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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."
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 how do you propose we grant iPods the ability to "know" the intent of their users?
Because truly "interoperable", transparent DRM would require exactly that. A Zune would need to know whether you mean for that particular copy to go to a machine you own as a backup, or to a random stranger's machine as a time-limited "sample". And it can't just ask you, because you could conceivably lie.
I do, however, agree with you on one point - If we can get a single form of DRM codified as international law, then when we crack that one, we'll finally have won the war rather than just another battle in an ongoing war.
IMO, "break once copy everywhere" provides the only truly long-term solution to the artifically-imposed DRM "problem".
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.-
When I think of standardized DRM, I am reminded of the Clipper Chip, of the mid 90s. Said chip was being pushed to be a part of pretty much any electronic appliance (computers, cars, modems) for cryptography. To protect the algorithm (which was classified at the time), the chips were highly tamper resistant (for the time), and were programmed with the Skipjack algorithm in a secure location after being made. Of course, we all know how well taken key escrow was at the time, and the Clipper chip died a slow death.
I can see someone coming out with a "TPM v2" chip that, instead of acting like a passive smart card like the 1.2 chip today, it being more of an active function, perhaps doing all the audio and video decoding on it, and only allowing decrypted input to be passed to another, similarly armored and tamper resistant, chip on the monitor. Of course, said "TPM v2" chip would be updatable and images pushed out within hours or days of someone breaching it. It could even be an integral part in the booting/running process of a machine, allowing and denying programs to run. Like the Clipper chip, its manufacture and algorithms can be made classified or top secret.
Then, laws and treaties (similar to WIPO) being put into force that make disassembly or modification of the "offical" chip meaning large amounts of time in a prison, and if one country doesn't enforce the law in their own nation, extradition treaties with another country could force citizens to be tried by judges in other countries.
Of course, somewhere down the line the chip becomes mandatory, similar to the V-Chip is in US TVs, and of course, sooner or later, it will require to phone home to be updated periodically.
Eventually, said chip could be made into something that can scan people's systems for anything that whatever nation thinks is bad, and silently phone home with the info, similar to how Punkbuster and WoW's Warden report people running cheat programs. Then, when someone goes to rip their latest DVD for their iPod, the chip notices the ripping/decoding software, phone homes immediately, and in less than 24 hours, the police arrive with a DMCA-based arrest warrent. (No search warrant would be necessary -- the chip would have done a formal scan of the machine and have sent up in a cryptographically signed/timestamped manner "proof" of the infraction with a list of software present.)
I can see standardized DRM taking place... and its a quite fearful thing, not just combining all the old school cypherpunk's fears with regard to key escrow in hardware, but taking modern issues such as rootkits, spyware, and "super-root" access, and mixing all this into one very noxious hodgepodge.
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!
You are a moron. If someone can listen to it, then they can also place a microphone next to it and record it. Sure the quality will be slightly degraded, but if it's done in a soundproof room in the middle of the countryside then it will be pretty decent quality. It's called the analog hole. I'm not a cracker so I'm not sure about the hardware side of things, but it's funny how modchip makers and crackers keep being able to crack supposedly uncrackable hardware too, huh? You don't know what you're talking about with your 'tamper-proof' hardware, unless you're talking about rigging every unit with C4. I can just see it now "WARRANTY VOID IF SEAL BROKEN (oh and your living room may end up rather void too)"
which is totally what she said
That's what baffles me too. Why can't these people understand that DRM cannot work? When 16 year old kids can break their schemes, you'd think that would be a strong hint that their schemes are hopelessly weak. But they don't take it that way, they only see that that one scheme wasn't strong enough, and delude themselves that it's still possible, and waste lots of effort trying again. They sort of half-assed understand that none of their schemes can hope to work, that's why they try to pass laws that make it illegal for DRM to be bypassed. If DRM actually worked, those laws wouldn't be necessary. Too bad they don't really understand, or they wouldn't waste money trying to create DRM systems, and bribing lawmakers to pass these stupid laws.
It's one thing for the ignorant to push these DRM schemes. But MS ought to know better. Their refusal to understand is criminally stupid. Vista is exhibit A there. Now the DRM proponents are engaged in the grandest attempt yet. They're going to try to control the users' devices from end to end. Vista was just the first shot. Unfortunately for Vista, it has to run on a PC, and that provides but one of many ways to bypass it. Next try might well be a "Trusted Computing" PC, which I expect no one will buy. TC was supposed to protect users from malicious software. TC wasn't supposed to be perverted to serve malicious DRM software at the expense of its users. And it doesn't stop with enforcing their "rights", the controllers start to want to use DRM to just plain gouge their customers, because they can. Double bonus when there's a technical problem that strips users of their privileges. They make money in 2 ways, by not spending money to fix the problem and by forcing their hapless users to work around the problem by paying for everything again! Region encoding is another example. Treacherous Computing indeed! No one will buy such a system by choice, at least not without severe brainwashing. Even if everyone could be forced to buy such systems, it still could not work. Just takes one user somewhere to introduce an unapproved device. It's impossible to stop such an "attack". Every large high school will have a few 16 year olds who will be quite capable of doing that.
They called it "copy protection" in the 1980's. That's all DRM is, is copy protection by another name. And they pressed every undocumented feature they could find into the service of copy protection, because at its heart, copy protection is security through obscurity. And none of it worked. What's that quote? "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it". So you have examples from recent history, you have many scientists who understand that it doesn't work and didn't need to try it even once to know better, but none of that stops these DRM fools.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"