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EU Encouraging Standardized DRM, Licensing
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The European Commission is trying to encourage a standard licensing and DRM scheme for all of Europe, as well as 'cooperation procedures' and 'codes of conduct' for ISPs, copyright holders, and customers. No legislation has been proposed yet, but the 'cooperation procedures' sound like a push for an EU version of the DMCA Takedown Notices, which are already routinely sent to people outside the US. While simplified licensing might be nice, it's interesting that they don't appear to understand the inherent tension between standardization, interoperability and DRM — break once, copy everywhere."
the internet is finished. Everyone go home, it was fun while it lasted.
Well to be honest that sounds like a good thing. If the industry is forced to do their DRM in an interoperable way it will be better than the present situation where DRMed content is practically not interoperable at all. And if the industry is forced to get their act together and actually do it right, because if they implement some kind of half-assed scheme that gets broken everywhere at once and forever, it doesn't sound too bad either. So maybe they do understand it.
I'm not a friend of DRM, but it's likely to stay around for a while, and in that case I'd rather have it implemented well than what we see at present.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
The EU is pretty fragmentary and local law trumps EU law when it comes to the citizens of your own country. This creates all kinds of loopholes.
Also, and I know that's a weird line of reasoning but I think that it is valid, the sooner we get through this shit the better, and if it takes getting these idiotic laws and then breaking them en masse then so be it.
The population is slowly starting to wake up to the idiocy of some of these laws. Right now chinese law (see the recent RIAA vs Baidu suit) is more reasonable when it comes to some of this stuff than the so called bastion of democracy and privacy that the EU is supposed to be.
We're being sold out here and that has never before been more apparent, maybe this is what it takes to get people to wake up, I sure hope so.
It's going to take more than a few torrent sites to get taken down for people to realize that their rights are being eroded left right and center.
MP3 Search Engine
> they don't appear to understand the inherent tension between
> standardization, interoperability and DRM -- break once, copy everywhere.
Or the inherent quality dilemma -- "Use at all, total shit."
OMG! Wau!
I have a proposal for an alternative to DRM.
Imagine what would happen if instead of locking content, media companies just made content that no one in their right mind would possibly want.
imagine if all new movies were either endless strings of sequels, or remakes of other movies you've already seen.
imagine if all music was watered-down over-produced generic crap.
imagine if the most popular video game system were to offer downloads of all their classic titles at great prices.
imagine if the dominant operating system was so buggy, incompatible, and slow, that no one wanted to use it.
if, in some parallel universe, those four things were to somehow able to happen, all at the same time, no one would pirate anything!
sadly, we may never see such a world...
-I only code in BASIC.-
We have to start again this fight, how many more times?
Do the music experience means nothing (finally they have mp3, in the USA, why not in EU?) ?????
Drm will not help producers to prevent copying (which is done by smart users with smart hardware),
will JUST make things harder/frustrating for paying customers, forcing them to NOT buy.
DRM relies on encryption.
Encryption is designed to secure communication between Alice and Bob while denying it to the evil Eve.
In DRM, Bob and Eve are one and the same person.
In other words, DRM seeks to give a person access to an item while denying him/her access to that item. This is not a recipe for success.
The proponents of DRM seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths and weaknesses of encryption, and so are attempting to use it in a manner that is inherently weak. The fact that DRM schemes are so frequently and so rapidly broken by people with minimal cracking resources is a clear pointer to this.
For further information, Google on Schneier.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I maybe wrong, though I live in Europe, but I seam to remember that the EU creates directives and these directives are then later on implemented in member countries as local laws...
This is often the point of confusion. DRM cannot be completely effective, ever. DRM-protected content fundamentally requires three things be given to the end-user: A method of keeping the content controlled, a key to allow that content to be made available to the end-user, and the secured content itself. No matter how well-designed the lock, the publisher has to give the end-user the key for it to be used. Any further restrictions are simply enough smoke and mirrors to limit what a typical user can do. In the hands of a technologist, those distractions are ignored, and the unlocked content can be made available. I leave it to the /. community to provide counter-examples for each possible use-case.
could software certificates be used for this? Like in email. Get a free certificate from a certain company identifying you as George Bush and whenever you get new music online the system sends the data about your identification to let's say Itunes. If you are George Bush then you get the content, if you ain't you don't. Would this be feasible?
If you standardize DRM, the materials which the content providers are trying to control will have to work anywhere and all the time. This by the very definition is NOT what DRM is about. It is about managed access, not universal access. A standardized DRM scheme would be just as useful to the content providers as MP3.
I wonder if DRM isn't used a lot just because it locks out the competition. It certainly seems like a strategy beyond encryption and copy(right) protection at least, where Apple has strongly opposed opening up their DRM method, and even more visibly with Microsoft suddenly switching to a new form of DRM in the Zune Marketplace and in the process making Zune players incompatible with their old PlaysForSure encryption. I doubt it was because they thought PlaysForSure used a too weak encryption. :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"And if the industry is forced to get their act together and actually do it right,"
Presumably, the BluRay/HD-DVD people had their act together and did it right. How did that work out?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
To be fair to the eurocrats up the road it looks like they are attempting to acheive two very reasonable objectives.
One -- get rid of the current absurd situation where distribution companies have a license to distribute in a single european country but not the rest of the EU. IE the Polish licensee is only licensed to sell CDs in Poland and would be breaking thier license agreement by mailing a CD to someone in Germany.
Two -- if distributors insist on DRM then there should be a conistent legal framework throughout the EU. Currently some types of copying are legal in some countries but not in others.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Yes, this is about itunes offering different prices in different EU countries. The EU is supposed to have a single market, which means someone in the UK should be allowed to buy songs from the German iTunes store if it is cheaper, but Apple don't want you to.
My little Linux and tech blog
In a related note, Doubleday and other tree killers (take THAT you dirty hippies) are working with the US Congress, th eUK House of Lords (Prayer), and the Canadian government (The Canadian Hockey League) to enact legislation forcing the WTO (Wild Teenaged Orgy) to standardize DRM (Dumb Restrictions on Media) (note, there are some redacted passages in the DRM article that you must highlight to read) to include their wares as well as the Music And Film Association of America (MAFIAA).
The proposed legislation will require that all Xerox machines be copy protected.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
As in NO DRM is a standard. Digital Restrictions Management is a stupid idea from the get go.
If this DRM system used a similar scheme as RFC 3514. This RFC has been extensively discussed before in Slashdot. A DRM implementation based on the same concept would keep all the open source community happy, while providing the standardization the EU recommends.
As usual, it's the European Commission that's behind "industry friendly" (read, big companies with loads of $$$ and many lobbyists in Brussels) legislation.
....
Those are the same guys that tried to push software patents in Europe even though the European Parliament voted against them and everybody but a couple of the biggest IT companies was against it.
Interestingly enough, the members of the European Commission are not elected to their post but instead are nominated by national governments
PS: I really like the EU concept. Actually, i am where i am (physically and financially) because of the EU. However, until the unelected powers inside the EU political infrastructure are removed, the current structure will remain flawed and prone to serve the hidden agendas of wealthy individuals and companies instead of serving the European citizens.
http://inglorion.net/documents/essays/vorbis-microsoft-apple/
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Trusted channels do not exist except in the minds of some wishful thinkers. The only way to have a true DRM is to have the media and player all in one black box enabled with a big self destruct anti-tamper device surrounding it. Even then I would question its ability to keep me out of it. If you suggest that there could be DRM on any general purpose machine that isn't subject to reverse engineering tools, RootKits, Virtualization, and custom device drivers then I'd like an account on that machine. Nothing, on any machine I have ever used could keep me from reading any byte in memory I choose if I have physical access to it. Given that nothing is safe that resides in its memory just where is this trusted channel going to exist?
And how, exactly, will that be accomplished worldwide. Do these machines refuse to print any currency? Nope, I thought not. And my printer has no problem reproducing dollars, sterling, euros or whatever. So what value do the restricted machines have that makes them more desireable than the one that I use now? Probably nothing at all, in which case they will not be bought.
And just for my own interest, can you tell me the make and the model of the printer that refuses to print dollars?
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Thats what the TPM is for. Compromising that is quite difficult, although admittedly not impossible. It is the TPM that can tell what booted, whether the original trusted system or a VM hypervisor. The only way to get at the key would then be to sniff the datalines. The Vista approach is put everything up in ring 0 with protection (and a nice big CPU cost to run it). Of course, that is with an ideal world. The reality is that no computer can be a sealed black box, with all those updates coming down from Microsoft, maintain the trusted signatures across all elements that need to be trusted would be IMHO very, very difficult.
As for the so called black box, well we already see it with systems that wipe the key should you attempt to open the case. Unless the kit is military, this is possible to get around but not trivial.
See my journal, I write things there
An open copy protection scheme is a contradiction in terms. There's basically two ways to make copy protection work: create a closed system that prevents users from running their own software as a peer to the copy protection scheme, or use obfuscation to keep attackers from figuring out where the keys are stored.
Microsoft's DRM depends on Windows Media Player using obfuscation to hide the keys, and on the OS (as of Windows Media Player 9, in Windows XP, and more so in Vista) preventing users from interfering with the DRM software. third-party Windows Media hardware is pretty much required by Microsoft to be closed.
Apple's DRM is more on the "honor system", but it still depends on obfuscation in iTunes and the iPod and the iPod being a closed system.
I'm assuming we're talking about musicians. FYI, many of them actually write their own stuff. But let's say that you are right.
If that is the case, did you consider that maybe the musicians would have to pay the composers/writers in order to use their stuff? Are you assuming that composers actually work for free--or that under the current system, the RIAAbots actually pay these people much of anything?
Yeah, right.
We need to terraform mars, and do it RIGHT this time. -g