-/
...
So I searched and found rockbox.org, a completely opensource OS replacement. BTW, it adds movies to an otherwise ordinary player and it is easy to revert back to an ordinary player (on the gigabeat at least).
So now I can INSTALL and also play my mp3's. But now how can I purchase new songs? AFAIK I can no longer play m$ DRM and gigabeat never played Apple DRM. I can get new songs by:
1: buying the whole CD, sometimes not worth it to get a few songs.
2: buy via iTunes, walmart, etc... to be "legal" and then download a version I can ACTUALLY use.
3: just download the music and dont give a rip about piracy and such.
The RIAA has me btwn a rock and a hard place. Either I shell out too much $$ for a whole CD. Or download from the internet. In option #2, I am sure they wouldn't care that I'd purchased a legal copy
The world would be a much nice place if we could all just get along.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
I haven't heard about Cinea protection being cracked yet.
I don't know about the technical details or if it really counts because it is only used by the studios on the screeners they send to association members.
It requires a special DVD player to play the DVDs and those DVD players aren't easily available.
Incidentally, I heard that they have had problems with it, apparently most of the screeners they sent out of Munich in 2005 wouldn't play which may have had an effect on the lack of Oscars the film won (although it still got 5 nominations in 2006).
Of course, if you could get hold of the disc and the hardware you could easily make a nice TS.
I would hazard a guess that content providers and copyright holders view DRM the weapon in the "war against piracy". However, like all such "wars", i.e. the "war on terror" or "war against drugs", it remains an ongoing battle.
I agree that it's going too far. DRM also codifies the rights that the copyright holder *thinks* you should have, regardless of the law, and that codification in theory lasts forever, regardless of changes in the law.
about the geeks that it takes to create and maintain different forms of DRM? I personnaly am not a DRM supporter but it just makes me wonder how many geeks out there actually do support it.
Google
Parent's post is not a troll.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
Joe realized that Alex' DRM tools were cracked. Alex knows that too, and he knows well that the spin of "we make it uncrackable" doesn't hold water. But he also knows how Joe thinks. His selling strategy thus is: 1. Cracking DRM is another burden, which keeps a few more people from copying. 2. Cracking DRM has been made illegal, which keeps another few more from copying. 3. Our DRM solution costs less than the losses due to illegal copying. Joe understands that. And thus Joe buys.
I think, though, that your calculus requires 'Joe' to have an inherent belief that "a few people" and "another few people" are large enough to be considered a business 'threat'; and that the cost due to illegal copying is, in fact, greater than the DRM solution. Herein, though, personal bias can run roughshod over good business sense; if you're a shark, trained to get as much value out of something for as little cost as possible, naturally you're going to see 'free copying' as a god-send. Of course everyone would do it! Nevermind that in a world where copying is a possibility, your business model must change from 'producing' music to 'delivering' music. It's that shift - and the loss of the heretofor gains - that they don't want to suffer.
Thus, they allow their personal biases to put in numbers to the calculus that make their instinctive choice seem 'right'.
[Ego]out
Yeah, I know, who cares? Well, a few of us do/did... MD was a good technology for its time, but crippled by DRM and other restrictions.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" - Hanlon's Razor
I mean I hate them as much as the next but it seems more likely that they actually believe that DRM is an effective means of stopping pirates.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
"and of course this begs the obvious question"
Um, no it doesn't, it *raises* it:
http://begthequestion.info/
To my knowledge, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCPHDCP has yet to have been cracked. This is most likely because HDCP has yet to have been implemented in any real way. It's also interesting that HDCP incorporates built-in "crack" workarounds, but those are all dependent on a manufacturers keys being compromised, as opposed to the implementation of the algorithms...
It's pretty straightforward why they continue to try coming up with new forms of DRM. It prevents Joe Schmoe from copying his music/movie collection for friends.
The other reason is because eventually, they will figure out a way to do it where it will be so incredibly annoying or difficult to pull off that people wont bother. Obviously we will still have DiAMOND and AXXO rips of movies in that kind of situation, but it eventually will work and it will cut down.
Beyond that, you have to please your investors. You can't let them think you are just giving stuff away to the world for free. They want "security" in knowing that their investment is "protected" by DRM.
If you think about it, Big Music uses DRM in the same way that we all use dead bolts on our doors. Sure there are plenty of people who can and will break into our houses still, but doesn't it make you feel just a little bit safer? Bump Keys are like the DeCSS of tumbler locks.
http://www.denialofreality.com/
What about taking a bitstream copy of the dongle with some kind of low-level drive-imaging software? I mean, dongle protection works in theory the way you've described it, but it seems to me like it just becomes the same race all over again: copying the dongle.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
What these tools are doing are trying to restrict when and how you play the media file. Yes, they claim they're doing that to restrict unauthorized copying, and in some cases it does makes copying media harder, but let's be clear here, DRM only reduces copying as a second-order effect of restricting playing.
This is why there is an inherent conflict between these schemes and FSF-defined Free Software. If your player is Free Software, you can modify it to allow copying, sampling, mashup building, converting to other formats, etc. Only if all of the media players for a medium are carefully controlled crippleware can you turn a player-restriction system into a "copy protection" system.
This is why the *IAA folks fear and loathe reverse-engineers and Free Software -- because they fear customizable/modifiable media players.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
You're misunderstanding the point of copy prevention (aka DRM, I agree with RMS on this, we shouldn't use "their" terminology as it implies nonexistent "rights") which is not to prevent theft. Nothing is lost in "illegal copying". As the phrase should tell you, software copying is a form of COUNTERFEITING. A much better analogy are the "security features" (microprinting, holograms, metal strips, etc.) inserted into US currency to prevent copying. And not casual copying either. Right now the "casual" counterfeiter can photocopy a few bills with a quality color copier and pass them pretty easily. The security features exist to a large extent to prevent large-scale counterfeiting, even some nations (like Cuba) are said to counterfeit American currency. Again few people are arrested for unknowingly (or even knowingly) passing a few counterfeit bills.
So this whole reasoning behind copy prevention, to prevent "casual copying", is bass-ackwards. Companies are SOLD this software to prevent counterfeiting and, shockingly, it doesn't work because most copy prevention software vendors are snake-oil salesmen. No offense to Russians, but why do you think most of the so-called DRM software you see comes from tiny Russian outfits? It's because reputable software vendors won't sell the shit.
I think my dad got it right when he first tried to explain security to me: you only have to make it more expensive to bypass the security than the thing it's protecting is worth, to make it 'secure'. In this sense, all DRM is 'secure' as the thing it is protecting is worth pretty much nothing. But this of course ignores the fact that DRM costs very little to bypass, and really isn't 'secure' in any true sense. Also, DRM is unconstitutional and tyrannical, so people will bypass it just for kicks or because it pisses them off, not because they want to pirate anything.
Nathan's blog
I know my Scientific Atlanta SA8300HD box has a bunch of recordings I can't get off due to TDES encryption. I haven't heard of any ways to get around the encryption, nor any firewire drivers that will get around the 5C encryption.
Many front doors and locks on houses have been defeated too. Does that mean we should stop using them, and it should not be against the law to "break and enter?" You guys are completely illogical.
has real rhapsody ever been cracked? I honestly don't know. ...might be an indication of their status... ;}
Wait, maybe I'm wrong about SACD. According to the wiki:
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I know of a software copy protection technology (a type of DRM) that has not been cracked since it was first introduced about ten years ago. I was one of the authors of "Electric Image Animation System" for the Mac and PC. I had been writing my own copy protection software for years. Each time we released a new version of the software, I would make some small improvements to the copy protection system. When the copy protection was cracked I would carefully analyize how the crack was implemented and then come up with a better copy proteciton for the next version. Eventually I invented strong copy protection technology. I ended up getting three patents on the copy protection technology. Strong software copy protection is possible. It is a lot easier to implement than it is to crack. Unfortunately this does little to help DRM for content protection. Because music and video never changes when you watch it, there is no good way to wrap protection around it. If you can see or hear it, you can copy it. My patents: http://tinyurl.com/36fovn http://tinyurl.com/3x5sek http://tinyurl.com/2lmzx7 -Mark Granger
If they could somehow make a DRM system that would automatically stab people in the eye who send in /. summaries that misuse "begs the question", I'd get behind it 100000000%.
Software is a bit different, but offline application like the mentioned Logic Pro 7 have all been cracked up to this day to my knowledge.
Logic Pro has never been properly cracked. I have not tested any of the cracks for it in the wild, but I was advised by people who have "been-there, done-that", that if you intend to use Logic Pro seriously, that you will need to purchase it. Otherwise the application is too unstable to be useable. There is also a light version of Logic which is stripped down and uses a Serial # instead of a dongle.
There's several other dongle-based audio apps that have not been cracked, including the newest Cubase and WaveLab. I think these have been on the market for nearly a year now, and there is no crack in sight. The Waves plugins on the mac have some sort of iLok demo reset script which can reset the trial time. But I think one would have to be seriously desperate to tolerate that.
This new breed of iLok and Synchrosoft is good enough to be considered "uncrackable". I think the evidence that these dongle apps have been on the market so long and remain uncracked speaks for itself. The thresh hold of work and skill required to break these applications is apparently too much for anyone to invest in successfully cracking these applications. I'm really curious to see as a general experiment, if these "uncrackables" begin losing market and mindshare to competitors who play a little more loose with their protection schemes. I'm thinking in terms of Microsoft Windows/Office and Adobe Photoshop which gained dominance in part because they were easy to copy.
I imagine also the trend is more to use net connections and like you mentioned web 2.0 for stuff that can be migrated to an online rent/subscriber model for access/use. That isn't impervious to attacks either obviously, but it probably is an improvement from the company's perspective. It will be interesting watching how these things develop over the next few years.
Yeah, it's cyberpunk but whatever. Information Wants to be Free. See wikipedia also. The bottom line is that people will get to the information any way they can. If it's easier to get for free, they will do that. The absolute bottom line is that PUBLISHING COMPANIES CHARGE TOO MUCH, so we would rather steal than pay them extortive rates. No one doubts that the information is valuable, but if people want the information, they will tend to drive the price down, one way or the other. RIAA and the other MAFIAA tried to prevent this from happening with regulation, which was like putting a condom on a firehose.
Now, on the other hand, signing documents with PGP or something actually serves a useful purpose, yet this has been subjugated by industry and government alike. Weird how they don't seem to do what's in our (the customer's) best interests, isn't it? Well, too bad for them, they will go out of business and we will keep buying stuff from someone else. Nice knowing you, ttyl.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Most locks can be picked with a minimum of effort. They can certainly be bypassed. The point isn't to provide an unsinkable defense. It's to provide a reminder to people that there's a line they're crossing and it's one they should not.
The goal isn't to stop determined criminals or to make it impossible to crack. The goal is simply to be a lock like the one on nearly any door in the world.
My last posting had no line breaks or paragraphs for some reason. Here is another go at it.
I myself have and will continue to refuse any form of DRM controlled content and more importantly, the devices. I am certainly not alone in these feelings. They all have one thing in common, and that is complete failure. The scorecard really just states the obvious. Any DRM method that has not been cracked is not a testament to its strength, but its market penetration. I personally feel that DRM in its entirety is a worthless enterprise that I am being forced to "pay" or give value to. The fact that there are laws to support its failure is a true testament to stupidity and corruption in the government. Adobe is a great example. They make a secure product, which is of course not secure at all, and when it is broken they use the FBI and the law to suppress the knowledge of and ability to do it. DRM has many aspects that contribute to its failure and nobody seems to address them all.
DRM prevents people from making copies for their own use, inhibiting their ability to enjoy intellectual property that they have already compensated the owners for, which really pisses them off. I have yet to meet the person that loved to be told what to do with their property, bondage addicts aside. Make no mistake either, once someone has paid for something, they consider it their property. Its not on loan from the RIAA, and they certainly don't feel compelled to call someone up and ask, "Hey you mind if I listen to the song i bought in my car too? Oh, can I also burn it to a cd and play it on another device too? What about my vaction home or timeshare?". Even when someone rents or leases something they dont tend to refer to it as belonging to something else. When someone asks me if that Infiniti is mine, I dont say, "Ummm, no. It actually belongs to the dealership, but I am allowed to use it with certain provisions". Its all about perceptions of the consumer.
The arguments that DRM prevents copying thereby protecting or even increasing sales is ludicrous. People that are going to purchase IP, do not do so becuase they are forced to do so. They do so becuase they have the money and ability to purchase it in the first place. When I was younger, I did not have the money and I certainly did my fair share of Piracy. Probally more then my fair share actually. However, I now purchase everything and I actually have gone back and purchased things from the past. The Command and Conquer anthology is a good example. I purchased 2 copies of it. One for me, and one for my little brother. When I see a game that i used to play, I just buy it now for the memories. I dont think I am alone in this either. I have the ability to get any content I want for free, I now choose not to. Piracy and bypassing DRM are really 2 different behaviours that can have completely different motives. Grouping them together is simplistic and not all people that bypass DRM are pirates. I see so many arguments about DRM in which people that make intelligent arguments against it are simplistically accused of being a pirate and therefore morally bankrupt and any argument that is made must simply be wrong. The RIAA is certainly guilty of this as they use Piracy and lost sales to bypass other serious issues about DRM.
From a technical viewpoint it is naive to think that any group of people could create a system that could not be cracked by the global community. It is thousands of people at best going up against millions of determined people. Those millions have proved time and time again that their collective intelligence, immagination, and resourcefullness will trump any proprietary solution of even the biggest and most sophisticated companies. Making the fruits of their labor available on the internet, a global communciations medium is also trivial. The aformentioned perceptions of the consumer that content is theirs to do with what they want without any control or monitoring, coupled with the global hacking community creates an environm
Granted.
But it's a one-time effort and 2 minutes with Google will yield you a step-by-step instruction that even Joe Idiot can follow.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You don't get it. Only lockpickers can steal physical property. Lockpicking is a fairly specialized skill that takes a long time to master. However, with digital property, only one person has to "pick the lock", and its the same as if everyone had the skill to pick the lock. Its that distinction that makes DRM untenable.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
No, lockpicking is not a terribly specialized skill, and no, not only the lockpicker can steal the property. Once the lock is picked and left open, anyone can steal anything until the lock is replaced.
Once the lock is broken, anyone can get it. The only difference is that you can replace locks quickly and DRM isn't so fast. You're still missing the point, moreover, that a lock is more a reminder than a safety device. You can punch through the glass in the door, break a window, or even brute-force defeat a lock. Most of them are not that strong. It's a casual deterrent and a reminder that you're breaking into something that you're not supposed to. That's it.
Every stop sign in town has been run at least once, so let's get rid of those as well. They're an inconvenience and stop me from driving as I'd like to.
What about OMA DRM?
The Adobe books i purchased cannot be read without activating the reader.
Its still not cracked like MS Reader ebooks.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Does anyone remember copy protected software? There were several on the Apple ][, C= 64, etc and lots of ways to defeat them. When the IBM PC came out, there was copy protection there as well.
The only form I personally still see of this are dongles and license servers. You can copy the disks (& even download them) but they won't work without a license server (local or network) or a dongle of some sort. Typically this is only for expensive software ($1000 / seat or more).
I suspect DRM will eventually go this way.
See my post regarding NetMD.
All the controversy surrounding DRM may be obsolete in the future, according to this article. They're suggesting that the future of movie watching may lie in streaming video sites like www.reeltime.com. With streaming technology becoming more sophisticated with higher quality pictures and better content, I'd wager that streams will dominate the internet and at least downloading DRM will be a non-issue. What do you think?
... buffering ... buffering.
Seeing these words blinking at the bottom of the postage-stamp-size screen during a download of jerky video defines the annoying experience of entertainment on a computer monitor.
However, the potential of new streaming video services -- fast, full screen and in sharp resolution -- is unleashing a torrent of movies and television shows, much of it aimed at narrowly defined audiences that can't find niche programming even on cable systems with 500 or more channels.
The Independent Film Channel is streaming 22 short films called "Trapped in the Closet" by the R&B recording artist R. Kelly. The Jewish Television Network, a nonprofit television production and distribution company, is streaming music videos by Jewish performers, cooking shows and Israeli news programs. The network is also planning to stream religious services during the High Holy Days in September, the sort of broadcast that would be hard to find on mainstream television.
"There is extreme interest in streaming because it simplifies the process of getting video to the consumer," said Ross Rubin, the director of industry analysis for the NPD Group, a market analysis company.
Streaming video, unlike downloads, never resides on a viewer's computer. It usually cannot be replayed as a downloaded file can be, which is another reason that content creators like it.
The growing use and popularity of streaming among consumers are closely tied to the increasing popularity of broadband Internet connections in homes. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimated that 47 percent of American households have broadband connections that make streaming possible because it transmits data faster.
"The greater adoption of broadband in the United States is really raising the ante for all kinds of content from premium Hollywood offerings to pet videos," said Mr. Rubin, who noted that NBC and ABC have begun streaming their prime-time programming to online viewers.
This year, the DVD rental company Netflix began to take advantage of click-and-view streaming of full-length films and television episodes with a subscription service. "Push a tab 'Watch Now' and more than 3,000 television episodes and movies come up in 30 seconds or less," said Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman. "There's no downloading."
Streaming high-quality video to computers and television screens is the "first step to getting what people want to see on any screen they want, from laptops to cellphones to wide-screen televisions," Mr. Swasey said. "Netflix's goal is to get movies delivered instantly to all those different screens."
Companies like ReelTime, Joost, Limelight Networks and Brightcove are staking their futures on streaming video.
"We're point, click and watch -- instantly," said Barry Henthorn, the chief executive and co-founder of ReelTime. "We never stop and never buffer."
ReelTime, based in Seattle, digitally distributes thousands of movies and television shows to customers who either rent titles for 99 cents each or subscribe to the service for $4.99 a month to $19.99 for six months.
While ReelTime content can easily be watched on desktop and notebook computers, Mr. Henthorn urges customers to connect the computer to the television's larger screen for viewing because, he said, "the quality is that good."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/business/media/0 6stream.html
Nothing to Watch on TV? Streaming Video Appeals to Niche Audiences Michel Marriott for The New York Times Buffering