Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Patents DRM'd Torrents
Anonymous Crobar writes "Microsoft has received a patent for a 'digital rights management scheme for an on-demand distributed streaming system,' or using a P2P network to distribute commercial media content. The patent, #7,639,805, covers a method of individually encrypting each packet with a separate key and allowing users to decrypt differing levels of quality depending on the license that has been purchased."
If this goes mainstream we won't get in trouble for downloading "stolen" products, we'll get in trouble for stealing/cracking encryption keys. That should be even harder to police.
That's a problem you have with any DRM. However, a system like the one described would be a fairly interesting way to deliver live content to subscribers without undue server load, especially if the underlying P2P system was network topology aware.
Stealing would be walking into my house and taking my hard drive.
Do you lay any claim to the data on that hard drive? Would not the thief merely be requiring you to line up your kids and take new snapshots of them, or recalculate your taxes, or re-download all your torrents? Have they actually deprived you of anything, by your standards? I'm genuinely curious if you attach any value to time and effort, or if because it is merely digital it can never have any value at all.
This system will fail because nobody will download the restricted media; there is unrestricted media available at no cost.
You're dreaming, at best. 'Nobody' or 'nobody who is already using torrents'? There are a vast, wide majority of people consuming media like this that have zero idea what a torrent even is, let alone how to safely acquire and use them. Torrents only appeal to a small, technically-minded group of people. Subsequently, few profits are probably lost to this crowd.
Further, the amount of time needed to extract the secret keys from the restricted codecs is minimal, unless a hardware crypto module is required. I expect that any software implementation will be broken within a week; an implementation using hardware crypto will probably be defeated within a year of its release.
See, again: minimal for whom? For those that were previously using illegal means to gain access to the content, or for those people who actually make up their target market. You know, the people who use money who buy these things.
Some of us stopped feeling remorse for the recording and movie industries when we saw how extensive their lies are. Like, the RIAA claiming that Kazaa was killing CD sales, when in reality they had record setting revenues during the height of Kazaa. Or Hollywood accounting. Or the claim that downloading is benefiting violent Mexican gangs. After a decade of claiming that they are suffering financially, I would expect to see RIAA and MPAA member companies all defunct or near bankruptcy, yet in reality these companies are among the wealthiest and most powerful corporations in the world.
On these points we definitely agree. They do in fact over-charge, and a certain backlash is to be expected. I do see the danger, however, in a world where everyone feels this way. Eventually there will be no one else to support the content you are obtaining illegally, and so none will be made. Any way you slice it, your torrents are funded by the good faith of others, and you are abusing that. If you really, honestly believed that the content held no value, and had stronger ethics, you'd simply stop consuming it.
Indeed, using DRM-protected torrent to distribute paid-for content was attempted by several players almost immediately by several provider when bittorrent appeared. And lots of less-legal sharing cites may encrypt the torrents so only members of the community could access its content.
In addition, having different levels of quality in different packets of the same stream (the more packet you have, the better the quality), has been proposed in lots of old systems such as the OGG/Vorbis compression (so that a web radio emits only 1 single stream and quality decreases as packet are dropped, instead of having to emit several stream of varying quality). In fact, progressive JPEGs work in a similar way (first chunks contain low-res blurry image, later chunks add the missing details), except that they are not a media stream but static pictures.
Meanwhile the patent was applied for only in 2005. The only thing that wasn't widely used before, is using separate key on each different "quality" packets. But it looks almost straight forward given the other technologies.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]