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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."
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
I found this part particular amusing:
"But the effort still has a long way to go before it can claim anything like success. The proof will be whether it revives home entertainment sales by getting consumers excited about the new freedoms of the digital world."
Really? New Freedoms? What crack are these people smoking? How delusional have they become? People rip these things of the disks because of the stranglehold these studios are attempting to put there. Once ripped, they can play them when and wherever they way. They already overcharge for content. 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?
People see the 'value' of an Audio CD or a movie and they know they are overpriced. The digital forms of that just enforce that opinion.
The whole economics of today seems like it's paying only for exorbitant CEO profits and studio whoring.
What worries me is not so much the attempted sale of "DECE enabled" media, people are entitled to their stupid ideas; but what this will mean for hardware.
If the idea of DECE is to have magic-interoperable DRM, than it is clear that they intend to extend this DRM to as many devices and platforms as possible. From the perspective of a DRM system, this is a terrible idea. All it takes is one manufacturer to fuck up on one device model, and the precious "content" is back in the clear.
However, from the perspective of a customer who wants to be able to repurpose/modify/extend/otherwise enjoy free use of his devices, this is a potential disaster. In pretty much all cases, DRM consortia work as follows:
1. Design a DRM scheme, include some "hook IP" that is necessary to implement the scheme; but copyrighted or otherwise legally protected.
2. Force anybody who wishes to implement the scheme, as a condition of licencing the "hook IP" to agree to certain terms and conditions, including "platform robustness" requirements, in the attempt to prevent the one-weak-implementation-leaks-everything problem.
That's the issue. If this takes off, virtually every common consumer device that happens to touch media in any significant way(set top boxes, media players, multifunction routers, PMPs, etc, etc, etc.) will be produced subject to "platform robustness" requirements. Goodbye third-party-firmware development.
Obviously, there will still be some hacking here and there, they can't stop that; but it could easily be the kiss of death for the vibrant, productive, (and legal) hacking and extension communities like OpenWRT and rockbox. You'll still be able to get a cracked firmware(if you have a hardware revision 4353 manufactured on week 567 and know which warez group to ask around in, so the DRM won't actually stop anything); but being easily able to modify your own devices, even for perfectly legal and legitimate ends, could well end up being a casualty.
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
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