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RIAA and MPAA Developing Domain-Based DRM

Posted by Soulskill on from the if-you-can't-beat-them,-keep-trying-to-beat-them dept.

An anonymous reader points out news that the music and movie studios are attempting to develop a new type of DRM that would allow customers more flexibility in playing content on multiple devices. The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) would establish a list of devices in your personal "domain" (unrelated to web domains), and minimizes or removes restrictions within that domain. TechCrunch summarizes DECE and notes that many of the big corporations have decided to support it. "The ecosystem envisioned by Singer et al revolves around a common set of formats, interfaces and other standards. Devices built to the DECE specifications would be able to play any DECE-branded content and work with any DECE-certified service. The goal is to create for downloads the same kind of interoperability that's been true for physical products, such as CDs and DVDs. Where it gets really interesting, though, is the group's stated intention to make digital files as flexible and permissive as CDs, at least within the confines of someone's personal domain. Once you've acquired a file, you could play it on any of your devices -- if it couldn't be passed directly from one DECE-ready device to another, you'd be allowed to download additional copies. And when you're away from home, you could stream the file to any device with a DECE-compatible Web browser."

2 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yes, as flexible as a cd by TD-Linux · · Score: 5, Informative

    In addition, the iPod will never support it. There goes 70% of the potential users.

  2. Re:Edison cracked it in 1977 by BlueParrot · · Score: 3, Informative

    Right. Which is why we all are still listening to analog media.

    Sound is analog. ""Digital" music is simply a digital encoding of an analog signal, if you convert it back to analog, copy the analog signal, and then re-encode it into digital you will have a digital signal, but this time without whatever bullshit encryption was on it to begin with. Yes, you will get some degradation in the process, but I can guarantee you that this can be made VERY minor, and certainly much less significant than the compression algorithms used to reduce the file size. Any statistical noise can be dealt with by repeating the process and average the result, systematic errors will be no worse than those inherent in the equipment you end up using to listen to it.