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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
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.
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.