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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. :)
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
“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
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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...)
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?
But the point is still valid. You are referring to natural obsolescence of hardware. He is referring to forced obsolescence.
What if, in addition to building a phonograph cylinder machine to listen to your old cylinders (which is technologically very feasible) you were prevented from actually playing the cylinders because they were protected by a DRM scheme and the DMCA says you can't bypass those, and you can't Edison to sell you a license because the current licenseholder for the DRM technology isn't selling them any more?
And even if you found an old licensed cylinder player, you couldn't simply borrow it and make a backup of your cylinders, because to do so would involve bypassing the DRM scheme and that's illegal. You could listen to them as long as you can find an old player that was built specifically to handle the DRM scheme your cylinders were encoded with.
At this point, the current DVD CSS scheme is licensed, and that license is not perpetual. If the MPAA wanted to, they could force termination of licensing agreements with the various DVD manufacturers, meaning that no new DVD players could be manufactured that could play CSS-encoded DVDs. It's still possible to make DVD players, just not legal to make them so they can actually play CSS-encrypted DVDs. Once your DVD player dies you can only buy a DECE one, and it's incapable of playing your CSS-encoded movies.
Or you spend 15 minutes with each one of them and DeCSS, breaking the law to watch the media you've paid for.
I'm not saying that the movie studios WOULD do this, but they easily could. And it's not without precedent. Some newer games require that you have an old CD reader around and their DRM schemes refuse to work with anything that can actually write DVDs. Finding a working DVD reader not capable of writing DVDs is slowly getting harder, and there's no technological limitation keeping you from playing the game perfectly well on a newer model drive - just a DRM one.
And, as I'm sure several hundred people have posted already and several hundred more will also mention - none of this will slow down the pirates one whit. They'll crack it before the first movies become commercially available, and anyone who pirates the movie will one again have an arguably superior product to that offered to the paying customers. Pirates will be able to watch their movies on any device they own, keep backup copies, and freely move their content from computer to computer without hassles or asking a licensing agent for permission. Paying customers will have to beg like orphans, "please, sir, could I move this movie to my new computer?" and pray the licensing agent continues to find the business model profitable so they have someone to get permission from.
Of course, that'll never happen. *cough* MSN Music *cough-cough* Yahoo! Music *cough-cough* Wal-Mart Music *cough*
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
Hardware is often easier to make resistant to reverse engineering. For example, one way to get the secret keys from software is just to look at it in a hex editor or dis-assembly. This isn't easy, don't get me wrong, but it's a lot easier than using a SEM and a tiny drill to open a smartcard without setting off the self destruct. And if you screw up, you don't need to buy a new one to try again.
It also lets you close the screencap hole: with a cracked OS you can just capture everything that appears. Now if the OS just renders a black rectangle and passes off instructions to the video card to fill it with delicious, delicious content, then this is more difficult. Note that this has advantages as well, in that the graphical processing is offloaded to the graphics card with minimal CPU load.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
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.
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.
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 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.
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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.