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Secret BBC Documents Reveal Flimsy Case For DRM
mouthbeef writes "The Guardian just published my investigative story on the BBC and Ofcom's abuse of secrecy laws to hide the reasons for granting permission for DRM on UK public broadcasts. The UK public overwhelmingly rejected the proposal, but Ofcom approved it anyway, saying they were convinced by secret BBC arguments that couldn't be published due to 'commercial sensitivity.' As the article shows, the material was neither sensitive nor convincing — a fact that Ofcom and the BBC tried to hide from the public."
Content owners do have a right to make money from their content.
But the argument for DRM is a poor one. It punishes paying customers while not stopping piracy. Even worse, content owners/providers have to pay money to license DRM technology. It is a lose-lose scenario.
The CEO of Warner Brothers at the time predicted iTunes would fail, because no one would willingly pay for digital content. He compared it to Coca Cola coming out of the faucet for free, so why would someone willingly pay for a Coke?
As it turns out, people do like supporting things they enjoy, and iTunes is the largest retailer of music on the planet. Frankly, I think Apple has enough clout that they could make a difference here. They successfully sell DRM-free music. They need to publicly make the argument for why DRM is a broken concept so that the big players finally listen.
The MPAA/RIAA won't listen to Google because they think Google is the devil.
Back in the days of Mozart, once an opera was performed for the first time it fell into public domain. You were allowed to make money on your first show and by doing the best peformance of said show for as long as the public would support you. You were thus encouraged to keep creating.
Roll to the present and if you have one good song, you employ copyright to make money from it for the rest of your life, plus 70 years for whatever offspring you had or the profit of whomever you sold the rights to.
Since Apple is not writing or performing, they'll make money because there's always a new hot song out tomorrow. **AA are terrified they won't have scratch for their lunch money or to keep their stock price up for tomorrow.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well it couldn't happen as discussed, because _neither_ Ofcom nor the BBC are a function of government. Ofcom is government-approved (but not an arm of the government), and the BBC is wholly independent (with a constitution established by Royal charter, but not under Crown control).
Our government is wisely engineered almost totally out of this picture.
Right here.
On this new Guardian piece? Not that I can see yet. But having read the piece, why would they? There's nothing new in it. The Guardian now get to add some quotation marks to exact wording for things which were all described before.
Worse, they quote plain-English paragraphs then paraphrase it and tell you what you should interpret from it. All supposition, opinion and subjectivity.
DRM on BBC broadcasts is an arse, but so is this article.
It's only broken if you assume general purpose device like a PC. I forsee that once computers get fast enough, small enough, and have little enough heat to dissipate that eventually we will have the components encased in epoxy, with most of the important internals on a single chip, placed in a random place on a board (chips are placed in the same spot during manufacturing, edges are cut differently so they exist in a different physical position in the end product). There will be no media slot and possibly no ports of any kind for hooking up peripherals. It won't have general access to the internet, and will only be able to visit approved services, where all code is signed and encrypted so as not to allow unsigned code to run. If you look at the reason most DRM was cracked, it was because they existed on a run-of-the-mill computer, where the key was stored in memory. Or you have a console, where you can add on a mod chip, or edit the save game files to create a buffer overflow error. If you remove the ability of the user to interact with the machine at that level, then you go a very long way towards most people not bothering to break the DRM. It's only a matter of time before some $25 machine becomes all you need, and the only way, to play your media content, but that $25 machine is encased in epoxy and has no user accessible data of any kind. It just has HDMI out, and an Ethernet port. The software inside will only connect and run certified software.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The technical issues behind this fracas are even more banal, and so trivial that it's already been reverse engineered. In effect, the "DRM" was purely a closed specification, and not a technological measure such as encryption.
Unsurprisingly, the specification has already been deployed in popular open-source projects.
For those interested, the technical extent of the "DRM" and "encryption" was the use of a pre-calculated Huffman table, which must be embedded in the receiver firmware, in order to obtain the programme guide.
You're technically correct (the best kind of correct!) but getting it to work 99% of the time is still a ways off and will require some big technological breakthroughs. Even today's best (in terms of cracking difficulty) DRM schemes, HDCP and TPM-enabled DRM, are still crackable with hardhacks - there are even home HDCP circumvention kits, all you have to do is tap into some wires running out of a TV's HDCP decoder (or you could just get an HDCP stripper box and hope the key doesn't get blacklisted). TPM-enabled DRM is the toughest as it places the decryption keys in a tamper-proofed piece of hardware, but even this has been broken using some fancy equipment.
Let's even say, for the sake of argument, that you can use quantum encryption tech to have the data stream encrypted until it reaches the pixels and speakers themselves. A sufficiently sharp camera with some software pointed at the screen could effectively make a digital rip via light, and then you could tie into the speaker cone leads (sorry, no way to do the same for speakers without super-advanced nanotech) and get a good analog audio rip. You'd have a very good rip using the analog hole, which will always exist until there are surveillance cameras in our homes or non-DRM'ed files are impossible to open.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel