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DRM Take II — Digital Personal Property
Diabolus Advocatus writes "Ars Technica has an article on a new form of DRM being considered by the IEEE. It's called Digital Personal Property and although it removes some of the drawbacks of conventional DRM it introduces new drawbacks of its own. From the article: 'Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects. For instance, you might loan your car to a friend, a family member, or a neighbor. You might do so on many different occasions and for different lengths of time. But you are unlikely to leave the car out front of your house with the keys in it and a sign on it saying, "Take me!" If you did, you might never see the vehicle again. It's that ability to lose control over property that is central to the DPP system. DPP files are encrypted. They can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here's the trick: anyone who can view your content can also "steal" it irrevocably. The simple addition of a way to lose content instantly leads consumers to set up a "circle of trust" that can be as wide as they like but will not extend to total strangers on the Internet.'"
Yeah you know me!
All right, time to start the ol' betting pool up. Let's guess how long it'll be before someone hacks that and just permanently steals everyone's DPP. I must say, however, it's awfully nice of them to make theft easier than ever. Why bother to leave your house when you can do it from the comfort of your office chair? If you'd like to ransom their belongings you can use the Internet for that too! Thanks Internet!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
This new development in the copyright arena is going to raise several important questions. Do we refer to this as "Dippy" or as "Da peepee"? Do we change the acronym to "Digital Pretend Property" or "Digital Property Penalties"? Will this technology never really take off, or will it only die after a multi-billion dollar campaign and several dozen slashdot debates? Only time will tell.
I wouldn't leave my car outside my house with the keys in the ignition for all to steal (well, actually, my car is terrible so I have contemplated it). However, if I could 'burn' a new car from a car 'blank' for the price of a few pennies every time I left the house I would. I would also drive it over to my friends house and not worry if I found a different way back - I'd just leave my car there and create a new one. There is no reason to treat digital media the same way as physical media unless you're trying to force people to play by your old rules when the world has moved on.
what are they trying to achieve?
surely after years of being beaten to a pulp they MUST have learned that any attempt at controlling is more than futile?
They keep trying for the same reason that politicians who push for shitty laws keep trying: they know that they only need one major victory and everyone will be stuck with it forever. That's why they don't read something like this:
and come up with a response like this: "but if I could make an infinite number of perfect copies of my car while retaining my own copy, at low or no cost, what would be my incentive to use a system designed to make me lose control over my car or any other property?"
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Dear IEEE,
No thanks.
Sincerely yours,
Everybody
The point is, for most younger people: I have it, you have it, we all have it. All the time, and for free.
Anything that doesn't encompass that usage model will get bypassed in favor of stuff that will adhere to that model.
The problem is for creative types that this means they get one sale in an efficient market. The first buyer then makes their purchase available to the rest of the world for free. Why would they do that? I don't think anyone is completely sure, but a reputation or status built by sharing is part of it.
The "one sale" idea pretty much pushes things back to a patronage system. Instead of recording a song and selling copies of it, a band is paid by some rich guy to play. The rich guy gets to tell them what he likes and what he doesn't like - and if the band wants to continue living off music they will play that way. They can then distribute their work for free without any worries about compensation.
The problem is, as quite a few creative types found hundreds of years ago, a patronage system quickly ends up where everyone is trying to be just like Elvis because the people with money to spend on the arts really, really liked Elvis. Or whomever was the big favorite. So in 17th Century Europe you had playwrites coming up with pretty much rehashes of the same theme over and over again because that is what the patrons of the arts liked and would pay for.
Sounds sort of like what has happened with music recently. But the problem is while the record labels have (somewhat) learned that an endless series of "Boy Bands" aren't going to cut it any longer with a patronage system it isn't up to the marketplace - it is up to a very small number of patrons. Is that really where we want to go?
And no, I don't see the Internet making much of a difference. If the Internet lead to broad-based financial support it would. But the Internet is a way to distribute stuff for free. There is no "financial support" involved. iTunes is a myth and you might as well get over it. Nobody is making money off iTunes, especially Apple who created it as a music supply for iPods. And as many sales as iTunes has it occupies maybe 3% of music downloads today. No, no money that way.
The IEEE fails to take into account something rather major here:
First, that sounds like a royal goddamn pain in the ass and I'm a freaking software engineer. There's a reason the iPod has been so popular.
No it doesn't, it instantly leads to people who quickly and repeatedly lose access to things they pay for, as malicious script kiddies get into their machines that they've added to the latest and greatest botnet, copy the files off, and snag the key. I can see people jacking those keys being as popular as sniffing for world of warcraft accounts.
And it gets even more confusing:
So this key is moved into a tamper-protected circuit (irrelevant, no?) that is device exclusive. So you stick it in your phone so your music files only work there, or on your desktop and they only work there, or online and it's not even in your hands (but useless if you're not online) and this license can easily be moved around and if taken, fucks you permanently. But also somehow is magically secure enough that I can't just use it to decrypt the files and strip the DRM? And I can't somehow duplicate this key? What about key backups?
As dumb an idea as ever, I suggest the IEEE leave this one to rot in the dustbin, and stop letting the media companies push the tech industry around.
Social engineering. They want to change the way in which we understand data.
Currently we tend to think of any sort of information as something to be shared freely. It's what we as a species do. I think that tendency to swap data among ourselves is what led us to amass the information that makes up our present culture and technology. It's a pretty basic thing in human beings.
But it's a pain to monetize data on that model. It didn't matter when distributing the data was expensive, since you could charge for the distribution. So as distribution costs for data approach zero, the challenge for the media cartels has always been to reframe our understanding of data, so that we think of it in the same terms as a car or a house. I believe that's why the term "intellectual property" was coined in the first place.
The trouble is it didn't work. It turns out that if you take a tune and try and rebrand it as some sort of household accessory, people still treat it as a song. So this is the logical next step: make that song behave more like real property, and see of that shifts people's thinking.
I can't see it helping myself. It's DRM, and it's always going to fundamentally, inherently insecure. But you can see where they're going with the idea.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
A quick Google search brings his Linkedin profile, along with his current job position:
That leads us to his company homepage, Telebind Inc. Not surprisingly, their sole product is "technology and tools to create ownable Digital Property".
This is nothing but a pitiful attempt to pass astroturfing as a peer (or standardization group) reviewed article. And it is more probable that not even he believe on his product, but want to suck a few into his scam, just like the ones who sold the rootkit to Sony.