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Is Copy Protection Needed or Futile?
Hugh Pickens writes "Columnist Saul Hansell is hosting a debate about copyright issues and technology on his blog at the New York Times . On one side Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, says that anyone who is intellectually honest must 'acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content that is currently occurring in the digital world' and that we should be 'identify workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive and that fully respect other interests such as privacy and fair use.' Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, responds that 'locks will be broken, and so a business model that depends on locking is very vulnerable' adding that locks may form a part of certain successful business models but 'too much reliance on locking can seriously backfire.' Wu and Cotton will respond to each other and to comments by readers today." As for the man on the street, Panaqqa wrote us with word that the Question Copyright site has posted an interesting video of ordinary people explaining why they think copyright exists. It's pretty clear that most people don't understand it at all.
DRM tends to punish your paying customers as much (or more) than those stealing it. When your business model punishes your customer the result will be decline and eventually failure.
Price the content based on quality, and make it convenient. People prefer convenience.
People won't bother to steal if there's a quality, low-cost solution they could just pay for.
For example- I pay $15/month to subscribe to Yahoo Music with my MP3 player, because it's just easier than stealing. The catch? I don't even keep my music if I stop paying. But I don't care! I'm paying for convenience.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Let's also assume that they hand the secret crypto keys to Carol (the attacker) in an utterly unbreakable meanner
It's still totally futile. Let's take music as an example:
There comes that point, no matter how secure the path, they keys, the algoritm, etc where a digital signal must be transformed into an analog, human "readable" signal. That signal can be re-captured and re-digitalized (and with the right equipment in good quality too)
Thaat's also referred to as the analog hole and no amount of DRM will ever get around that.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
If we are truly to be intellectually honest, then we must address the problem of supply versus demand. Rampant piracy suggests that the demand for content delivered over the Internet is obvious. Yet digital content has traditionally been held hostage by physical media. In many of the instances that content is provided digitally, it is further held hostage behind walls of incompatibilities, digital restrictions, overpricing, poor terms of services, and other devaluing options. All in the name of "protecting" digital content.
The preciously few times that digital content is loosed upon the populace at a fair price and fair terms, it blooms and propers. Which (if we are to be "intellectually honest") means that the failure to prevent copyright infringement is a failure to provide what the average consumer wants. When the content producers fail, many consumers take matters into their own hands.
My dear Warner Bros., why has the DVD of 300 been available for over 6 months, yet it is impossible to purchase or rent online? BBC, why are you not catering to your international audience by providing quality shows like Doctor Who on services like iTunes? NBC, thank you for your website. We very much enjoy the television content you provide. Now why are you backing out of the lucrative iTunes deal? You don't need exclusivity in this business. Viacom, CBS makes a killing on promoting their Late Late Show on YouTube. Why are you cutting off promotion of your excellent Comedy Central series rather than embracing it? (And thereby having some modicum of control over it.)
No. If we are to be "intellectually honest", we must face the fact that content producers are afraid. The world has changed, yet content producers cling to any false sense of control they can find. Each of these walls crumble under the might of economic demand, for which content producers only call for a bigger wall. Your customer is not your enemy. As with the barbarians at the gates of Rome who only wanted the land and crops originally promised to them by the emperor, your customers only want easy access to the content you promise them. No one has proven that they are not willing to pay for that privilege.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Licenses are for publishers, not end users. You don't "license a work" to me, you license the content to the publisher, who sells me the media containing the work. This is how it's worked since Gutenberg.
Now that the printing press has been invented, all the scribes will be out of business and nobody will write any more books!
Just like Gutenberg changed media, the internet changed media. The world is not as it was in the 20th century and never will be again. This is no more the time to invest in media companies than 1900 was the time to be investing in carraiges. Like that business then, the future paradigm is completely unlnown. What is known is that DRM doesn't work and cannot work. As has been said countless times before, making bits uncopyable is like making water not wet.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Here's a second critical difference: Breaking the lock on one physical item nets you one physical item. Breaking the protection on a copy-protected work nets you as many copies of that work as you care to make.
And a third difference: Sometimes breaking the copy-protection on a work allows you to copy many other works as well.
If breaking one auto lock gave a thief access to every car of that model, and perhaps every car of that model year, they'd be pretty useless. Such is copy protection.
You're right to bring up the idea of deterrence. Anyone security expert worth their salt will tell you that security is really all about deterrence. You can't make something impossible to access, and even if you could, the only way to completely secure it is to disallow all access, even to the owner. Otherwise, the owner could inadvertently give access to someone else.
So the purpose of security measures is to make it difficult to get unauthorized access, risky to attempt to gain unauthorized access, and very likely to get caught if you do gain unauthorized access. That's all. However, a good DRM scheme has to be transparent to the authorized user, meaning it has to be simple to get access, without risk to gain access, and unlikely to suffer bad consequences from getting access. Therefore it's just incompatible with the idea of security. You don't secure things against authorized access.
Contrary to what a few people like to say, the overwhelming majority of people downloading music off bit torrent/p2p are NOT doing it for 'convenience' and wouldnt pay for the music on ITunes even if it didnt have DRM. Most of the people downloading music are doing it specifically because it means they get it for free.
You are also ignoring the fact that other grossly overpriced items invite theft and law abuse.
There is such a glut of entertainment that there is no reason that Tom Cruise gets $20 million for a $100 million movie when a movie (and a host of people involved with the movie also get 7 figure and 6 figure salaries as well).
The fact is that a movie -- the hard technology of it, the writing, the editing, can be done at a 10th the cost it is currently done at (probably 1/100th).
Sane people do not pirate $6 dvd's. However $89 DVD is something different. Especially for a movie that made it's profits years ago and is in the "all gravy" phase.
Do people have a *right* to infringe (steal) creator's works? No.
But to think they will not when they can easily do so for $1 and two hours of their time is insane.
Also... I used to write software which was used to earn my company 8 billion dollars. Why are movie and television writers so special that they get paid for the rest of their life when they write yet another boilerplate television script?
Actors... writers... everyone in hollywood is in for a wakeup call. Multi-million dollar salaries are going to be unsupportable very soon. Already, I spend 30% of my entertainment time on free things like Star Wreck, Fan Movies, and so on. A huge chunk of my time goes to Mmorg's at $15 a month (maybe 50 cents per hour). And then DVD's of series like Mission impossible and Heroes run me about $1 per hour for entertainment. Why does a movie justify $15 per hour? It doesn't.
The compensation in the entertainment industry is grossly inflated.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Copyright is a bargain, not an actual "right". A "right" is something you could stop other people from doing to you. Since you can't stop Alice from copying to Betty, nor Betty copying to Cynthia, you have no "right" to prevent copying. No, copyright is a *bargain*. The public gives up something (the right to copy) for a LIMITED period of time as an incentive for creators to create. Creators have unilaterally abandoned their end of the bargain by seeking to control copying forever. The public is, IN RESPONSE TO THE ACTIONS OF CREATORS, taking back its right to copy.
Don't like that? Uphold your end of the bargain and see what happens.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
shouldn't they be able to deploy a wide range of ever-changing DRM systems?
This is significantly dangerous for the consumer since it means that the consumer's right to access their legally purchased content may be revoked at any time. For example - if the DRM server becomes inaccessible you really don't want all your content to be revoked (if the rights holder has gone bankrupt, for example, they aren't going to care that none of their customers can access their content any more).
Sadly many of the public who I have talked with about DRM seem to think this is a problem. Usually they say something along the lines of "I don't care if I lose access to my music in 10 years, after all it's 10 years old so not important" - I don't know about anyone else, but I still listen to music I purchased well over 10 years ago.
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