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Install Copyright Filters on PCs, Says RIAA Boss
Don't squeeze the Sherman writes "At a conference last week, RIAA president Cary Sherman said he didn't support mandatory filtering by ISPs, but in a video clip posted by Public Knowledge, Sherman offers a far more troubling 'solution': installing filters on users' PCs. From Ars Technica's coverage: 'The issue of encryption "would have to be faced," Sherman admitted after talking about the wonders of filtering. "One could have a filter on the end user's computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from encryption because if you want to hear [the music], you would need to decrypt it, and at that point the filter would work."'"
It's funny how the RIAA and MPAA both seem to be using a public forum for their brainstorming technique. Most groups would come to a conclusion in private and announce their final and ultimate strategy. Nope, these guys just come up with idea after idea and announce them before they've even contemplated what they mean or their reprocussions. If my company announced every brain-dead idea we came up with before bouncing it around in the brainstorming sessions we had- we'd kill ourselves off with bad PR alone!
If you read TFA he goes on to admit that it's unlikely to get people to install the filterware themselves, but maybe if they put it into routers and modems....It's worth noting that the decryption doesn't take place there, and it'd be no more effective.
It just seems like this guy has it figured out- he understands what won't work, but he still wants to move foward with the bad plan. If you're going to go down, might as well go down swinging..?
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Yeah you guys go spend a bunch of money on that.
We are so fast approaching the time when bands just have concert promoters rather than record labels. I think this is a very good thing.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I think it's apparent that it's only their complete ignorance of how technology works--evidenced by these ridiculous statements--that lets them have any hope that their organization can possibly continue to be relevant in the face of the increasing numbers of technological workarounds for every countermeasure that they come up with.
One might get the impression that were they to receive adequate education in The Way Things Work, they might possibly lose all morale altogether...not necessarily a bad thing, methinks.
Perhaps we should sign them up for a correspondence course in basic computer science?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
The Right to Read. If you haven't read it yet, read it now, while there is no filter preventing it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You want me to run your software? I'll consider it, but you have to remember that my computer is just that... MY computer. Time on it will cost you just like it would cost from a mainframe from IBM. How much are you willing to pay me to run this software that only benefits you? If this takes too much RAM, CPU the overflow charges may be... up there.
Your security is not my concern, and should not be expected to be my concern. Otherwise you also have a responsibility to make sure no one breaks into my house. (You should be happy to, they could steal my CDs!)
Of course, the conditions under which I'm willing to run your software may change without announcement from time to time but will still be considered binding, much like whatever the "licensing" consists of on a CD is this week. Like your CD licensing, the wording behind this agreement will never be readily available. Perhaps I'll add extra charges for running the software on weekends...
It didn't matter how many video geeks knew and understood that Beta was better than VHS, did it? They were the small minority of video users... the same sadly applies to the computer world.
Don't ever use this as your example of why DRM is bad, because it's complete bullshit.
Go on, tell me why Betamax was better than VHS. You don't know why. Why? Because it wasn't in the real world. You can spout some meaningless statistics about Betamax, but it had so many things wrong with it, that the "technical superiority" was almost irrelevant.
Lets see a small example of what was wrong with Betamax and why it failed completely and utterly.
1. Beta tapes lasted 1 hour, instead of two. How many 1 hour movies did you watch back then? None? This made the tapes next to useless for movies. Back then, recording movies off of HBO and shit was the thing to do... can't do it with Betamax! Tapes are too short. Those VHS tapes, though, they are just long enough!
2. How many Beta tapes did you see for rent back then? A small section in the local video store, maybe? Even if that section started out the same size as the VHS section (30 or 40 tapes each), each month, the VHS section grew, and the Beta section stayed the same or shrank. Why? Because Sony tried to suck the blood out of the market, like we see them continue to do, with their ridiculous licensing requirements.
3. Ever go try to buy a Betamax? 30 - 40% more than a VHS in a lot of cases. So, shorter tapes, less availability and they cost more? Yeahhhh, that's going to win market share. That is until VHS started beating down Sony with consumers, then suddenly the prices dropped drastically. There goes Sony again, using their monopoly to rape consumers, then wondering why consumers flee their products in droves when other companies start offering the same or similar things for half the price.
4. The last point I'm going to make here is the fact that consumers, Joe Average, could not distinguish between Beta and VHS pictures under any circumstance. The difference was not vast enough like VHS and DVD. On top of this, given the equipment available at the time, even audiophiles really couldn't distinguish between the two, since the TVs and such were so crappy (compared to today) anyway. It would take tens of thousands of dollars of equipment for someone to see the difference. Given that people don't mind MP3's in 128k today, and people still watch VHS when they have DVD available, do you really think the supposed difference between VHS and Beta made a lick of difference?
No, Beta was not superior to VHS, except on paper. In every instance that mattered, Beta failed miserably compared to Beta. Being better on paper is irrelevant, it's real world results that make a difference, and Beta had no advantage there.
I'm surprised that no one here is referring back to Peter Gutmann's paper on Vista. Yes, it contained some things that were subject to misunderstanding (that could have been construed as factual errors to sticklers) but the point of the paper was this: Microsoft engineered Vista primarily to benefit content producers, not the people who buy the OS. And if you will recall, their requirements for Vista certification mostly concerned arm-twisting on the part of Microsoft: Show that you support DRM in all of your hardware or you don't get Vista certification; Oh, and by the way, make sure that your hardware will disable itself in any OS that doesn't toe the DRM line.
Sure, in the case of Vista, the more egregious steps are aimed at HD content, but the lion's share of Vista technology was aimed at digital restrictions management, not end-user functionality. Which is one of the reasons why Vista has been less than a stellar success: Microsoft didn't engineer it for the people who buy it; they put most of the engineering into satisfying the corporate obsession with control. This ticked off all of the end users who had a clue. Sure, the OS has a large lemming constituency.
But Gutmann's paper made clear that Microsoft was unsatisfied with leveraging lock-in of simple computer operating systems. He may have gotten a few things wrong, but he clearly understood the main fact that their (Microsoft's) main motivation is the extension of their hegemony into the realm of content. They ignored older content, concentrating on HD stuff.
It's still an open question of whether this is merely the flailing of a dying dinosaur or not. It will take a few years to see. Dinosaurs survived for a long time after their extinction became inevitable. The real irony of Microsoft is that they, as a computer company of all things, haven't realized that we live in a postmodern, information-age culture. Microsoft is simply one more institution governed by modern, industrial-age assumptions.
In this period of cultural liminality and transition, there are plenty of institutions like Microsoft (and the RIAA and MPAA) who are bewildered by the facts of the new economy. The old economic formulas are based on scarcity of goods, and even according to them, price always approaches incremental cost. Digital content, however, is produced at an effective incremental cost of zero, and the flailing of the RIAA, MPAA, and companies like Microsoft reflects resistance not only to the new paradigm, but also to the prevailing economic rule that price ALWAYS approaches incremental cost. In an economy of abundance, different models must emerge, but media companies and would-be channel monopolies like Microsoft have not even shown the ability to apprehend, much less operate according to, the newly emerging formulas that govern an economy of abundance, and it is unlikely that they will read people like Eben Moglen, Larry Lessig, or Yochai Benkler in an effort to understand the emerging reality, since they aren't interested in understanding; they only view these thinkers as enemies.
But please don't miss the fact that the issue is larger than just the RIAA and the MPAA. The incremental cost of digital media is merely one of the first fields to be impacted by the emerging economic paradigm. It's already affecting publishing and the general field of knowledge and education. Look for industrial-age institutions across the entire economic and political spectrum to be just as resistant to change as the RIAA and MPAA are.
These institutions will fight to preserve their business model, just as the RIAA and MPAA are fighting to preserve theirs. The business models are dinosaurs, and are extinct already de facto, but it will take a while before the walnut-sized brain gets the word that the heart stopped beating some time ago.
Change will be disruptive, but what will drive it is not rage against the existing institutions. Though that will obviously play a role, the real driver will be the emergence of new institu