Slashdot Mirror
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.
“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.
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
Just imagine old LP Albums having DRM. What company would still support servers to unlock those? Not even whe biggest multi-major-corp commitment would allow me to play records if this kinds of DRM would have been possible 80 years ago.
.sig: No such file or directory
You don't really want this because the content providers' notion of their "content" will certainly include stuff like those unskippable ads and other crap that drive you insane. With the content stored "in the could" as you propose, there's likely no way around this type of annoyance, and in fact with the content in the cloud they can change the ads, add additional ones, etc. whenever they like. And don't for a minute think they won't try to extract additional money from you by "licensing" you the stream for only a certain amount of time, after which you need to renew, etc.
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.
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.
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...)
my son needed his Dora, Oso and Little Einsteins.
This is where the problem starts. Why does your son need his Dora, Oso and Little Einsteins?
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 don't think It's supply and demand. It's price anchoring. People are used to paying $10 so that's what they continue to think it's worth. If the price were set at $2 for a CD sales would initially jump because people would see it as a deal since it's well below the established anchor but eventually they'd adjust to the new anchor and internally value a CD at $2. Then if you tried to charge $10 for a CD you'd have next to zero sales because it's ridiculously higher than what people think a CD is worth. This has nothing to do with supply or demand. It has everything to do with how people's brains work.
Think about it like this: the $599 for an iPhone or a Droid is arbitrary. It was a price point generated by market research that takes irrational agents into account (because as much as economics majors want to pretend we're all rational, we're most definitely not). Now when you see you can get a Droid or iPhone for $199 it feels like a good deal. But only because the original price was set as an anchor. If the original price had been $199 you wouldn't think it's a steal at $199 but because of the early arbitrary price (early adopters are almost always price insensitive) now $199 feels like a good purchasing decision. This is done ALL THE TIME by manufacturers and retailers. Why do you think there are such things as MSRP?
It works everywhere. Studies even show adding a few high priced items to a menu increases sales of ALL items on the menu. People perceive a deal based on relative prices arbitrarily, supply and demand be damned.
Thats what capitalism is all about isn't it? Supply and demand?
Under normal circumstances, yes. "Intellectual property" screws that idea all up though. Supply and demand don't work when supply is infinite. Prices are only set by demand, but that too gets screwed up when people find a way to access the unlimited supply for zero cost.
Record companies EXPECT people to pay the prices they set. Some will, many (who still want the product - just not as that asking price) won't. You can argue about "THAT'S STEALING!!!" all you want, but the population as a whole just doesn't see it that way. Supply and demand simple doesn't apply to this model.
Imagine you saw the Playstation 3 when it came out. You want one, but realistically you couldn't pay the $400+ price tag. A genie visits you and tells you that if you press this red button a Playstation 3 will magically appear. It doesn't disappear off some store shelf, it doesn't take one from someone else to make yours, it literally appears for free out of thin air. The only "cost" to anyone is that you will no longer buy it from Sony. Do you honestly think most people would feel it morally wrong to take the Playstation out of thin air? Nope - and no amount of bickering from Sony will change that.
With digital goods we have that magic red button. People were fooled for a while when they felt like they were buying physical albums and movies on a hard-media, but that trick is going away. They're not getting the genie back into the bottle. Even as an iTunes user I'll admit that my purchases there are about the convenience of having everything easily searchable and of a known quality. Not having to deal with shady torrent sites, spending hours looking for something, and then discovering that it's a bad rip, fake, etc, it more than worth $0.99 per song to me. However I'm paying for that convenience, NOT out of some weird moral calling. The companies need to learn to work that angle. Give me a product that WORKS - and works everywhere - with a price that's high enough to make a profit but still low enough that it's worth it to people to get it this way rather than resorting to the back alley ways. Price it too high or bog it down with DRM and I have absolutely no issue going back to getting my music and/or movies via P2P.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
That is supply and demand. The motives for people buying the goods at a given price is irrelevant - it could be mind control from the planet Zog , it makes no difference. The fact that they are willing to do so is all that matters.
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 only way the "supply and demand" model fluctuates prices is when there is a true market, with many people selling the exact same thing and many people buying it (think commodities).
In this situation, each seller is not just calculating what the customer is likely to be prepared to pay for their product, but how cheaply one of their competitors is likely to sell their identical product for, thus attracting buyers away.
The situation with music and movies is not a true market. Although there is still a calculation as to what the customer is ultimately prepared to pay, there is no real competition from other suppliers as, someone who wants to listen to one artist's music is not necessarily going to switch to another company's artists just because their CD's are cheaper to buy.
Yes, things like price anchoring and appeals to "think of the poor starving artists" help the public to keep swallowing the pills, but the real issue is that without real competition, the media companies have too much control for the "market" for it to ever establish the true price of the product.
Whether you agree with it or not, the rise of the Internet "pirate" is the first real competition these companies have ever faced.
This [ ] left intentionally [ ]
If the price of all food except for white rice was set (arbitrarily) at $5,000/oz. would that be ok? I mean, it would be your fault if you paid for anything besides white rice. People should not have to do without things they want in order to eliminate corruption. That some do is noble, and laudable besides. But it doesn't mean it's ok for practices to continue, just because not all people choose the same of the two evils.