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."

Comments

Hm...

[rxmd]

they don't appear to understand the inherent tension between standardization, interoperability and DRM break once, copy everywhere.

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.

Re:Hm...

[QuantumG]

And if the industry is forced to get their act together and actually do it right, Do DRM right. Do something that is information theory impossible, but do it right. Yes. I'll just get my magic pixie dust now. This time we'll sprinkle it *right*.

Re:Hm...

[rlauzon]

The only problem is that standardized DRM is a pipe dream.

DRM relies on a secret in order to work. If the DRM is standardized, that secret it out and the DRM is broken.

This, of course, presumes that the purpose of DRM is to "protect" content. We all know that the only purpose of DRM is to lock consumers into a product and restrict consumer choice. So standardizing DRM is something that companies want to avoid at all costs.

Re:Hm...

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

OTOH, letting DRM fail naturally from poor interoperability would be a potent lesson for the labels and studios.

Give them the benefit of the doubt, let them distribute any way they want, then turn 'round and say "I told you so".

Re:Hm...

[MartinG]

I think you are looking too much at the short term.

Having more interoperable DRM will be better than having non-interoperable DRM right now, but it will only delay the real goal of no DRM at all.

I'd prefer to put up with a short term spate of incompatability, shortly followed by no DRM at all (which is actually already starting to happen, at least in with music) than a half-assed sort-of-better solution that in reality will never fully work as intended.

Re:Hm...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Standardized" DRM will be based on a TPM in every machine. Ever machine that wants to access "premium" content will require a licensed, signed and certified operating system with certified drivers. In other words: Microsoft and/or Apple, running on Intel and/or AMD, with NVIDIA and/or ATI video cards... and all the software certified to "protect the precious digital bits owned by the copyright holder". And all of this will be enforced by treacherous computing PC hardware.

Re:Hm...

[Richard W.M. Jones]

And all of this will be enforced by treacherous computing PC hardware.

Sure, but the treacherous hardware is here, in my hands. (Literally in fact - my desktop machine is an Intel development box which contains a TPM chip). Since it's in my hands, I can use whatever resources are available, and all the time and ingenuity in the world to break the DRM.

Once one person anywhere breaks the DRM on a piece of content and releases that content DRM-free, then everyone has the DRM-free content

Still don't believe me? If you want a parallel case, think about games consoles & "ROMs" (ie. game images) which are distributed on the net because a tiny fraction of a percent of console owners broke apart their consoles, found out how they worked, and removed the DRM from the games.

Rich.

Re:Hm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but the treacherous hardware is here, in my hands. (Literally in fact - my desktop machine is an Intel development box which contains a TPM chip). Since it's in my hands, I can use whatever resources are available, and all the time and ingenuity in the world to break the DRM.

True, but you are missing the point. DRM (at least for the tech companies) is not about piracy. It's about control over legal uses of technology. "Standardized DRM", is a codeword for Trusted Computing -- it's something that technology companies like Intel, Apple and Microsoft want very badly. Look at Intel - since about 1997 everything Intel has done as been influenced by DRM. '97 is when Intel put its engineers (in force) to work on programs that were deliberately meant to "secure a PC, softare and data, from the owner". I was at a talk from an Intel engineer using this exact phrase - he didn't call it DRM, because it wasn't in common use then.

For the last 25 years, the PC has been a mostly open platform - TC is an attempt to reformulate it into a closed vendor-lock-in platform, which rewards those companies who already have massive market share. Ultimately, the tech companies knows that piracy of content (at least in some form) is impossible to prevent. They also know that control of what code runs on a machines is a cash cow.

So... "standardized DRM" is the dumb-down layman's term for a world in which almost every PC has a Fritz chip/TPM which can be asked "is the machine running software with digital signature X" -- can it be 'trusted'. No Fritz chip/TPM... you aren't trusted, and you get nothing. No digitally signed and certified software... you aren't trusted, and you get nothing.

Gates/Job/Ballmer/[Insert tech company head here] wet dream.

this cloud has a silver lining though

[jacquesm]

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.

Re:this cloud has a silver lining though

[AliasMarlowe]

...and local law trumps EU law... Wrong.
The primacy of EU law over national law is explicit in the EU treaties to which all member countries are signatories. National laws must be amended and regulations recodified to comply with EU law (causing a certain amount of obscene posturing and squealing by local politicians).

Re:this cloud has a silver lining though

[Blimundus]

"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." That's completely false. EU law (if correctly adopted, and with sufficient legal basis in the treaties) prevails over local law. Also, some EU laws (the regulations, as opposed to the directives), don't even have to be implemented into local law to have direct effect.

Re:this cloud has a silver lining though

[datachild]

This isn't a troll but I will point out a few things that I find odd with your post.


Firstly, I'm sure there is a good reason as to why DRM exists at all, and why these laws that we all find dumb are being passed.
A few that come to mind are...

Big corporations corrupting politicians even further
This is a no-brainer really. What a better way to ensure your survival than to simply pay off a politician to try to pass a law?
Big corporations like Sony, Microsoft, and so on have lots of money that they can spend to make sure that the customer stays locked in,
and as obvious as my post seems so far, I think this gets lost in translating between bullshit and facts.

Unfortunately I cannot believe some of the laws they apply for. It's laughable because they should be minding their own business and not
attempting to pass a law that they have no clue about, but they are too busy exchanging laws and money with corporations to care about things
like common sense, logic, and what have you.

Sadly I've no idea what will become of this, but as long as there are politicians, there will be a problem. At the moment, I don't have a solution either.


DRM is a way to control people, not content
It's quite clear to all of us from all these torrent websites, and the warez scene that dates back to the 1980s in general, as to why they are still alive.
The companies that produce things like software, movies, audio, et cetera, aren't stupid. They KNOW their content is getting pirated, and reading a story a few
weeks ago, they are using it as a metric to find out how popular their content is. Instead, I think they are trying to control people themselves, to make sure
that no one else except them can dictate how that content is viewed. I mean, look at Sony for example -- you need a Blu-Ray player to watch Blu-Ray movies.
Yes, seems like a duh type of thing, but it's a pretty good lock-in.


Companies want to see how much shit they can get away with
This is one of my favorite ones to date. You see a company doing something stupid and you just know they are testing the grounds to see how much shit they can get away with.
Awhile ago, Rogers, a Canadian ISP inserted ads into the HTTP stream before the site loaded, so you would see an overlay of Yahoo! on Google. Who the fuck, honestly?
Laws are no different, in my opinion. When you want to pass a ridiculous law, you apply for it, and then you wait to see what was disagreed on. While some of the points
may get rejected, some of the other ones will remain, and then you strip the law of the ones that got rejected, and apply for again. Rinse and repeat.


However, on the flip side...


"Consumers" are at fault as well
Firstly, for letting yourselves be called that. Secondly, for not caring about your rights as citizens, not just customers. And thirdly, because you let the people who
represent you and who you pay to be where they are today fuck you over by the three points I've already stated. I'm sure posting on Digg and Slashdot and saying "Fuck Bush",
"Ron Paul's the answer, now what's the question?", and "Obama-nation" is great and all, but it doesn't really solve anything. You are stuck with what you have because you refuse
to act with something more than just a keyboard. Voicing your opinion is one thing, changing laws and defending The Constitution is another. I'm sure politicians laugh at all the
protests anyway. They are being paid off, and you helped them get to their position.


You have your rights, content makers have theirs
This is where my post meets the parent. I laugh whenever I see on Slashdot someone saying how they use Bittorrent to just download Linux distributions. That's a great way
to act like a politician. It's bullshit, and you know it. While I am not one of these so called "content makers," I do pity them regarding what Bitt

Standardized restrictions?

[WoollyMittens]

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.

Re:a better idea

[goldspider]

Yeah, I see what ya did there. Now if only that actually stopped people from pirating!

The moral of the story is that no matter how bad a product is, people will take it if they can get it for free.