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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.
Are the two options mutually-exclusive? Ask the PC Games industry whether copy protection is needed or futile. It's needed because retailers/publishers won't sell the game without it. It's mostly futile for the obvious reason (although I'm sure it snags some casual copiers.)
A more interesting question would be to ask a PC game maker if they'd release their game with no copyright, if their publishers/retailers allowed them to. Right now, they have no choice-- given the choice, which would they make?
Comment of the year
The problem with DRM is that the copyright holders want it to be a magic bullet to control exactly how a product is used by the consumer. Unfortunately for them, the consumer usually has a different idea of what they want to do with their own legitimately purchased products.
The Media companies need to understand that what they really need to focus on is getting customers to pay for the song. How they get it should be device agnostic -- a download, a CD, recorded off the air, etc. Once the "license" for that song is acquired, the consumer should be legally entitled to do whatever they want with it, including (but not limited to) space shifting, time shifting, remixing (for non-commercial use), transcoding, and demonstration.
While I don't agree with "file sharing" in a general case as a legitimate practice anymore (I think enough legal alternatives exist) the litigation-happy companies going after every last dime because someone ripped a legally purchased song into an MP3 that's on their iPod, desktop PC, Laptop PC, car CD changer, digital picture frame, gaming console, playing in the background of a youtube video of their kids, and their cellphone ringtone. Technology has made media accessible EVERYWHERE, and the rights of the consumer to use it as such should outweigh the nickle-and-dime dreams of the RIAA.
Car locks, home locks, e-mail accounts, and computer firewalls all differ greatly from media DRM in (at least) one important way:
Not one of the security models used in his analogy depends on giving the key to the potential attacker. With media DRM you are given a restricted format and an obscured key to unlock it. This is its weakness, and has no corollary with the examples he gave.
Two - in the case of car and home locks - deterrence is enough. I don't need to secure my house against a perfect thief, unless I have the Hope diamond in my bedroom. I only need to secure my home better than my neighbor does. Even securing my house well enough to change the risk:reward or difficulty:reward balance is enough to greatly reduce the chances of a break-in.
Price the content based on quality, and make it convenient. People prefer convenience.
It really sucks that, as it stands, pirate content is easier to acquire, easier to manipulate, easier to consume, and is priced more effectively.
Someone will get rich when people like me are better off paying for content rather than paying to steal it.
No matter what the medium, service, or object, there has always been piracy, and always been people who will copy anything.
Counterfeiting is big business. As are knock-offs of Gucci and Chanel.
I've been using computers for nearly 30 years now, and since the day I started programming, I've seen piracy. In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of any protection scheme that hasn't failed. From early software anti-copying measures, to serial numbers, to DRM, to DVD encryption, its all failed miserably to stop the determined.
I've often wondered what the actual cost of these measures truly is to the companies that use them. If they create them internally, there's the development cost. If they license them, they end up paying per-use, I would guess. Either way, it seems to me that this is one of the ultimate excersizes in futility. I've often wondered if this was due to stubborness or simply stupidity. Either way, it ends up being a burden to the legitimate user, and hasn't, as far as I can tell, stopped the illegitimate users.
Take copy protection. When I was a 13 year old using an Apple IIe, everyone I knew was pirating software. We did it because there was no way we could afford to buy it, for the most part. While I acknowledge it was stealing, at the end of the day, it wasn't a loss, because we wouldn't have done it if we could a) afford it, or b) live without it.
So what did copy protection accomplish? It simply stopped people who bought it from making backups of legitimately purchased software. I remember once when I school I went to had a bad drive, and through stupidity ended up destroying multiple copies of AppleWorks trying to get it working on a machine. A "friend" of mine attempted to make duplicates of legitimate software so they had enough to go around for classes. Because of the copy protection, he ended up using cracked software to make copies so they could teach class for the two weeks it took to get Apple to acknowledge they owned the software and to ship it out to them.
As far as my own personal views, I can see the motivation for someone who is young and poor to make illegitimate copies of digital property. Mainly because you can't afford it. I know a few years ago, $20 made a differenc between eating or not. I sure didn't have it to spend on (software, CD's, etc.).
Now, however, I buy what I need to use. When I could afford it, I went and bought CD's to replace all the cassette copies of my favorite bands. I can afford it, and I recognize that if my favorite (artist, author, software company) doesn't sell their work, they won't make more for me to enjoy. Could I suck down my favorite albums off a Torrent? Sure. But I don't have a single desire to do so. I want that struggling band to sell enough CD's that they'll make the next one.
So, does any sort of copy protection benfit anyone at all? Maybe the guys who write/license it.
But everyone else loses, in the end.
Hopefully the negative feedback inherent in this system will rip it apart. One can only hope.
Bill
How about proposals that don't destroy our physical property rights? Stop telling people what they can do with their DVD players and computers, and we'll have more respect for your copyrights. Our physical property rights are the result of centuries of common law and culture. They should get primacy over intellectual property rights because they are a tradition that has been with us, and worked for us, for far longer than intellectual property has been around.
It really will always fail but at the same time I am sick of the pirates as well.
Pirate's Bay is making money off of other peoples work. They Sell ads on their website they are not the good guys. I don't like the RIAA or the MPAA going after grandmothers, little kids, and college students and they are also not the good guys for sure.
As I said it seems that we are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
You have two groups of people that seem to think they are entitled to rule the world.
You have the media companies that think that they should have the right to control how you watch and or listen to their media. If they could do figure out how they would charge you for every person that you let listen to your music. Don't put that CD on at a party and heaven forbid you play while tailgating at a football game! Don't forget that broadcast flag! They must sell you that show on DVD when they get around to selling it.
And then you have the people that think they are entitled to take any media that they can! You can tell them by their matting call. "I it isn't my responsibility to make your business model work!"
I really don't mind paying for my music. I don't mind buying or renting DVDs. Heck I don't even rip the DVDs I get from NetFlix. But I want to record shows off my TV for my own use and I want to put my DVDs on my hard drive and my iPod. Oh and I don't want to pay bunch for my digital music. Even $.99 for a song is a bit silly folks.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You need to tell people what rights they don't have so they don't violate the law without being put on notice.
However, copy protection is wrong if for no other reason that you may interfere with a person's lawful right to copy.
Books do this quite well: They have a notice inside that says "copyright... all rights reserved." Most books can be copied with a regular photocopier.
One thing books do not do right:
Many do not alert you that you do have certain fair use and other rights.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
People no longer see the value in buying a record from 1968 as digital format at a high price. The digital cost has effectively gone to zero.
What copyright holders refuse to accept is perhaps with the consumer aware of the value, that they simply not prepared to but the music at the price asked.
I am an example, I travel all the time, and in my earlier life I spend thousands of dollars on movies. Now I cannot see movies ( I live in France and most DVD's seem to be in French Dutch and German etc) because I travel and frankly having invested lots of money in kids's DVD that get scratched, I am fed up with the price and the infexibility of delivery.
Now I download a digital files because I can. I would pay 5 Euros a film - no interest in Blue ray etc. No one will offer me a site where I can download a film and pay.
Please don't blah blah stealing to me. I am willing to pay. If they are so inflexible that they refuse in a capable world to sell me their product how I want it, and I can get it for free, well I can and will do this.
When they bother to ask me, perhaps they might learn there are many different ways people will pay.
When the cost of duplication is zero, be careful in how you price your product.
They have no clue.
I've recently been recovering data from some 20+ year old Commodore 64/128 disks (mostly interested in old papers). They were written using the word processors of the time, and can't really be recovered without them. I still have the old disks, and for the most part the data is still fully readable. I legally purchased the word processor many years ago, and still have the disks. My methodology was to recover the data to a modern PC running linux to an image file, and then run the word processor off an image file using an emulator.
Of course, I was thwarted by the copy protection on the disks. I couldn't get a proper image of them because of it. I wound up having to find a cracked copy of the word processor on some website (which took me all of 20 minutes to find using Google), and can recover my old papers perfectly.
It's very amusing to me that the CRACKED version of the software is actually more valuable to me than the non-cracked version. Re-buying the software (even if it was available) is useless to me, as I can't run it on an emulator, and thus transfer the data to somewhere useful.
This may seem like a special case.. but I don't think so. Even 20+ years later I can STILL get the cracked, pirated version of the software. The software was cracked many years ago, so it didn't really prevent much of anyone from getting it if they wanted to. I suspect if I had used a proper C64 copy utility I'd have been able to copy the disk anyway. The only thing it prevented was ME, the guy who bought the software from using the product as intended.
AccountKiller
I'm going to quote myself from the comment I made there yesterday (comment 54):
The only reason copyright law was enacted in the first place was to "promote the useful arts". So tell me, how does locking up and extracting maximum profit from a work for up to 150 years "promote the useful arts"? Currently I can't build on by remixing or being too closely inspired by current works until long after I'm dead? Disney would never have had their Snow White if the Grimm Brothers had been able to exercise this level of control. It's an ironic situation.
Now with that said, if copyright was actually set to a sane level I'd have a lot more respect for it. Like 14 years - that's more than enough time to make a reasonable profit off of your work. And none of this eternity DRM. If your restrictions scheme doesn't have an expiry mechanism it should be outright illegal.
Shh.
is needed for copyright to work at all. There must be some barrier to copying, or copyright vanishes magically into thin air. Barriers to copying, as is pointed out by many comments here, are like locks, keep 'your friends' from copying, even if they don't stop your enemies.
The problem is, of course, at a certain point, it doesn't matter. If people can infinitely copy the work with the lock broken, copyrighted works do not have a barrier to copying beyond a trivial investment of time. (And the tools can be near-completely automated.)
And, without this barrier to copying, copyright does not exist. I don't mean in a moral sense, or a legal sense, I mean in a practical sense. There is no such thing, in society, right now, as copyrights on music. The laws involving them might still exist, but the concept itself exists more in absence.
As DVD copying gets more practical, there will soon be no such things as copyrights on DVDs. Right now it's at the edge, and has been delayed by the lack of a Napster designed to share DVDs to launch the idea into the public mind, enough bandwidth, and the fact you'd have to burn them, on double-density DVDs even. I give it another five years.
Note to people who are about to argue why we, morally or practically, need copyright: I didn't say this was a good thing. I'm just stating facts.
So, 'copy protection', as in, actual difficulty in copying, is needed for copyright. OTOH, all 'copy protection' and DRM schemes on computers, do not actually provide that, so they are rather pointless.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Then she asked "why can't we download these movies right now"?
The movie and music industries need to realize that restricting content only shrinks the market for your products. With every instance of artificial restrictions, I can easily name many situations where the distributor of that content lost a potential sale:
Movies released to theaters - OLD model good for teens, not good for parents with young kids, a home theater and high speed internet. I would love to see new releases, but we can't really get to the theater (and we hate going there anyway). Why not let me "rent" the movie at my house? (I have digital cable with on-demand movies, but the list of movies is not current with new releases.) The practice of staging release times (in general, theatre, then aeroplanes, then rental, then buy-to-own media) is pretty well established, and I'm pretty sure the justification is that it maximises profits. At each stage in the chain, the later release would take away sales from the earlier one, if they'd come out at the same time, and not vice versa. e.g. People watch a movie in the theatre (because they're keen to see it and there's no other way), then later buy the DVD. With a simultaneous release, they'd just buy the DVD and stop there. I'm sure the studios are bright enough to stop this as soon as it becomes profitable to do so.
So the answer to your wife is -- 'because they think they can make more money by making us wait'.
DVD region coding is a slightly different thing, in that it's about distributors setting prices based on specific markets, and being able to stagger publicity campaigns (to spread spending over time, and to utilise resources that can't be duplicated, like actors for personal appearances and interviews). For a while it looked as if DVD region encoding was dead in the water, since it felt as if everyone (in Europe at least) had a hacked player -- but now that DVD is mainstream, the vast majority of consumers play the game -- while those who care and can be bothered (I like importing Japanese DVDs), can work around it and not get hurt. Actually it's worked out quite well.
DRM in no way alters the risk of copying. It only alters the difficulty of copying. A thief trying to break into a car that is locked takes on inherently more risk then a car that is unlocked because he is more likely to be seen. Copying a DRMed song from itunes is no more risky then copying a song from a CD.
One problem...
Make the lock as strong as you want it. But if one person.. anywhere in the world breaks it, then it is broken for everyone.
It would be like if one person figured out how to jimmy a chevy in london and all chevy locks throughout the world unlocked.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's a silly argument. It's pitifully easy to rip a DVD and share it online. I know for a fact that I could go and download 300 off of Pirate Bay if I wanted. But I don't want to. I *want* to do the right thing. I *want* to purchase the movie legally from the content owner. I *want* MovieLink to have a better selection than when I was using it. I *want* iTunes to carry more blockbusters other than just Disney movies.
As a consumer, I want those things and have a track record of being willing to pay for them. The infrastructure exists in the form of MovieLink, iTunes, Vongo, etc., and are no more dangerous than a DVD. (In fact, it's quite a bit easier to rip from a DVD.) In most cases, they also generate the same revenue per copy. Yet studios are blind to these simple facts.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I know we all love the car analogies, but it seems to me that to really make people understand this, you have to go even simpler:
Digital products, by definition, are represented by 1s and 0s. Because of this, it is no longer a physical product. It has become information.
By nature, information can be transferred. Also, you cannot prevent me from transfering some specific information unless you monitor all the information I send out. This means monitoring my mail, monitoring my holiday pictures, monitoring the video I took of my family during christmas. Unless you monitor ALL information, I will be able to transfer illegal information.
And pray that nobody ever finds a way to monitor and prevent ALL illegal information. If that ever happens, free speech will become illegal, and all your information is already monitored.
Good old paper mail is the best analogy still. You cannot prevent people from mailing song texts to eachother unless you monitor ALL their mail. This does not happen. (But don't tell the record companies, or they will get fuming over such a loophole...)
I lost my sig.