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IEEE Working Group Considers Kinder, Gentler DRM
slave5tom writes "An IEEE working group is trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Its scheme will allow unlimited copying of encrypted content, which will require a playkey to activate. Trying to add a cost by making the playkey 'rivalrous' (what you take I lose) and rescuing the big content players from the brink of oblivion does seem futile, but it is entertaining to watch them fight the inevitable."
On tasty artisan bread.
Still not terribly appetizing.
Facts have a liberal bias.
Turn to page 5...paragraph 4, sentence 3, word 4. Write it in the box. Insert dongle to continue. Serial numbers, online activation, warder, blah blah blah, and the list goes on.
Guys, no matter how you want to fuck with the technology, you can't erase one simple fact: At some point it needs to be viewed by a human, listened to by a human, interpreted... by a human. That means that at some point the data comes out analog, and can be scanned, manipulated, copied, and everything else.
DRM will always be an excercise in fail.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There are examples of successful DRM out there. The PS3 is probably the most biggest. The PS3 has been out a long time now and it's looking like the DRM isn't going to be cracked anytime soon. The machine is definitely in the second half of its life right now and the most high profile attack was geohot's ultimately useless hypervisor hack.
So when the publisher is no longer interested in maintaining the DRM servers, I still lose my 'property'?
There are always ways to make money though even though people can get your content for free. Look at webcomics, videos like Homestar Runner, etc. if you are truly -good- at what you do, you can always make money because your fans will support you.
Yes, with no scarcity there is no reason to pay for all the crap coming from hollywood with generic plots, sub-par acting, etc. but if you are truly good at what you do, you are almost always successful.
Just about every artist or product "killed" by piracy wasn't very good to begin with.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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DRM itself is like trying to put a genie back into a bottle. The original genie was let out with the LP vinyl album. They played on ANY record player and didn't need to "phone home" to get permission. Along came cassettes and then CDs. Back in the 80s, artists complained about cassette recorders making copies of their music. I also recall the movie industry crying about the VCR. ANY form of DRM is unwelcome on my devices. Why? Middlemen only get in the way. I like to make backups, just in case. I also like to play what I want, on any device I want, and I shouldn't have to ask permission to do it. I got that permission when I paid amazon.com $1 for the song.
Who knows, it may yet work - if it manages all rights, not just the distributors rights. For example, I want my user rights to be just as important - if it fails, it has to fail "open". If the company goes out of business, I must still be able to use the stuff I paid for. Likewise, it must automatically unlock/decrypt the content when the copyright term is over and the stuff enters the public domain.
Treat my rights as a consumer as equally important as the rights of the distributor, and we can talk about DRM. It's probably still a stupid idea, but as long as the "R" in DRM is entirely one-sided, remind me why I should even consider it as an option?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And now you know why researchers are trying to create an artificial one....
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'm sure this has been articulated better by others but it's on my mind so here goes...
How do you get money from people who wouldn't spend it regardless of DRM. That's the core problem right?
Are these not the people that DRM schemes seek to deter? Are the people who buy things with restrictions feeling pressure to circumvent these countermeasures to fully enjoy the things they buy (LAN play with no internet type games, resale purchases, etc).
If this is so, then the only thing DRM has been successful at so far is creating an environment that encourages more non-customers.
crazy dynamite monkey
Right, because an internet forum is a great place to get accurate data...
Lets see here, Zombieland made $102,297,496 with a budget of $23.6 million (see http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=zombieland.htm) . And that isn't even taking into consideration any sales from DVD sales. I'd say that is a lot of money made in profit. Note that they've made over 50 million dollars in -profit- not just sales but profit after they've paid everyone.
Can you show me a great movie/game/etc that really -has- been killed off by "piracy" and not just the fact that it didn't appeal to a wider audience or that the movie/game/etc was terrible?
Technology is coming along at such a fast pace that you don't need a studio to make a movie, you don't need theaters to make a profit. The internet is full of examples of this. In the '80s and earlier, yeah, you needed professional equipment, today? You can go out and buy a camcorder that will shoot HD video, a computer and programs that add in special effects, etc.
So go on, find an example of something "killed" by "piracy" that was truly killed by it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
... IEEE members should read their own publication more
But the main question is, do we need a huge company to do all this stuff? Does having a $200,000 wardrobe budget really make the movie that much better? Heck, a lot of the stuff on YouTube is better than the trash on TV, xkcd and other webcomics are usually better than all the "professional" cartoonists with a "real" publisher and editors and the like.
And there are also ads and the like to generate revenue. Look at Google, it had a profit of over $6 billion last year, and yet it in essence gives away its chief product(s)! I don't have to pay $30.00 for a license to use Google's search engine, the majority if not all of their downloadable programs are free, the majority of Android save for a couple of Google created programs are open source, etc.
Again, there are very, very few people/companies that have been "killed" through "piracy" and had a good program that appealed to people.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I used to buy some 50 albums a year. I haven't done that in a number of years. And it is not because I am stealing the albums now. The new music sucks. There is nothing I want from them. At any price. I will admit to buying used albums, but that is for 'missing' items from my collection.
Rivalrous is an economics term. Zero-sum is a game theory term. Different, but related fields of study may use different terms for similar concepts.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The vast majority of movies either lose money or break even, so the big studios subsidize them with the profits made by the big hits. Picking a single very successful movie and trying to make an argument about the entire industry then isn't going to work.
No obviously not, because something has to be made before it can be pirated, so piracy cannot "kill" a game or movie. It can significantly reduce the probability of a sequel, presumably, but as we're talking about probably and decisions made behind closed doors that's tough to prove.
What we do know is that from time to time a loose lipped game company executive mentions that they de-prioritize PC ports of games because of piracy. This usually leads to widespread condemnation from PC gamers of course so it's not surprising that mostly they prefer not to discuss it. But I frequently read on Slashdot that "PC gaming is dying" and it's being killed by consoles.
Business is not, entirely, about rational financial decisions. If a team of people work on a big, complex project for 3-4 years and when it launches, 90% of players are pirates, that takes a serious emotional toll as well as a financial one. The next project, whoever is in charge may well look at PC game development, the piracy rates, the extra server and support costs involved in supporting the pirates etc and say "fuck that".
What a load of crap. Film technology has been advancing rapidly for more than three decades, but I fail to see movies produced in peoples bedrooms taking over the cinemas. After all, isn't the most successful movie yet made also one of the most expensive?
Interesting that you should bring up Portal. The team for that in fact was quite small, (no more than 10 people involved, according to wikipedia) and made a very similar game before Portal on their own - with presumably very little funding. Apparently most of the time and money required in Portal compared to the previous game was to create it in the Half Life universe. And even then, going by the MSRP for the game, it's a pretty safe bet it was in fact fairly cheap to make.
As far as movies go, a lot of things that used to cost a lot of money can already be replicated fairly cheaply with a green screen and CG. And then, take Avatar for example of what things will probably look like in the future. Sure, that tech is expensive now, but only because it's new. Give it a decade or two, and anyone will be able to create their own movie with that tech, with consumer-grade equipment they'll probably be able to purchase for the equivalent of 1-2K in today's US dollars or less. That will basically put the movie industry in the same place the music industry is now: where the only real difference is that the "expensive" stuff is a lot more heavily advertised, and you'll be able to get all you want of just-as-good stuff for [nearly] free from indie sources.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
I expect this kind of greed and stupidity from content makers, but the IEEE? Or are they accepting money to do something they know won't work?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The "tamper-protected circuit" is yet another attempt to bring about trusted computing, the idea that while you physically own a computer, there are parts of it that if accessed in non-approved ways, stop working. It's the only real way to implement unbreakable DRM... or at least, it makes the target the hardware, which can be much more difficult to crack than a software implementation. Think encrypted RAM with the key stored in such a "tamper-protected" chip, gooped up with epoxy and a self-destruct mechanism if it detects an attempt at physical access. They're just framing the idea in a different way; the result is the same.
If this ever actually took off, it could split the internet in two, between open and "trusted". Avoid these things like the plague, and refuse any hardware or software that uses them.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs