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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."
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Actually EU law supersedes national law when it conflicts. This has been upheld on many occasions
European Law Supremacy
I never get used to these constant resurrections
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.-
Yes, for the foreign parties it does, but for the local parties it doesn't !
I'll give you an example:
A dutch guy wants to marry a woman from Africa. In the netherlands he'd have to fulfill all kinds of BS requirements so he moves to Belgium, then marries the woman while in Africa and then moves with her to Belgium. In Belgium the dutch person can claim EU resident status, so EU law will trump belgium law.
(this is known as the 'belgium route' in the netherlands)
But in the Netherlands because he's Dutch he would not be able to do that, for a Dutch national in the Netherlands Dutch law trumps EU law.
(which is why the belgium route exists)
I know this sounds crazy but it really is true, an eu-resident but non-dutch person in the Netherlands has more rights in the Netherlands than a Dutch person does and conversely a Dutch person has more rights in other European countries than those countries nationals.
MP3 Search Engine
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
Yeah, because the only useful thing the internet did was help spread illegal music? Have we so quickly forgotten our roots? Won't someone please think of the porn stars? :(
which is totally what she said
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