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4 Microsoft Engineers Predicted DRM Would Fail 10 Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes "Ars is running an article about a paper written just over a decade ago by four engineers at Microsoft. In it, they talk about the darknet, and how it applies to distributing content online. They correctly predicted the uselessness of DRM: 'In the presence of an infinitely efficient darknet — which allows instantaneous transmission of objects to all interested users — even sophisticated DRM systems are inherently ineffective.' The paper's lead author, Peter Biddle, said he almost got fired over the paper at the time. 'Biddle tried to get buy-in from senior Microsoft executives prior to releasing the paper. But he says they didn't really understand the paper's implications — and particularly how it could strain relationships with content companies — until after it was released. Once the paper was released, Microsoft's got stuck in bureaucratic paralysis. Redmond neither repudiated Biddle's paper nor allowed him to publicly defend it.' The paper itself is available in .DOC format."
DRM hasn't failed and isn't useless. It's quite successful at pissing off honest customers and turning them towards piracy and circumvention.
Who didn't predict that?
... except for the few people I knew who worked for companies that stood to benefit from the wide acceptance of DRM, pretty much everyone was predicting it was a disaster starting in about 1996.
The DMCA has, in fact, prolonged the life of DRM by making it a literal crime to circumvent it. At least in the US.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I like the sound of that.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They still put CSS on DVDs. That doesn't mean it does anything to protect anything.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Not from what I can see. AACS was cracked within a year or so of the arrival of Blu-ray and HD-DVD, with BD+ falling not long after. The DRM on most ebook formats was stripped within weeks or less.
The DMCA just makes sure that the tools to strip DRM are hosted outside the US.
Couldn't they have torrented a pdf file to make their case?
Basically, for these folks, the darknet paper was just writing the obituary for the Palladium (trusted computing) project they were working on for Microsoft. They knew that it wouldn't stop piracy, so might as well explain why that is the case and move on...
The paper presentation at CCS 2002 was pretty good. I was one of the about 60 people in the room and 5 minutes in I had the feeling of witnessing history in the making. And yes, in the Q&A part, they did directly confirm that they thought DRM was completely doomed from the beginning.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
CSS isn't just about stopping piracy. It also requires a license to impliment legally (Being both patented, and covered under the DMCA or your national equivilent). The terms for this license include a number of other conditions, including mandating that players respect the region code byte and that they not provide the ability to skip videos in a certain navigational area usually used for anti-piracy warnings and studio logos. As an anti-piracy measure it is useless today, but it still serves to keep consumer electronics manufacturers (Who cannot afford to go underground to avoid lawsuits) more-or-less in compliance with the region system.
...hell, most of us knew that back when we were using nibblers on Commodore 64 boxes to copy stuff onto blank 720k floppies. ;)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Te hoped that writing a paper saying so would reassure Microsoft's critics in the technical community that Redmond wasn't planning to lock down the PC in order to satisfy Hollywood. And by making it clear that the people behind Microsoft's "trusted computing" push were not fans of DRM, Biddle hoped he could persuade the technical community to consider other, more benign applications of the technology he was building.
snip
It didn't work out that way. "I almost got fired over the paper," Biddle told Ars. "It was extremely controversial." Biddle tried to get buy-in from senior Microsoft executives prior to releasing the paper. But he says they didn't really understand the paper's implications—and particularly how it could strain relationships with content companies—until after it was released. Once the paper was released, Microsoft's got stuck in bureaucratic paralysis. Redmond neither repudiated Biddle's paper nor allowed him to publicly defend it.
At the same time, "the community we thought would draw a connection never drew the connection," Biddle said, referring to anti-DRM activists. "Microsoft was taking so much heat around security and trustworthy computing, that I was not allowed to go out and talk about any of this stuff publicly. I couldn't explain 'guys, we're totally on your side. What we want is a program that's open.'"
The so called "community" is and was rabidly anti-Microsoft regardless of the actual merits of the case. There are umpteen journalists(eg. Farhad Manjoo of Slate), who railed endlessly against Palladium, but when Apple implemented the Palladium spec to the letter in the iPhone and iPad, locked out developers and users from their own machines, the exact same people went "OOH SHINY" were falling all over themselves singing its praises.
See http://www.salon.com/2002/07/11/palladium/ and http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/new_ipad_how_apple_s_tablet_strategy_parallels_its_unbeatable_ipod_success_.html
Now we have the slow decimation of user and developer freedom led over the past 5 years by the iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook,locked bootloaders on Android phones like the Droid, tablets etc., Windows Phone and now Windows RT. As they say, the first cut is the deepest, the war was lost when the public started buying iDevices in droves and they *still* can't keep them in stock. Now everyone can say if it's okay for the market leader Apple to do it, so can we. This is the harm with the "raise hell if it's MS, ignore and pump it if it's Apple etc." attitude of the community and Slashdot is no different for the most part. If, instead of playing fanboys and haters, if pundits and tech folks actually stood for openness like RMS did, we might have had a different future today.
The cat is out of the bag though. Apple charging 30% of even the services offered through apps is just the tip of the iceberg.
If "success" means "no content copied", then of course nothing will work. That's an impossible goal.
What success actually means *economically* is "increase revenues, or prevent revenue loss, more than the cost of implementation." If you make it difficult enough for somebody who has the potential means and motivation to buy to avoid buying then it could be deemed a success. A teenager with nothing to lose (and no money) might not care about being busted for torrenting copyrighted content---but a family man with a mortgage, job and credit rating might care.
Electronic tags on handbags don't prevent 100% of shoplifting, and yet they're deployed fairly widely.
Another case in point, that speaking truth to power is usually costly for the Kassandras of the world.
Encouraging though that they did speak up.
99.99999999999% of the time DRM is an utter failure, but what about those oh so rare exceptions?
I believe that many of those successes were 'protecting' software that just wasn't all that popular. Any sufficiently obscure software with DRM you pretty much have to crack yourself.
There have been occassional locked down hardware systems that have gone uncracked for years. The PS3 for instance.
I was dismayed to find that Audible.com's proprietary audio format: .aa/.aax, which supposedly is just a wrapper for mp3s, has gone uncracked for quite some time now. It remains 100% uncracked. However the quality of the 64 kbps .aax audio is high enough for its speech only content that the generation loss involved with burning to CD and re-encoding to mp3 is minimal. This workaround may be the reason no one has made any serious attempt to crack the .aax format.
Nevertheless it is disappointing. From the POV of Amazon/Audible the .aax format DRM has been a complete success. Their files cannot be distributed without generation loss. Is it possible they didn't anticipate that most people wouldn't particularly care about the minor loss in voice quality? Admittedly the higher quality 64 kbps .aax file is a somewhat recent addition. Before that there were only 32 kbps versions. Perhaps in that case the generation loss would have been much more noticeable.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
All of my consumer electronics has crappy DRM. I'm stuck with HDMI and HDCP. Occasionally box A does not want to talk to box B. Sometimes it does. I had to toss a perfectly good AVR because the HDMI/HDCP board went...something not really essential. DRM is a raging success for making my CE experience harder.
Cool, tell me how to run unsigned code on my PS3 without having obsolete firmware or a hardware flasher.
(Hint: the hacks that "completely" cracked the PS3 didn't.)
I was there...and one of the Gnutella network founders from MIT testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee (after Lars and Shawn Fanning w/ 'M' hat)...he testified that the **infinitely copyable** nature of digital music files made DRM useless
These Microsoft guys get respect...but they were being **kind**...no damn "darknet" is necessary...trading with friends IS NOT A DARKNET
See, anyone is allowed to compile music on media and give to a friend...that's part of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act...and the Federal Government cannot define 'friend' just to control digital music...it is a non-starter
So...the labels/studios had to either 1) adapt business model beyond holding copyright **OR** 2) use DRM
We know the rest...
FYI it was the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to propose adaptations to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in July (?) of 2000...Senators Leahy and Hatch presided...I used my 'intern' badge to sneak into the press box :P
Thank you Dave Raggett
It's about the 'rights' as they say down in LA
You all have it...no dispute...DRM is anchored in the concept of holding a 'copyright' to written music
The concept has been so abused that it gets confusing, and it's definitely about money at the core...money...power...control...whathaveyou...we all know their fsking game now, to me that's the important thing
Thank you Dave Raggett
I have been hanging around with TV executives for 10 years, always trying to make them understand that all the protection they were trying (lamely) to put in place will only block legitimate customers while increasing product cost. But those guys behave like Gollum in Lord of the Ring: their content is sooooo precioooousss. They are beyond any reasonable argument.