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DVD-CSS's Encryption Not Enough? Here Comes DECE
An anonymous reader writes "Studios digitally restricting (drm) or locking down content with DVD-CSS not enough for you? Well, get ready, here comes the entertainment cartel's Holy Grail, all-hardware encryption, via 'DECE.' And let's not forget this little issue."
Online music distribution is picking up now that DRM is fading away, and the movie industry wants to up the encryption? Seriously?
This sonuds like a good reason why I would want to pirate things rather than buy them. Already the issues with the stupid software DRM that's prevalent all over the place encourage people to either pirate the software or find a crack so that they don't have to deal with it.
DECE? More like FECE!
As in, poop.
Get it?
Oh never mind. :)
Hardware encryption would work okay if the studio's weren't so cheap and buy bottom-rate technology that takes mere days to map with an electron-microscope.
You will have to read the EULA VERY CAREFULLY before buying any device with DECE capability. It is very likely that Hollywood will leave you with no rights after installing one of these devices.
Now in order to get lynched I'm going to start with a statement
I don't care if they put these restrictions on
But I'll add a caveat...
As long as I can play it on any device that I own with only a single payment
My ideal these days would be to just buy a license (and I use the term deliberately) and for them to store the content in their cloud and for me (in a Steam type way) to then be able to activate that content on my various different devices. If I could get rid of all my DVDs and have a single, secure, backed up place where my devices can connect and download the content for local playing then I'd be much happier.
Otherwise I'm not playing. I don't want physical copies, I want stuff on disk and in the cloud, and if they don't do it for me then I'm already doing it for myself.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
What if ICANN goes under? The internet goes down. Many things we rely on depend on some company staying up.
*If* there's a multi-major-corporation committment to a central repository (which the article discusses), then the only real issues may be of posterirty, or deleberate revocation of rights.
If, on the other hand, individual vendors do their own validation: then as the Slashdot snippit suggests, we are at the mercy of the corporate whims, as was seen with so many DRM music sites.
while visiting the in-laws i actually thought about buying some cartoons on iTunes since they don't have a DVR and my son needed his Dora, Oso and Little Einsteins. This is more like an open encryption standard for online purchases than increasing DRM. of course Apple won't support it so anything you buy from itunes will only play on apple hardware/software. for everything else you will just buy a commodity box like a Roku and buy the content from anywhere on the internet and take it with you
“Consumers shouldn’t have to know what’s inside,” he said. “They should just know it will play.”
Yeah. Except when it doesn't. No internet connection? No movie for you. Rights locker company hit by power failure? No movies for anyone.
If I "buy" a movie, I expect it to play whenever and wherever I want to watch it...in an airplane, on a boat or in a cave; and without the requirement for internet connectivity or an external "permission" server. I'm fine with those constraints if I'm renting a movie online, but purchase, at a higher price, should mean reduced restrictions on transport and use, in addition to the rights to play multiple times.
And let's not even think about the "oops, we have decided to discontinue this DRM scheme in favor of a new, incompatible one" scenario, which obsoletes your player and movie collection.
A new challenge. Lets see if it stands for more than a week.
.sig: No such file or directory
All I ever wanted was to buy the LICENCE to the content which is what I'm really paying for and nevermind about how I get a copy. I want to sign up somewhere that I have a lifetime personal use licence to say, The Matrix. Maybe I get a free download of the DVD quality file. Maybe I need to pay $1 or so on top of the licence if I want to download a full BluRay of it to offset costs, etc. Why is this so hard of an argument for them? OH RIGHT. They don't want to sell me licences because then they can't sell me the same content over and over, I'd only licence it once. Rather than give this up and adopt something rational, they instead insist on pursuing these crazy schemes and wasting gobs of money and everyone's time.
DRM only hurts the legitimate customers. The people pirating get around it. The content owners spend millions of dollars (if not more) to create better encryption that is cracked in months and is then obsolete to try and keep pirates from doing their thing (which never works) but the only thing they succeed in doing is pissing off their actual customers.
I was at home for christmas and wanted to watch a Blu-Ray movie on my laptop and output it to my parent's HDTV. Connected up an HDMI cable and PowerDVD 9 said it could only run on the primary display. I disabled the laptop display and tried again; now it said that the display connected was incompatible or some such nonsense (DRM non-compliant). If I had just pirated my movie, I wouldn't have had a problem.
-SaNo
apple will never support this for i-tunes, as it would mean no one has to buy there overpriced crap anymore. so there goes the largest market.
The summary is slightly misleading. Yes, it's DRM but it's an effort by the industry to make it so that content purchased in one way (eg. on your PS3) will work on a multitude of other devices which may or may not be owned by you.
I dislike DRM as much as the next Slashdotter, but this is actually laxer than the current DRM employed on digital content distribution - where you're locked into the device you download it to and the possibility to popping over to a friends house to watch something is minimal.
(side note: of course this will fail)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
It might sound technical, but it could be crucial to persuading consumers to buy all the splashy new Internet-connected gear that tech companies will demonstrate at C.E.S., like HDTVs and set-top boxes that can download TV shows and films.
I have a set-top box which can download TV and films. It's a Windows PC with a BitTorrent client. No doubt there are other solutions, but mine works without DRM.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I prefer 09F9
... the same system! .encryptionKeys {display:none}
They must have been using visibility:hidden which is less secure because you can still see that it is there, you just can't see the content very clearly.
Those silly, silly people. That's what happens when you don't stay up-to-date.
that the performance hit of all their content scrambling and encryption makes watching media from a conventional optical disc unpractical. I'm fine leaving it scrambled of course, so long as I can put the entire disc image on my 1TB external hard drive. I have all kinds of 4.5 and 9 GB .iso files that are exactly that.
I find their pleas on 'ethics' amusing. What ethical theory are they trying to use? Hedonistic consequentialism? We'd almost all be better off if they were bankrupt so they'd leave us alone, so plotting their downfall is the right thing to do. They've declared war on me, I have no problem declaring war on them. And that's just the beginning. As software like Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, and Pitivi catches up to and surpasses its proprietary competition, the barrier for entry into digital content production will be nearly eliminated. Some day CC-licensed video will be as easy to find as audio via sites like Jamendo.com today, or software, like the stuff in the Ubuntu Software Center. The industry, by inspiring such a deep hatred in such a broad swath of the worldwide population, is digging themselves a very deep hole. My main concern is that we'll bail them out when they fall in, I'd be pissed. Think of it, working all these years to destroy the monster and then it gets my tax money? No way.
While they're lobotomizing their own digital content, the Free Culture will be replacing it, and there is simply no way to stop us.
As I have one of these.
Hollywood and its high-tech partners are deeply concerned that their customers will rebel against some of the limitations taking shape as video moves away from physical discs.
Consumers, the industry believes, could balk at buying digital movies and TV shows until they can bring their collections with them wherever they go — by and large the same freedom people have with DVDs.
The main limitation that's taking shape is Big Content's want for absolute control over media files. What we're balking at is the idea of locked down files that only play on certain network-connected systems with licensed hardware or software. The solution is to sell DRM-free files of content we actually want.
Music albums, TV networks and to some extent movies are all designed around selling content we want mixed with crap we don't want. Well guess what? The jig us up.
Now in order to get lynched I'm going to start with a statement
I don't care if they put these restrictions on
But I'll add a caveat...
As long as I can play it on any device that I own with only a single payment
And what about re-sale? can you sell it to me? can you leave it to your grandchildren? How about:
As long as it can be played on any device I or anyone else owns or may own in the future that supports an open standard?
That pretty much rules out DRM. An open standard is a standard that anyone can implement, with no (significant) barriers to entry. Otherwise the word "open" is just newspeak for closed.
With movies, I would not buy a digital copy. A company shuts down or turns off its servers, and all of that stuff you bought goes away, which would not be fun.
The world is how you make it
Remember, these difficulties are from them wanting information to behave like limited physical objects. Every step they have to negate information's greatest advantages over physical objects, in order to maintain artificial scarcity. Those who haven't shackled themselves would never need a "broad alliance of high-tech companies and Hollywood studios" to address the problem, since it wouldn't even exist. We already have video encoding standards, and storage medium standards, so we can move video among all our devices. The only problem is that it's too easy. It's insane that their problem is that something is too useful, and they consider crippling the technology to be creating value.
So, they had decided to finally DECEmate DVD format?
The summary is slightly misleading. Yes, it's DRM but it's an effort by the industry to make it so that content purchased in one way (eg. on your PS3) will work on a multitude of other devices which may or may not be owned by you.
If I want to take a movie to a friend's house (see first line of TFA) and play it, all I have to do is stick the .mp4 (or whatever) file on a USB stick and plug it in their player. The only thing that would stop me doing this is DRM.
...so its a new form of DRM which solves a problem that only exists because of DRM.
Now, I'm happy to either (a) pay a small fee to a streaming video-on-demand service to view a film once, (b) pay a reasonable subscription for access to a large media library or (c) pay a significantly larger price to download an unprotected copy in a standard format which I can watch time and again and "treat like a DVD".
This however, seems to combine the worst features of (a),(b) and (c).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I want high quality, unencrypted, unencumbered media.
You are attempting to compete against piracy, which can already provide me with the above, by offering me an inferior product at the cost of replacing my existing, fully functional hardware.
I did not purchase music online until Amazon MP3 came to town. Amazon MP3 actually fills my exact requirements, high quality, unencrypted, unencumbered media, and as such I have stopped pirating audio entirely and have instead been purchasing music again. It's worth the money to get a high quality instance of what I actually want, and includes an unexpected high value bonus; the album art in every file!
Amazon MP3 offers a superior product to that produced by piracy. Do the same for video and I will begin spending money on movies again, until that time I will continue to get what I want from the people willing to offer it; pirates.
bend like the reed
(from transcript http://thinkforyourself.vaillife.net/assets/afternow/01tota.streamjack.doc ) -
It was a few years later when the REAL crackdown came. The Listener’s License. What a fantastic concept. I can’t believe it. See it happened like this. There was this - There is all this piracy, see everybody was - Piracy was - Uh, Piracy is now what they now consider a theft. See in order to combat piracy which was getting really rampant, all this information was flowing around nobody really liked that so they wanted it gone. And they wanted to get rid of piracy. But they couldn’t stop it.
The Internet was growing everyday. No one could stem the flow so they created the Listener’s License. Started real easy. See music, legitimate music to purchase, was, you know, say 20 bucks. And then what they did was, if you signed up to get this card, you know like a loyalty program card of the day. You’d get 75% percent off. So a 20 dollar CD became a 5 dollar CD. And you could buy it legitimately. For 20 bucks you would walk out of there with 4 CD’s. Amazing.
Of course people were signing up for it in droves, I mean why wouldn’t ya? You could go buy a pirate CD for 6 bucks or you could buy the reall thing for 5. Consumers are such mercenaries. So they signed up en masse.
2 years went by, 2 years. Then it became mandatory. See if you didn’t have your listener’s license, if you couldn’t present your card, well you weren’t able to buy music. Part of the licensing agreement came when you got the card. And all of sudden people were out in the cold.
But it wasn’t just the music you know. The Listener’s License was created by the conglomerates. They all got together. If you wanted to see a movie, hey if you had your listener’s License you could get in for 2 dollars. (chuckle) 2 bucks. Oh you don’t have a Listener’s License, well you can’t get in. See they couldn’t control the piracy so they stopped it at its source.
If ever you were found to be a pirate or if your computer was ever found to have MP3’s that weren’t appropriate on it you were eliminated, your listener’s License was revoked and you were out of the loop. It's all private enterprise, you don’t have a right to music, you never had a right to it. It's all private.
No more movies no more shows. Can’t even buy art. Cause you can scan it. What if you scanned that picture? So, regulation of course is always the first step to total domination. But we didn’t see that either. We weren’t ready for the horror.
At that time the Listener’s License had huge power. Not the power it has today, I mean now. If you do not have a valid Listener’s License. I mean - well in our time you can’t do anything, I mean, you’re a pirate. If you can’t present, that is part of your paperwork. It’s part of your identification. See the listener’s License, after they came out with that. That was a huge step one.
But everyone was so focused on the Listener’s License they didn’t see where the REAL power play was made. See everyone was so whipped up, and the media again, you know the corporately controlled media. Got everyone focusing on the benefits and the drawbacks, a big debate over the listener’s license. But then what they didn’t see was, was the regulations that went into play on the recording equipment. See that was the one that really came back. They started putting these standards on microphones and any kind of recording media. You wanted to record, well you gotta adhere to this standard. Because this is the future. Got to make sure the quality is there.
Chips were put into place. All re
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Ok, I'll bite. What the heck is all-hardware encryption? Granted, I'm sure it's possible to implement decryption algorithms in silicon, instead of as software, but what's to prevent some enterprising programmer from creating a *software* implementation of the decryption algo? How can you *force* encryption/decryption to be all-hardware?
There's one thing that goes against the internet philosophy: Geographic restrictions. I can't buy amazon .mp3s, can't watch Hulu, etc. It's getting more and more annoying.
So I rented "The Hangover" last night. There is a nice new nasty FBI warning when you load the disk and it won't let you skip the previews or go to the main menu. It was another nail in the coffin for me an purchasing or renting movies. I'm about one more bad experience away from becoming a full blown pirate. What made DVD's great when they first came out was the ability to skip all the crap and to not have to rewind, this forcing you to watch PSA's before the movie is utter crap. (Yes there is a stop smoking PSA you can't skip too...)
"It is easy to take a DVD to a friend’s house and watch it on his TV. But things are more complicated when digital video downloads are involved."
It's not, really. If my friends don't have a multimedia-HDD able to play downloaded movies, I bring mine. I have to bring it because my movies are on it anyways.
Of course, I never tried with a movie you pay to download, which sounds like a really stupid thing to do...
What I'm wondering if the network connection is required then aren't they making themselves best possible target on the internet for terrorist, blackmailers and so on.
I mean its just not hackers who'd like see them fail. Say the carrier says sorry but we don't let bit locker trough because it eats up our channels...
Digital copies of media is great. DRM that requires any central storage = bad. I think these folks need to take a trip to some remote location and see how difficult it is to get any form of Internet connection. I can see the trip to the cabin in the woods now. Lil' Johnny brought his movie collection but sees "Check Internet Connection" on the screen since the nearest cell tower or broadband hookup is 50+ miles away. Digital rights need to be transferable and usable without any 3rd party dependencies. Learn from DIVX people.
And we are supposed to trust these companies with a detailed history of my "digital rights"!?!? They can not even protect their own content, let alone my personally identifiable information.
If this is the price that we will be required to pay, then I will pirate everything I can get my hands on.
Hollywood needs consumers to buy more digital content. DVD and Blu-ray revenues contribute significantly to Hollywood’s bottom line, but spending on those discs is dropping sharply. It declined 3.2 percent to $4 billion in the third quarter of last year. Digital sales were up nearly 20 percent in the quarter, but amounted to a relatively paltry $420 million.
Let's do some math, shall we?
3.2% of 4 billion == 128 million
20% of 420 million == a paltry 84 million.
Net difference? 44 million?
Jeez, looks like they got off easy. The economy collapses and their sales were down less than 1%. I feel sorry for them.
"Once it's digital the costs to the manufacturer drop and profit soars yet the consumer doesn't see any of that. We're still paying $10 bucks for a CD (sans the CD) how many years later?"
So? Its whats on the CD you're paying for and always has been. The CD itself is worth pennies. Its pretty naive to think that just because the format changes there'll be a serious shift in the price.
"The whole economics of today seems like it's paying only for exorbitant CEO profits and studio whoring."
It may well be overpriced , but at the end of the day media isn't one of lifes necessities. If you don't like the price don't buy the goods. If everyone did that then they'd soon get the message. They only get away with charging high prices because theres enough people willing to pay them. Thats what capitalism is all about isn't it? Supply and demand?
The system you describe is similar to what is described in TFA (licenses stored in the cloud, play content anywhere). One issue with it is further erosion of privacy. Whoever owns the licenses service knows where you are, what you watch, how often you watch it, etc.
Then again, Amazon knows what books you have bought, and the Kindle could track what you read and when if they wanted to; your mobile phone knows where you are; Netflix knows what you watch and your DVR knows what you watch and when; Google knows what you are searching for; Facebook knows who you friends are...
Perhaps David Brin ("The transparent society") was right and privacy is doomed no matter what. People who grew up in a world where it existed will just fade away and the children of today will not understand what the fuss is about. I'm old enough to be deeply uncomfortable with this, though.
The reason why we punish all these things is that we perceive them as unjust.
Voters as a whole perceive as unjust what the public schools and the TV tell them to perceive as unjust. And guess who owns American TV news.
I mean you have to buy new hardware, just to get more disadvantages?
When everybody can already get it elsewhere, for free, with no disadvantages at all.
Yeah, that’s gonna be a big seller! ^^
I mean, how twisted can one’s reality be? Reminds me of North Koreans, who are brainwashed to think that if they touch something with a American flag on it, that their hands will literally rot off. (I saw an interview with someone who gets people out of there. Wanna know where they flee to? China! Because it’s so much better.”(TM))
Or schizophrenic people whose logic and inner model stops being based on reality.
But I tend to see the good in in: They will go down even faster. Yay. :) ;)
(Oh, and they will go waaayyy down. Where it’s hot and sulfury
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
There are upsides to an offering like this. It actually seems to work very similar to Steam.
Single sign-on, all content available on any (compatible) device anywere from the cloud.
However, if they limit resale/transfer of licenses (I'm sure they will), price has to come down considerably. If they attach other strings (playable only from US IP addresses etc, no way to play a downloaded file without active internet connection), price has to come down considerably.
I'm sure they'll attach all these strings and that weighs down the benefits (all stuff available from cloud anywhere, always "backed up") and still price it the same as a dvd (or worse, blu-ray), overpricing themselves from the market.
Heck, blu-ray is already doing that. The players are already cheap enough, but I see no reason to buy one because the movie discs themselves are overpriced compared to DVD. I could see paying 1-2$ premium for HD version, not +50-100%...
The MPAA members made record profits last year. And the year before.
So the motivation for this is not to prevent “losses”, but to make even more money.
By selling us everything twice, thrice, as often as we don’t learn from it.
I wonder if kids that grow up now will think that this is actually normal. North Korea suggests that this is the case. I really hope for them that I won’t have to fix the minds of my future children some day. Or they (the **AA) are in for a looong life of pain, tears and nightmares.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
All of these key escrow schemes, I guarantee, will retain the "rights" of the content creators to force you to sit through the previews, warnings, and tedious menus each time you want to watch "your" content regardless of where you play it, every time you play it.
There will always be an analog hole for people who just want "the video" played beginning-to-end. There will also be experts who can make a scene-by-scene copies using high-resolution analog video-capture devices, and re-build a playable media file from those scenes.
If you are a content vendor, what you want is a combination of durable and fragile watermarks that will:
*Have "hi def" equipment detect copies that are not "original" or "perfect copies of the original" and either refuse to play them or play them at "low def"
*Using the durable watermarks, trace bootleg copies back to the original legitimate copy, even analog copies. If there are enough copies of a given original, use the court system as your rights management tool.
*For original copies and perfect copies of original copies, "phone home" one out of every 100 plays. Report back the network address and player serial number and the media serial number. If it's a widely pirated "perfect copy original" use the courts system to enforce your rights.
*For files marked for rental, refuse to play after the time expires. Rental information would be stored in durable watermarks. Yes, this could be defeated but it will deter casual or unsophisticated renters and make "throw away rentals" practical.
Why is this better than Digital Restrictions Management?
*It won't annoy legitimate customers unless they inadvertently bought media that had been previously illegally copied.
*Casual and even semi-serious copying will be easier to detect, and that will be a deterrent to all but the most expert or those who leech well-made copies from elsewhere.
*There is no foolproof way to prevent expert copies, and no foolproof way to prevent leechers from getting those once they are in the wild. Don't be a Don Quixote.
*You don't have the "bankruptcy problem" - if the phone home attempt fails the movie still plays.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Oh wait, that's right, they probably haven't.
Queue the obligatory Princess Leia quote in ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Does "any company" include Debian? Does it include the mplayer and mythtv teams? Can I look up the spec and implement it myself, without signing any contracts? If not, then these guys are a joke as far as "standards" are concerned.
That is why there never has been, and never will be, any DRM standard. If it's a standard, then people can create or maintain their implementations. If people can maintain their implementations, then restrictions can't be enforced through "technical measures." You can't have technical enforcement (i.e. deliberate bugs) and maintainability at the same time. That's an oxymoron.
The CD, not the DVD, is the past that you should draw your inspiration from. Although I'd say that instead of looking to the past, you should look at the current market, where the unDRMed file (forget the media itself; think stream of bytes) is the minimum baseline standard.
Hollywood, you keep saying that, but the working playback products are already on the market and widely deployed right now, without you having to try to create another fake standard or talk any tech companies into joining anything. There are millions of customers waiting for a product from you, Hollywood, not waiting for a product from Taiwan. We already have our kickass Taiwan stuff and we love it.
The pirates offer movie2009.720p.x264.avi and it plays perfectly. The current defacto standards that the market has already settled on, have everything that customers want. Where's your file? Sell me a file that mplayer/xine/mythtv (without any weird patches from you) can play. If you don't have one for sale, then you can't even claim the pirates are impacting your market, because you're not in the market yet. Statements that you want to increase sales, are a joke that nobody can take seriously, and only make you look either stupid or dishonest.
It's time to open for business. The customers aren't asking for DRM; they're asking for the files and you're telling them and their money to fuck off. How much longer can the agenda of revenue avoidance last, before the stockholders figure it out and fire/sue you?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm becoming increasingly more suspicious that all of these flawed, redundant, and ineffective (so-called) anti-piracy technologies are for one thing: licensing fees, but not the kind you are thinking of.
As US corporations move further and further away from producing anything actually physical, their revenues will come more and more from their Intellectual Property licensing fees.
As an example, if you are a chip vendor, and you want to create an HDMI controller that does HD, how many different companies do you have pay licensing fees to? What have these companies actually done to see your product through? It does *nothing* for *anyone*, except inflate the price of consumer goods because of the requisite licensing fees. (Especially for HDCP!?!) Every TV sold supporting HDCP pays $X to: Digital Content Protection, LLC, a subsidiary of Intel. It's basically a tax on making consumer goods for US markets/media.
Rights Locker Company crippled by Internet attacks (DoS, or whatever)
(talk about unfair competition. These could be backed by competing media companies, competing rights-lockers, disgruntled employees, radical groups, unfriendly governments, or groups trying to stop the playback of some movie they find offensive.)
Suppose they decide that this competes too much with pay-per-view or the competing solution of their sister company or holding company?
I don't know about you but as a Linux user, I will contact them and let them know that if it doesn't support Linux then I really don't care about their product. The day I cannot get a product and run it on my Linux machines is the day I will stick to illegal downloads.
This also goes for being able to play the product on a device that isn't connected to the Internet.
Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem
Any bets on how long it will take to crack this ill-considered DRM scheme? My guess is certainly less than 6 months from release. Why so long? Because they are likely using more robust encryption and it will take awhile to find the holes in it. In any case, the studios will still have to release content on DVDs for a long time, and that means it is less than 1 hour from release to wide availability on the internet... So, what does this buy the studios, content creators, actors, et al? More $$? NOT! Wider distribution of their work? Right... Can't get wider than universal access, which is what we pretty much have now. Such narrow-minded, short-sighted mavens of moronity should just shoot themselves and put us all out of their misery!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Most of you are missing the entire point of DRM. In corporate entertainment world, the thinking is this is the *only* thing that will save their industry.
1. Media conglomerates extract their exorbitant rent by controlling distribution. Anything that exerts more control over distribution is a project worth investing in.
2. Consumers are already used to the idea of paying for crippled content. Subscriber-based TV? Blu-Ray? Kindle?
3. This is the only way to induce scarcity. Which is a fancy way of saying increase prices and increase viewing restrictions. The industry sees a missed opportunity to monetize each viewing in a DVD sale.
This project is a 'go' and ordinary consumers will buy it. Most of you are already on Blu-ray right? Those DRM handcuffs fit comfortably. This project, or another like it, is next.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
for what the bad do. no security restriction will stop the pirate, it will only frustrate the nonpirate, and turn them into pirates
if you lock me down geographically, if you put a sunset clause in my hardware, if i experience bugs emanating from your security faults, if my media is inaccessible in certain times/ places... all you do is convince me that the pirate material is more attractive, because it has no such restrictions
eventually, the question becomes, what am i paying for?
i'm paying for more restrictions. and that's it
the other guy, who is paying nothing, is getting the same material as me, without any restrictions
its a no brainer
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Good luck phoning home from my media player.
And if it becomes mandatory, as in won't play if no net, then it won't be played.
There is a staggering amount of old content on teh internets. My attention is by far scarcer resource than content being pushed.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
I don't have kids of my own (either Homo or Capra), but I do babysit my aunt's children sometimes, and I was a child once. Children existed before Dora the Explorer was first shown. Children existed before television was invented. Some children even existed before 1923 and had access only to works that are in the public domain today. So how is watching Dora the Explorer a need and not a want?
Anyone remember Circuit City pushing DIVX players back in the 90s? All the same smell.
On another note would it be a fair assessment to say that because I pay for X cable/Satellite service that offers these shows I'm somewhat or absolutely entitled to being able to download rips of these episodes from the NET?
Not in a U.S. court of law at least. You aren't necessarily entitled to download a copy of a work to which you otherwise have access. UMG v. MP3.com. But you're free to buy or build a DVR to record them off Nick Jr. though. Sony v. Universal.
The content owners are sadly stuck in the mindset of trying to roll the calendar back to the day when no one could rip dvd's (and before that cds) due to technical limitations. Stupid and greedy.
If they were *smart* and greedy they would realize that what the customer wants is access to the whole catalog - on demand. And cheaply.
How to do this? Well setting up a server farm to stream the data would be a good start - but how to convince people to stream content from their servers instead of using p2p to access illegal sources?
Easy. Make it cheaper/easier to stream the content from a legal source rather than from an illegal source by working out a deal with ISP's so that data streamed from the legal servers costs less per Gb than 'normal' internet access. Cut the ISP's in for a peice of the action and they will help *encourage* streaming from legal sources.
As a side effect, currently existing pirated content sitting on the net becomes cost *un* effective.
Then only a moron would pirate a movie via p2p for more than the cost of streaming from the legal sources.
Remember most people only watch a movie/show once so the benefit of downloading for multiple views is not worth the extra cost .
Bingo - piracy obsoleted, content owners and ISP's a have a new market that easy to manage and exploit, old content becomes valuable again and the customer gets what they want.
In a free market, DRM would not be an issue at all.
Think about it, every major DRM encumbered format has been broken in a matter of months. Some also died simply due to competition offering non DRM encumbered alternatives. DRM is fundamentally doomed to fail since it provides less value to people for higher costs, which is uneconomical. Witness Amazon's MP3 forcing Apple to kill DRM. Witness how easy is to watch encrypted DVD's in linux. DECE will fail for the same reasons, it wont be long before someone cracks it if it really becomes mainstream, so DECE is no significant threat to us.
The real problem is when government intervenes. Governments make stuff like DMCA and put people in jail for essentially enabling competition. DMCA and sw patents are the complete opposite of antitrust laws (not that I agree with antitrust either). They legally protect and enable monopolies. Government's schizophrenia would be laughable if we were not living with it. So aim your pitchforks at the right entity, at the violent force that coerces you into using this stuff and punishes anyone who might otherwise provide you with an alternative.
Maybe if they go far enough, people will get fed up and boycott their products. Imagine if we did the Great American Smoke Out, only with DVD/CD purchases. Show them we will not accept this kind of nonsense, and even go so far as to demand an end to region coding and encryption on DVD's, as it's pointless.
BTW, I found a great workaround combo for my music collection: jamando.com. Legal to download, and free too, (by and large) Creative Commons released content, on Jamando and sister sites, and I download in ogg and/or vorbis format formatted files, so I don't have to worry about someone else restricting my access, or ability to use the "content" at some point in the future.
I agree with previous poster who advocated refreshing your music/movie collection periodically, however, I want to retian the rights to listen to that which I've paid for. Getting the music under the CC license, and downloading and storing it in a non-patent-encumbered form assures me I will have access to my files again and again throughout the years. ~Hal
This "cost per Gb" concept is very intriguing, would it exist in an hypothetical country where an ISP wouldn't offer unlimited download?
Just think of it as a warning label. I expect to see "rear deck spoilers" appearing on pickup tailgates any time now. (Please note that this invalidates any patent application for such a ludicrous product, surpassing the installation of one on a Hyundai).
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
At least until they'll get to the idea of planting the decryption into the costumer and neural connection.
The reason is simple, at some point the content you're trying to lock has to get to the costumer, that's the whole point. At that point (at the first point it's free, you might say) rip it. They might make it difficult, but you can always replace the actual audio/video generation with recording. There is no way to encrypt the audio/video. Then, if there is any open format that is universally (or almost universally) supported, the content is no longer protected.
The only ways (I can imagine) to protect this content are things like:
* neural connection with encryption, when removing the chip from the brain is impossible (obviously far beyond modern technology, not to mention moral issues)
* players check online for copyright of content (beyond modern technology, won't work without internet connection, privacy issues)
Or similar crazy ideas. It will take many years before they'll get to something of this sort.
All this apply only to non-interactive content, of course, because in interactive content you might encrypt (using hardware encryption) the computation, then it won't leak.
The notion is that content you license is encrypted to private keys unique to you, stored in secure trust stores that you possess, but are tamper-proof[1].
You have a limited ability to check out and check in copies of these keys to other devices to share, perhaps simultaneously, content you've licensed to a limited audience. Backup copies of your keys, lest all key stores fail, can be held in escrow for you.
Check out and check in of keys can be done with other trusted secure stores with trust established with well known PKI techniques.
The biggest problems are (a) this can't recognize fair use excerpts because there is no technical way to recognize fair use, (b) escrow services might be privacy risks, and, of course (c) [1] for some definition of "tamper proof" -- it is well known that possession of secret information, even in "tamper proof" stores is not to be considered secure -- the bane of ALL DRM schemes. Further, it is only as strong as the weakest such trust store.
Still, this is no weaker than present DRM schemes, though far more convenient for the consumer who wishes to purchase local caches of content.
Streaming solves the problem of local copies of content available for decryption at leisure, though this is not hard to circumvent with network capture tools. Rather, it offers the convenience of not having to maintain a local cache. But, for that to be accepted, it has to (a) be as reliable as having one, (b) be as inexpensive as having one. Compare electrical power: how many of us have generators in case the power fails? A few, but not many, I'd wager. Of course, power from a generator is generally more expensive than from the grid, even ignoring the capital equipment costs. One does not pay for bandwidth use on one's own LAN, but one does pay for internet bandwidth. Unless it remains a fixed cost for "unlimited" use, each stream will cost money, even if there is not a "per viewing" cost by the gatekeeper.
Right now, I can rent a move on a DVD for two days for $2 from a rental kiosk, rent it in high definition for $5-$6 on demand from the cable company (again, for two days), or own a cache of it on DVD for $20. If I'm willing to pay $20, therefore, I should have unfettered access to the content without additional cost, whenever I want.
Let's say that "unlimited" internet bandwidth remains a fixed cost, for some reasonable value of "unlimited". (I expect that bandwidth costs will go down over time for this to remain true, within normal price inflation: internet access always cost me $60-$100 for "adequate" bandwidth since about 2000, where "adequate" increased over those ten years.) And, content providers and access providers are "reliable". And, content providers don't go out of business. Then this model makes sense.
But, what if the provider of all your "unlimited viewing license" content suddenly goes out of business? What then? One should certainly have the option to purchase a local cache (for the cost of the media) so one can continue to enjoy it. Or, be able to download it to one's own local cache for free.
I just don't see the infrastructure and licensing in place for that kind of model, and I do not want to be constrained to "pay per view" for everything, all the time: I want an insurance mechanism against content providers' bankruptcy, perhaps service disruptions, etc.
I also want copyright content to enter the public domain in a timely manner (which such mechanisms could automatically enforce), but that's a separate issue.
In Liberty, Rene
There are going to be a lot of ticked off people in the military that don’t have access to the internet on their laptops. We already can’t play a lot of games in our off time and now movies. I hope books don’t go this way too.
http://xkcd.com/305/
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Another scheme to control content, embedded in hardware. What a fan-fucking-tastic idea.
People who just finished getting all HDCP-enabled can just go out and buy new stuff. The consumer is a conduit of money, and the consumer has more than enough laying around, being wasted on stuff we don't sell, so we'll just compel him ... ONCE AGAIN ... to buy a bunch of new stuff. LIke, every four years. For life.
Clueless Movie Mogul; to Boardroom: ... Because this new scheme is so today, and our old scheme is so yesterday. Oh, and ... you won't believe what we are going to come up with tomorrow! I'm so EXCITED!! I can't say much, but it's coming in 2013, we haven't even mentioned it to anyone yet, so ... Sworn To Secrecy, Everybody ... but ... the consumer will be able to watch movies. Yeah, you heard it right, folks! Actually watch them! Once they buy them in the proposed unique encrypted new digital format, of course. And get some new hardware, of course. Plus we still gotta agree on a few details of the standard we're proposing. Plus ... "
"
Thinking of CSS as "not enough" is like having a Café using 5 spoons of salt for every coffee, and when the customers are fleeing in troves thinking that the cause is perhaps they are using "not enough" salt.
It's data scrambling.
Encryption is when the key is sooper sekrit, get it?
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
You either sell me a physical tangible object I can do with as I please, or a license to enjoy the content, and when your copyright expires it better be unlocked, or you will release the technical details for unlocking it. That's what I tell everyone who advertises to me - usually on the phone if I can find a number.
Under the former, it's like a book where I can lend it to friends or take it with me to the beach or a hotel and enjoy the content. If I want to rip out the pages, or specific words, and paste them together in a different way, I can. Specifically for audio content, I am allowed to make a copy for archival purposes, format shift them into a format for my portable audio device, or allow a friend to listen. As long as I don't violate IP laws of course, so I can't just burn copies for all of my friends (although who would know? Also, that last bit is a legal grey area, I'm just saying I'm not asking for the right to violate copyright.)
If it's the latter then I have a license to listen which cannot be revoked when your DRM server goes down, and since you licensed the audio not the physical object if my CD gets scratched, you replace it. If my hard drive with your audio on it gets hit by lightning, you replace the audio file. My license to listen does not end just because I walk away from my desktop, I will losslessly format shift because you are not selling the data file.
In both of these cases, and one more, DRM you can't work around has no place.
The last case is when your copyright expires. I don't see any exception to the anti-circumvention laws for works where the copyright is expired. In infinity minus one years, we will have the ability to disseminate software to unlock the first generation of DRM (MacroVision, Windows Media, and CSS) but it would be illegal to disseminate until every work using that scheme came out of copyright. Probably you can make an argument and win a court case, but that require time and money - a big gamble for most people. They never thought of that...