The military approach hasn't worked, so the solution? More troops. It would be satisfying if simplistic to state that DRM is a technological solution that's doomed to failure. You can be sure that the issue of DRM is discussed in boardrooms of media companies, in government, and in the board rooms of any technology company that has an interest in the matter.
At those levels, the issue becomes a political one, and people are held accountable for what they do or don't do. Put another way, everyone needs to be seen doing something, even if that something has prior art in the form of a Dilbert cartoon. In that regard, we can say that Steve Jobs may be the only smart guy in the room. Only in Canada, eh? The analog hole Score: 5 , Insightful.
Re: Score: 3 , Interesting. Yes, people will put up with incredibily bad content in order to get something for free. And part of the attraction is that it is illegal or just somehow wrong to do it. In many ways, this is probably more than half the motivation in the first place. Also correct in that it has to be stopped at the distribution level. Nobody really cares if you buy a DVD and make a copy of it for yourself.
What they care about is you make a copy for the rest of the Internet-using folks on the planet. What scares content. Great quote! Score: 3 , Insightful. A rant? It's a rant all right. And a very very stupid one. Re:A rant? There's a book about this future - "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge.
It's fiction. You have no sense of history. Remember the "Clipper Chip"? People were frightned of that for the same reasons you list here, and now all phones must come with an embedded Clipper chip.
Oh wait You want to live in fear and think you can hide from a scary future by not talking about it. I refuse to live in fear. If the only way Windows will win is by being legislated, then I'm happy to be on the losing side.
DRM works Score: 3 , Insightful. Great rant, but a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of DRM, probably deliberately I might add, in order to highlight the fundamental misunderstandings of industry senior mgmt. DRM is not implemented to end piracy, or prevent it. There is precious little that can stop that. And that's all. Most folks don't want to do that. Many don't make it past all the porn popups, in fact.
Anything more is a liability. Trying to design a "watertight and unbreakable" DRM, of the kind discussed in this article, is the perfect way to end that balance and hoist content providers by their own petard. You must be new here :. Who's Manny? Re:This is going to get all kinds of responses, bu Score: 5 , Insightful. The biggest difference is that the distributors don't get paid if you download the ones without the DRM.
Hopefully, iTunes Plus will start providing evidence soon that people are willing to pay for DRM-free content, just as the original store showed that they were willing to pay for digital content. And not paying anyone. It's even legal, though the MPAA has been trying to change that.
Granted, there are disadvantages; rather than getting the show on demand, I have to wait until they schedule a "push". But generally the show is "pushed" before it is available through on-demand channels anyway, so that's not a big deal.
DRM is like Speeding Tickets. You can slow some people for awhile, but not forever. You can even get extra money out of them if they break the rules, but they'll view that as a small price to pay for doing what they want.
You cause most good and safe people to slow down who could otherwise enjoy going faster and doing more. But, in the end, everyone will see it for the profiteering racket that it really is. Correction Score: 4 , Interesting. If it wasn't for money, you wouldn'tbe able to download TV shows. DRM does nothing to prevent someone from copying the content.
This issue is about society and the rights of citizens, not about one person. It has become very clear, that people will pay for content, even when that content can be had for free. The people selling to the market ned to provide it convienantly, and at the price the MARKET is willing to pay, not what they want the market to pay. Re:Correction Score: 5 , Insightful. The question is will enough people be willing to pay for it to make it a viable business model.
Most college kids don't have the money to spend on something anyway so it doesn't affect the business model much now, but if they keep this attitude as they grow older and replace the people willing to pay, then there will be a problem. Re: Score: 3 , Insightful. The obvious conclusion is that if people aren't willing to pay enough to make it a viable business model, the entertainment industry should look for another business model instead of trying to create artificial monopolies with the help of broken technology to make the failed business model viable.
There is a huge amount of legitamely free music available out there right now, so the collapse of the record industry would be no big deal.
The only value the industry does impart is marketing and pre-screening to make sure you don't have to wade through a bunch of American Idol wannabees.
The movie industry would be a different situation though. Production values will be crap. Most movies will. Back when stars were just employees of the studios, they made as many as 10 movies a year-- every year. Now that they are a "star", they get more money and do a lot less work.
Car theft? Give me a break. It's simply a matter of the consumer demonstrating the product wasn't worth that price to them - no more, no less. Re:Correction Score: 5 , Interesting. And the fact that it's illegal is absolutely immaterial to you? I have no interest in "protecting property rights", and that is not the purpose of copyright law. Copyright law is supposed to be an incentive to create.
A reasonable copyright term for music is probably 10 or 15 years. For software and movies it is probably more like 5 or 10 years. Seriously, are you aware of any company that uses the projected 10 year profits to justify a project? A movie studio will consider box-office and DVD sales How many of you are using a yea. He was slightly upset, to say the least, when he not only got the song faster over P2P, but it was also better quality kbps vs kbps from iTunes - the difference was clearly noticeable just by listening to the songs.
He played the two songs back to back over and over again, getting angrier and angrier,. Re:Correction Score: 4 , Insightful. Are you saying that iTunes is not a viable business model? I'm confused Why is it not a viable business model? As of right now, that shift hasn't happened - if anything, iTunes success has increased, despite the continuing existence of various P2P networks.
I question whether your assumption is plausible Sure it does. Every time I get one of those questions, I tell the person that Sony or whoever it is that sold the media ripped you off.
They gave you a rental model when you paid for the purchase model, and that is wrong. Yes, but 40 years ago there was an entire generation of college kids that thought love and sex and drugs and rock and roll were free to be taken and shared, and now that generation packs mega churches and votes for George W.
People change as they age. I don't think it's appropriate to claim that a generation "has no honor" and thus will not use an honor-based system. Even if it is partially true at one point in time, it can change. Thanks to our crappy American school system, everyone thinks that everyone was a hippie in the s and turned into yuppies in the s and s.
The hippies and yuppies were just the most visible groups just like jocks and cheerleaders are the most visible in high schools while "the rest" became unassuming, mostly productive, somewhat boring, average people.
The bottled water companies do not seem to have a problem turning a profit despite the availability of free alternatives.
It is all marketing, and they deserve every dime if they can convince people that their water is better and get them to pay for it. The record industry is the same. They have convinced quite a bit of people to demand their particular artists instead of the huge supply of legitamely free music available.
The difference is that some people have been convinced that yes, the re. Re:This is going to get all kinds of responses, bu Score: 4 , Insightful. I know that in a few minutes, this response is going way to the bottom because your post will be "0, Flamebait", but you bring up a good point regardless.
First of all, why criticize DRM and not the consumer practices that necessitate its use? Second, what counts as "working"? Laws against murder "work" even though murder still happens. Windows still "works" even though it has numerous security holes. For DRM to "work", it's not necessary that it make piracy impossible, only that it reduce it to sufficiently low levels that the production of the work is still profitable. You mean the fact that media companies won't make their products easily available to the public to download at a reasonable price?
That justification for leeching didn't work when you were five, and it doesn't work now. But it can't work, because only one person has to crack the DRM on a file and put it on the Net, and the rest of the world's population can download it. Let me tell you a quick story about a friend of mine.
It was the Summer of 01 or 02, and he bought a CD. Like he used to do. He didn't know much about the 'net and he didn't download songs, he went to his local store and bought CDs.
Simply because he didn't want to deal with P2P, considered it a hassle and didn't even want to look into it. What for? He bought a CD every few months, who cared that they costed 20 bucks? He can afford that. He slipped his brand new CD into his car-hifi and No music. It was one of those dreaded CDs that don't play everywhere, because they don't conform with the standard. To say the least, he was pissed. He came to me and asked me what to do.
Now, I didn't have any idea how to copy the "protected" CD to a CDR so he could play it in his car, but I knew that there are services where he could download what he bought. Funny enough, that was legal here back then, he had the "right" to "own" that music by buying that CD.
So he went and installed some P2P software. Was surprised how easy it is and within a few hours he had his CD on the computer, burning it to a CDR that works in his car was trivial. You can download an email privacy program that uses standard, public encryption algorithms to scramble your email so that only its intended recipients can read them. You know that messages can only be read by the authorised sender and the authorised receiver because you are the only ones who know have the key.
In order to do that, it tries to stop you from decrypting the DVD. The entertainment industry calls DRM "security" software, because it makes them secure from their customers. Security is not a matter of abstract absolutes, it requires a context. You can't be "secure," generally -- you can only be secure from some risk. For example, having food makes you secure from hunger, but puts you at risk from obesity-related illness. DRM is designed on the presumption that users don't want it, and if they could turn it off, they would.
You only need DRM to stop users from doing things they're trying to do and want to do. You don't need a lock on a door that no one ever wants to open. DRM assumes that the computer's owner is its adversary. For DRM to work, there has to be no obvious way to remove, interrupt or fool it. For DRM to work, it has to reside in a computer whose operating system is designed to obfuscate some of its files and processes: to deliberately hoodwink the computer's owner about what the computer is doing.
If you ask your computer to list all the running programs, it has to hide the DRM program from you. If you ask it to show you the files, it has to hide the DRM files from you. Anything less and you, as the computer's owner, would kill the program and delete its associated files at the first sign of trouble.
An increase in the security of the companies you buy your media from means a decrease in your own security. When your computer is designed to treat you as an untrusted party, you are at serious risk: anyone who can put malicious software on your computer has only to take advantage of your computer's intentional capacity to disguise its operation from you in order to make it much harder for you to know when and how you've been compromised.
Here's another thing about security: it's a process, not a product hat tip to Bruce Schneier! There's no test to know whether a system is secure or not; by definition, all you can do to test a system's security is tell people how it works and ask them to tell you what's wrong with it. Designing a security system without public review is a fool's errand, ensuring that you've designed a system that is secure against people stupider than you, and no one else.
Every security system relies on reports of newly discovered vulnerabilities as a means of continuously improving. The forces that work against security systems — scripts that automate attacks, theoretical advances, easy-to-follow guides that can be readily googled — are always improving so any system that does not benefit from its own continuous improvement becomes less effective over time.
That is, the pool of adversaries capable of defeating the system goes up over time, and the energy they must expend to do so goes down over time, unless vulnerabilities are continuously reported and repaired. Here is where DRM and your security work at cross-purposes.
Canada got them through Bill C Pretty much any place that's industrialized and wants to trade with the rest of the world has a prohibition on weakening DRM. Many of these laws — including the DMCA — have provisions that supposedly protect legitimate security research, but in practice, these are so narrow and the penalties for DMCA violations are so terrible that no one tries to avail themselves of them.
DRM simply cannot work. For less technical readers who might be wondering what I'm going on about, DRM is the attempt to control copying on a digital file, or sometimes even to add a restriction on how many times such a file can be copied. It's usually applied to online music or movies, but it's never sold to the consumer for what it actually is, an added restriction on what can be done with something they've paid for.
DRM is always explained as the "wonderful new technology that will help protect your medical records from thieves. DRM is often spoken about in conjunction with encryption, which actually is a massively useful technology that can protect your medical records from thieves. Encryption is based on secrets, usually known only to two communicating parties.
People snooping encrypted traffic end up with what appears to be random noise, only the people who have the secret key can make sense of it.
Decades of real scientific research goes into creating sophisticated encryption algorithms and methods such as public-key cryptography, on which almost all Internet commerce is based, which allows a secret key to be derived from publicly available information.
But the point of all encryption is that the key is a secret. It has to be a secret, as it's the basis of the privacy between the two parties. Now let's consider DRM. DRM is applied to digital data by one party, usually the vendor of a music or movie, and encrypts the data to be protected using an encryption algorithm and a key.
The other party in the transaction, the consumer of the music or movie, is then given the encrypted data, knowledge of what algorithm is used to encrypt the data, and a copy of the encryption key used to encrypt the data.
All of these things must be supplied to the consumer in order for them to be able to use the data; without them, there's no way the consumer can listen to or watch the data they've just bought. Yet DRM is supposed to be able to restrict what the customer can do with the data. How can this be done given the fundamental reality of the situation described above? The magic of dilithium crystals? Sure, there's gobs and gobs of extra software in the process which is usually run at the consumer end of the deal, trying to obfuscate and hide the fact that the consumer possesses all the information needed to decrypt the file they've just been given.
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