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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."
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
The amount of software I have a "cracked" version of running on my PC coincides in a scary manner (>85%) with the amount of software I have discs for sitting on my shelf.
The remainder I have either (a) lost the disc for or (b) had the floppy go bad.
Why so many of them cracked? In the case of games, so I don't have to get out the disc and use the DVD drive as a fucking 5 1/4" dongle just to play all the content that's been loaded to my hard drive anyways. In the case of the software, so I can disable the neverending stream of "UPDATE ME UPDATE ME UPDATE ME" crap and just use the software for what I need it for.
And don't tell me it really constantly needs to check for updates. It's phoning home just to fucking phone home.
They turn around and do this with "digital media" files, I don't bother with them any more. "Rights locker" my ass.
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.
(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!
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.
Au contraire, experience with game consoles suggests the opposite: hardware hackers wanting to run their own firmware will still do so (and with complex systems like these there will be holes), and then people who want to work around the DRM will piggyback on their efforts. The most notable difference will be that the latter will be those wanting to freely use their media (since people who just want to get free movies will just download them from the internet as they do today, sans DRM), while >90% of people using homebrew hacks to bypass console copy protection are in it for the warez games, which they can't run at all otherwise (non-DRMed media will play anywhere, but warez games will only play on a hacked console, emulators notwithstanding). Or in other words, this will make the resulting hacks somewhat more legit than game console hacks.
StarForce can break some drives /hardware/, parent had SecuROM break /software/ (drivers). I've never heard of this before, but I believe it inserts itself as a CD driver to prevent some things, so a small bug could easily ruin a driver stack and require a reinstall.
One of the many dangers of trusting legal, properly licensed software. Kind of sad that you can trust scene hackers more than legit content providers; I've found trojans in both but the former is by far cleaner.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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.
Well, that's demand anyway. The idea of "Supply and Demand" is that prices fluctuate based on shifts in either. But MP3s on Amazon or iTunes are in unlimited supply so according to supply and demand the price for them (regardless of demand) should approach $0.
I'm not suggesting that supply and demand don't factor into real world prices of physical products. But I am suggesting that the reason buying an MP3/AAC "album" on iTunes/Amazon is still priced close to the same cost as buying the physical CD *and* why the price for a newly released CD is still $9.99 - $13.99 (on average) even though the cost to manufacture them has dropped significantly since the early days of CDs is NOT supply and demand but due to price anchoring. Hell, Amazon still shows "list prices" of almost all CDs and has them CROSSED OUT so you can see how much "you save" when you buy it even though NOBODY is paying $18.98 for a new Taylor Swift CD. And that IS price anchoring.
Keep in mind MS also kicked a load of modded 360's off live and if they want live they have to buy new hardware. They are able to mod the hardware as you suggest but it's not problem free.
No, it's not "won" and if this new initiative takes hold, you can bet the music industry will try to climb aboard. I suspect, however, it will go about as well as "music DVDs" did and will ultimately go nowhere because DRM free music is now the norm... there is no reason for people to want to change now.
In an ideal world, we would have the video industrialists take note of what happened in the audio industry and learn from it. They haven't and it seems they won't. Sad really. They could really prevent the waste of millions if not billions of dollars in R&D into this new DRM scheme.
You mean it still can't run warez and it can't run unlimited homebrew with access to all the hardware. Other OS mode offers a quite reasonable subset that keeps a sizable proportion of the homebrew community happy. Except on the newer PS3 Slim, and my bet is Sony's move to ditch Other OS will get their full OS hacked sooner now.
I have yet to find a ripper that does everything you'd need to remaster the disk. I'd love to have a ripper that creates a DVD Studio Pro project containing all the assets, including the menus and buttons and links and chapter marks and scripts. Then one can intelligently edit the project to remove the parts you don't want, including removing the buttons leading to them, use an image editor to airbrush out the button, expose and preserve all the easter eggs, and finally remaster them all to your preferred storage medium without transcoding.
I'd love to take an entire series on DVD and remaster it onto a single hard drive, all the menus intact but with links to the next disk, and replace the optical drive in a DVD player with a swappable hard drive bay. The drive would include the option to play every episode of the series in order automatically, including the promos for the next episode stored on the special features disk between the episodes (or between chapters), without swapping disks.
The same device would also accept any USB device as a media source. Imagine a single drobo pro holding 14.55 TB of video plugged in. That would be enough to hold some people's entire libraries. (Except you'd probably need one or two more maxed-out drobo pros just to have the space needed to master one.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?