BentUser takes a look at OS-level DRM in upcoming operating systems, particularly Windows Vista. Protected video path, PVP-UAB and PVP-OPM, have the potential to be really obnoxious, eclipsing any annoyances one experiences with current DRM technologies.
BentUser takes a look at OS-level DRM in upcoming operating systems,
particularly Windows Vista. Protected video path, PVP-UAB and PVP-OPM,
have the potential to be really obnoxious, eclipsing any annoyances
one experiences with current DRM technologies.
>
>
You want to run multimedia crapola, get what you deserve
Quit whining.
Browser: Lynx/2.8.5dev.7 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.7
…a future where I not will buy movies, music or anything like that.
This is my present.
…a future where I will not buy Vista, Windows, or anything like that.
…a future where you have to be extremely watchful of the hardware you buy, as evil chip-spirits will try for a deathgrip on your naughty bits.
From the article: “To make matters worse, it is unlikely that any “converter boxes” will become available for these devices as this would undermine the standard as a whole.” .
And who decides this? It’s more than obvious that there are also lots of interests in circunventing this, for example, for bulk dvd/bluray/hddvd piracy sellers and stuff like that. Saying that “ohh no one is gonna circunvent that, because it is bad for us” doesn’t really cut it.
Also, the dmca in america I think allows reverse-engineering for interoperability, so it should be (but IANAL) possible to at least circunvent some of these protections in order to be able to watch content on other operating systems.
Is it not forbidden to manufacture or sell equipment that circumvents DRM-technology in the US? I have heard something of that sort.
No you mean Europe. In the US the DMCA means you can’t circumvent encryption, there’s several cases of this in the courts right now
A future where you are forced to run Vista if you want to do anything remotely multimedia related.
That’s what Microsoft is betting the company on.
Except for the half that’s still bet on legacy products.
I’m just as pissed at Intel, Sony, ATI and all the other big names who are all signed up and ready implement this.
Microsoft can’t provide end to end protected path; they have hardware guys like Intel below their spot in the stack providing the TPM modules, and hardware guys like Sony above them leading the charge for HDMI interfaces.
It’s a big DRM gang bang and Microsoft is somewhere in the middle. Bill has much less to gain than the media companies who seem to have him on a leash. Hell hes’ got things to lose. The compatibility of his OS and the user friendlyness is serious hampered by the DRM and protected path craze. I suppose the only reason hes not fighting it is… what makes the world go round… money, from the likes of the RIAA and Sony directly. I doubt he’s doing it for any indirect benefits he would get by supporting DRM/PVP.
Bill has much less to gain than the media companies who seem to have him on a leash.
Actually Redmond have quite a lot to gain. They have seen a chance to force/lure the industry to accept protection against the pirate mob, in exchange of exclusively using Redmond multimedia standards. Most Video/Audio will thus be tied to the Windows platform.
If they in addition succeeds with replacing PDF and flash with their own closed alternatives – then they got it all.
All this DRM encumberment will only make it more attractive to download music/movies from the internet.
If you run Vista – otherwise you’re unable to…
Hopefully a sufficiently negative advertisment for the product.
Go go DRM! I envision the day when this crap will be obligatory and annoy the hell out of “honest” people so that many of them cease to buy the products infected with it.
Hopefully this will get people away from their picture box more and chase them outside, or make them read a book for once.
I simply won’t use DRM crapware. DRM protected hardware will eventually get hacked, and most geeks will probably use “modified” versions of firmware or mod chips.
If I buy a DVD recorder, LCD or any hardware I can do whatever I want with it: smash it, put it underwater, solder ICs inside, whatever.
That is what they intend to happen.
Each time the DRM techniques are made stronger, a smaller and smaller section of the population have either the ability or need to circumvent them. It will never be totally secure, but it does not need to be.
Eventually the process of cracking, obtaining and installing the modified firmware/silicon and donwloading pirated content becomes such a difficult and long winded process that only 1% of the population can be bothered to do it.
And when that situation happens, they can celebrate the success of DRM protected media.
Eventually the process of cracking, obtaining and installing the modified firmware/silicon and donwloading pirated content becomes such a difficult and long winded process that only 1% of the population can be bothered to do it.
Incorrect. It is to the advantage of the DRM companies that the software and hardware get hacked. How else are they supposed to sell new product? I say this being one of those people who works for/on DRM product(s), and *trust* me, many of the places I have worked for/with use this as the internal company mantra – the fine line between having vulnerabilities and keeping a hair in front of any competition.
Well supposedly they are making more On-Demand service ‘players’ off the net that would run on most OSs. DVDs???
This was supposed to come in largely from the new AOL/Google deal.
Ah, I dont like AOL much.
Whatever happened to freedom of information?
Edited 2005-12-31 13:44
It’s time to put our money where our mouths are. Don’t like DRM? Go purchase your music from DRM-free stores like Magnatunes or Emusic. The industry is only in it for the money, if we show them that non-DRM sells, they’ll do it.
A future where you are forced to run PIRATED version of Vista if you want to do anything remotely multimedia related, on some chinese manufactured mobo with with deliberately loop-holed DRM chip installed.
End result will be something like dvd encryption and region code with chinese dvd players.
“I really have to say that the onrushing wall of content protection technology looks a little ominous, but at the same time I absolutely do not want to give up Napster and other content services made possible by progress in DRM”
made possible? You mean how it is now possible to not own your music anymore thanks to DRM. You stop paying your subscription and all your music vapourises! Enjoy. I prefer to own my music as I intend to still be listening to it when I’m old, without having to spend my pension on a subscription.
Total widespread piracy exists because the RIAA continued to rip people off for too long. And then napster came along entirely because of that. Had the RIAA adopted the Internet 10 years ago and provided cheap music online, there would have been no need for napster. Ten years later we could have been looking at digital as the primary distribution method, low low prices brought on by 10 years of market competition and no DRM, no HDCP, no TPM because there would have been no more piracy than existed pre-internet.
If the RIAA actually embraced the digitial distribution channel 10 years ago – before mass piracy – we would be seeing digital as the primary delivery, cheap and no DRM as without widespread piracy, there would be no need. Napster happened because the RIAA know nothing at all, what so ever, about the Internet and people were tired of being ripped off forever. Had they provided cheap internet distribution in the beginning, people would
DRM is because companies cannot realise the real problems in the industry.
Where’s my edit button >.< Fouth paragraph isn’t meant to be there.
made possible? You mean how it is now possible to not own your music anymore thanks to DRM. You stop paying your subscription and all your music vapourises! Enjoy. I prefer to own my music as I intend to still be listening to it when I’m old, without having to spend my pension on a subscription.
Actually, I think people misrepresent these rental music services, sort of (indirectly) implicating that they are supposed to prevent you from buying music. IMHO, Napster-To-Go and other services like it are to audio what Netflix is to video. Just because you subscribe to Netflix (or rent videos from Blockbuster), does that mean you don’t buy movies at all? Probably not. More than likely, you rent a ton of movies and only purchase the ones you really like.
Similarly, these rental services allow you to sample a very large amount of music, while allowing you to buy the tunes you want to keep, either via online music stores, CDs, or whatever. Sure, you coudl sit at your computer for hours and sample 30-second clips on iTunes, but why not download a few hundred tunes and listen to them in your car instead? As an analogy, imagine if you walked into the biggest music store ever created and they told you “Hey, we’ll give you access to every CD on the shelf for a few bucks a month” … would you take them up on the offer?
That being said, I am much more tolerant of DRM when it comes to renting than I am when it comes to buying. However, when it comes to iTunes, all I gotta do is burn the tracks to audio CD, then they’re mine to do whatever I want with them. And the audio quality is still excellent, even when ripped to MP3. Napster is not the same story though – WMA sounds like ass when burned and ripped, so I don’t really use it to buy music.
Still though, these music stores aren’t perfect. There is a huge gap in their library, especially when it comes to genres like dance and prog rock, two genres that are much more popular overeas than in the US, and some of the best tracks are hard to find here. However, I found a site called audiojelly.com the other day (legit, non-DRM downloads) that takes care of most of my dance/trance needs
I am still looking for a site like this with prog rock music.
As for piracy, I agree with the other guy – if CDs were $5 a piece and music online was non-DRM and $.10 a piece as they are on the illegal (ethically speaking) Russian mp3 sites, people would still pirate. Many of those who are dishonest will continue to be dishonest no matter what the price.
IMO, DRM will likely face the same fate as Region coding (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region_coding ). Essentially:
* Several countries will rule DRM illegal and allow DRM-free and DRM-cheating devices
* Several media products will be DRM-free to attract customers
* Several media products will start off with DRM but when customers don’t buy their products, they’ll switch to DRM-free
* In countries where DRM has legal backbone and where most media products are DRM, there will be a huge black market in DRM-cheating hardware and DRM-cracked content
The only twist in all of this is that DRM-free devices will still be produced. DRM is a useless price and inconvience burden on any device that doesn’t have anything remotely to do with DRM media (e.g. print servers, mail servers, etc). As much as Hollywood would disagree, the world does not revolve around the entertainment business. Some of us actually want to get some work done. If Microsoft and its allies want to cater solely to the entertainment business, let them. Solaris, Linux, and other hardware and software companies will focus on business.
I came away from that article with only one question in my mind…
Somebody out there still uses Napster now that it’s a pay service?!? I’m shocked… REALLY.
This will fail just like the Sony DRM CD’s did.
Does anyone remember how well Divx-DVDs and their associated hardware sold a few years back?
The DVDs were initially cheap to purchase (around $5.00 to $7.00, if I remember correctly), but you could only play them for an initial amount of time – 24 to 48 hours.
If you wanted to watch that movie, again, you had to pay $5-$7, again. Want to keep watching it without restrictions? You paid a larger fee to “unlock” the DVD. One kink: It would only work on the player you unlocked the movie on. You couldn’t watch it anywhere else.
What happens when the Divx-DVD player breaks?
There’s a reason Divx-DVD is a dead technology and no one (with any common-sense, at least) bought into it. Too many strings attached to the technology.
Let’s see how many “happy customers” these vendors have the first time DRM blows up, for whatever reason, and their customers can’t access their purchased media.
How much good press did Sony get lately with their DRM’ed music CDs?
Hopefully, DRM will die for the same reasons Divx-DVDs failed – people are not as stupid as the RIAA and Hollywood believe they are.
drm is why people pirate.
That is just plain stupid
DRM is *not* why people pirate.
I remember in the days of the Amiga and the Atari piracy ran rampant.
In Asia DVD, CD, Software piracy is rampant. No DRM was involved.
Piracy will exist with or without DRM.
The *amount* of people who pirate increases because of DRM. We go from people who are not willing to pay for software/movies/music because they have no money or they are cheap to people who are not willing to pay because they are not content with the product that they are getting “legally” but they are more than content when they get it “illegally”
People pirated like all hell before DRM. MS-DOS was pirated all the time, remember the original Napster?
Correction, DRM exists because of piracy, and piracy exists because of years and years of overinflated prices for crap media….
I see a vicious circle developing.
> […] and piracy exists because of years and years of
> overinflated prices for crap media….
No, piracy exists because anything else means controlling a law of nature. It is a fundamental fact that information can be replicated with unboundedly low cost (or more exactly, the same piece of information be attached to any number of “carriers”), just like it is a law of nature that things fall down if you drop them. It takes a certain amount of effort to *prevent* this from happening.
DRM is like a building: By itself, the ceiling would fall down, but the walls prevent it from doing so. Likewise, information can by itself be copied, but DRM prevents this. Without walls/DRM, the natural thing happens, and as such has happened for all the time before DRM. And the same thing happens if the walls are torn down or if DRM is cracked.
– Morin
Correction, DRM exists because of piracy, and piracy exists because of years and years of overinflated prices for crap media….
DRM exists because the content makers want to take control of the content that they sold to the customer and charge the customer repeatedely for each view/listen of their product. DRM exists so those that want to implement it, can spy and restrict your freedom.
Piracy would exist even if the content was available $0.01. But that is not what is at issue here. Digitial Restrictive Management is a threat to your freedom to use computer hardware/software and electronic devices the way you want to use them.
Correction, DRM exists because of piracy, and piracy exists because of years and years of overinflated prices for crap media….
I think the biggest rip is the ‘x number of dollars lost because of piracy’ – which is assuming that if the pirated versions didn’t exist, that people would still purchase the cd’s that they would otherwised copied or downloaded.
You are definately correct about the cost of a cd; when I am down the road, the cheapest one can get a new release cd is NZ$25 – in NZ there are no tariffs or quotas on music cds, so there are no price distorters.
I’m sorry but I get paidd $370 cash in hand each week, $25 is a HUGE chunk out of my pay; with that being said, that doesn’t mean I pirate my music, it just means that I am extra choosey with the music I may purchase; rather than risking purchasing a cd from a new artist, I’ll simply stick to the old stuff of remakes like Ella Fitzgerald, and maybe after a while, purchase a new one, but all in all, I’m now less likely to purchase new release cds.
Now, I’m not saying that cd’s need to be dirt cheap, but $15-18 per cd would be alot better for a new release, and plus, any margin lost would be made up in higher volume of sales – if it is cheap enough, people will say, “screw going to all that effort downloading, the cd is already cheap enough’.
…even worse DRM, ushered in with those “compatible” monitors. Just like what they did with VCRs, built-in copy protection into them without telling the public. Few knew until the market was saturated with copy protected players.
Bill Gates, you are officially off my pound cake tasting committee.
I don’t think the idiotic people in the RIAA and the MPAA will ever get it. It is not possible to provide hardware protection that can’t be circumvented. All that would happen is a big market will be created in after-market devices to get around the protection. The way you stop piracy is to provide a good product at a reasonable price.
I am really getting tired of seeing the RIAA say that they are losing all this money because people are pirating the music instead of buying it. Earth to the RIAA, most of those people wouldn’t buy your product anyway. You can’t lose a sale that would not have happened in the first place. There are always going to be people who will steal, and many of the people stealing your product could afford to buy it if they chose to. Your CD sales are going down because most people don’t want to buy a CD with ten songs on it to get the one song they really want. iTunes does so well because you can buy just the one song without buying the whole CD.
But then greed can blind you to the truth. And many people don’t feel that ripping off a heartless entity is a crime. It is more like “you are getting what you deserve”. (He climbs down off his soapbox)…
I don’t think the idiotic people in the RIAA and the MPAA will ever get it.
Never underestimate your enemy.
It is not possible to provide hardware protection that can’t be circumvented.
That is not required. All they have to do is make the DRM strong/secure enough that it prevents 98% of the buying population from circumventing it. Make the costs of circumventing the protection high and not worth the effort–that is what they are trying to do.
All that would happen is a big market will be created in after-market devices to get around the protection.
And they will bribe law-makers to get those devices banned. Look how they (content-makers cartel) tried to get the FCC to pass the broadcast flag and are still trying to get them to pass it. Devices made after a certain date that circumvented the broadcast flags would have been banned in the U.S. if not for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals
decided against the FCC and content-maker backers.
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/
The way you stop piracy is to provide a good product at a reasonable price.
Piracy would still exist as long as the product is not free or is cheaper then the price of the product; why can’t people just get through their skulls that there are some people in this world who will not pay anything for something?
Piracy would still exist as long as the product is not free or is cheaper then the price of the product; why can’t people just get through their skulls that there are some people in this world who will not pay anything for something?
Why do you intended to make a blanket statement claiming that everyone is hell bent on ripping off ‘the man’? 98% of people would be willing and are able to pay for things like movies and music, what stops a large number is the rip-off prices that these companies charge.
Lets be bloody honest, how many would be willing to download movies that take 8hours when, if the movies companies only charged NZ$20 for a DVD rather than $39.95!
DRM will not help the record industry. Their sales are down because they don’t offer products and services that people like, not because of piracy.
If you have heard one of these bands, put toghether of young beautiful people that look good on picture, you have heard them all.
The only thing that will happen, is that the people who still buys records will get more hazzle, e.g. if their equippment breaks down, and getting your customers annoyed is not good for business in the long run.
Agreed. Provide the buying public with music, movies, etc; that is worth buying and people will. Some people prirate media because that think that’s all it’s really worth to them.
DRM is simply a tool, and like any tool it can have valid applications or it can be abused.
I don’t think fee-based or time limited media purchases are bad, in fact I think they expand users options. Personally I like the convenience of being able to order a movie on demand via digital cable, rather than having to run out to Blockbuster. And for many people, subscription based services for music downloads do make sense, especially if your tastes vary or you like to experiment.
The difference is in those situations, customers know they are receiving a service. You don’t rent a movie from blockbuster or borrow a CD from the local library reasonably believing you have a right to copy it for personal use.
Purchasing content is a completely separate issue, and this is where DRM will irk me but at the same time makes me think the situation is not entirely tenable. If I buy a DVD from the store, fair use provisions in my country give me the right to do whatever I want. I can copy it to my hard drive, I edit it and re-sequence it, I can install unlicensed codecs on my linux laptop if that’s required to view it. The only thing I can’t do is blatantly re-distribute it, which is entirely reasonable to me.
It’s one thing for the RIAA and their ilk to pressure governments to go after file sharers, but I think it’s a whole seperate and monumentally different issue for them to pressure governments to start restricting citizens rights. Outside of the US and Australia, I can’t see governments tripping over themselves to sign away consumer’s rights. Look at the controvery OpenDoc is creating by drawing attention to the fact Microsoft essentially owns the format for the majority of computer documents in the world, and that’s a result of simple free-market influence. Are sovereign governments going to enact restrictive legislation enforcing ownership rights of legally purchased material to hollywood conglomerates? Moreso, are they going to enforce a legal mechanism that would could conceivably force consumers to continually pay for media they have legally purchased?
No doubt US influence with things like the WTO will force manufacturers to build in security mechanisms to media playback hardware, and that’s something that local governments likely can’t influence. But I also think it will only be a matter of time until circumvention methods are in place, and I don’t think citizens will be reduced to criminal status for simply bypassing obstacles built in to prevent their usage of legally purchased media.
Anyways, maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I can see this becoming a significant political issue as DRM starts becoming more and more prevalent. It’s not an issue now because it hasn’t started affecting Joe Average citizen yet, but ultimately it will. Until then, the DRM proponents like the RIAA will hide behind ridiculous rhetoric equating DRM critics with supporting terrorism and congress will fall right in line.
I understand that!! I meant to say that DRM makes people pirate even more. Thanks for the corrections, though.
Dont kill me over it.
What about Linux or BSD being able to play all this DRM media, and hardware? Its already illegal to play DVD’s in Linux and BSD… to a point(css2).
What are we to do?
I would love to go up front of Congress and speak my mind about the RIAA and MPAA, and what there trying to do.
The DRM controlers will have control over what hardware is made, and what software/OS you must use to use their media.
Im sure they have a few terms for that….
What about Linux or BSD being able to play all this DRM media, and hardware? Its already illegal to play DVD’s in Linux and BSD… to a point(css2).
Nothing is stopping one of the Linux distributors from licensing necessary technologies to create a conforming implementation for this or DVD. In either case there may be fees that preclude the distributors from just giving the implementation away, but it doesn’t prevent Linux/BSD/et al from having a legal implementation that users can obtain. There are already examples of software (OSes and applications) distributions having free versions that don’t include proprietary technologies and commercial versions whose cost pays necessary licensing fees. The main variable is whether people are willing to pay to have legal implementations on their preferred OS or if they’ll just use unlicensed implementations or circumvention methods instead.
Nothing is stopping one of the Linux distributors from licensing necessary technologies to create a conforming implementation for this or DVD. In either case there may be fees that preclude the distributors from just giving the implementation away, but it doesn’t prevent Linux/BSD/et al from having a legal implementation that users can obtain.
True, and TurboLinux does include a licensed DVD player. However, where I have a philosophical issue with this is a) I bought a DVD and b) I bought a DVD player (in my laptop). Why do I have to purchase an application to play my DVD when it really should be an extension of the OS or standard media applications?
It’s a bit of a scam, the licensing fees are a double dip because the content providers pay a fee to encrypt, and the content receiver is supposed to pay a fee one way or the other (via licensing) to decrypt.
This is where I think the fair use provisions in different jurisdictions come into play. The DMCA clearly makes unlicensed codecs illegal within the US, but in Canada and most other countries, there is no such restriction. If you purchase a DVD you have a legally protected provision for fair use. If you have to write your own software or use someone else’s, so be it (as long as that software doesn’t violate copyright). If you have to reverse engineer to produce that software, so be it.
To me it’s analogous to buying a book with deliberately blurred text, with the publisher expecting you to purchase or rent special glasses from them in order to read it. Nothing should prevent the publisher from doing that (other than common sense), and nothing should force you to purchase that book. But if you do, nothing should prevent you from using your own glasses, a magnifying glass or some sort of digitizing method to be able to read your book.
Wow, I just re-read that last paragraph. Not a very sensible analogy maybe. I’ve already been into the New Year’s tipple so my sense are a little dulled.
Suffice to say, my point is that I don’t think anything should prevent the content providers from securing their material, but I don’t think anything can prevent lawful purchasers of that content from enjoying that content using any method they want in most jurisdictions, as long as saner heads prevail.
I’ll sign off now before I stop making any sense at all.
True, and TurboLinux does include a licensed DVD player. However, where I have a philosophical issue with this is a) I bought a DVD and b) I bought a DVD player (in my laptop). Why do I have to purchase an application to play my DVD when it really should be an extension of the OS or standard media applications?
You’re purchasing a codec. Whether it’s included in the purchase price of the OS or not is up to the vendor. They can include the cost of the codec license in the OS and pass it on to the user (all users), or they can let the user choose to purchase the codec seperately, allowing only users wanting DVD playback to pay the extra costs and giving them a choice among codec vendors if there are multiple vendors for that particular platform.
It’s a bit of a scam, the licensing fees are a double dip because the content providers pay a fee to encrypt, and the content receiver is supposed to pay a fee one way or the other (via licensing) to decrypt.
DVD is no different than many other formats in this respect (mp3 for example). With DVD and similar standards, you have to license the spec whether for encoding or decoding, and often such licensing keeps implementers from breaking security features (leaking necessary shared secrets). I agree that the licensing can go to far such as with mp4’s per-playback/distribution size fees, but even though I don’t agree w/ that extreme, I think it’s the technology-provider’s right to choose their licensing scheme and the market’s right to reject it if it goes to far (e.g., the subsequent pushback on mp4 licensing by web content producers).
This is where I think the fair use provisions in different jurisdictions come into play. The DMCA clearly makes unlicensed codecs illegal within the US, but in Canada and most other countries, there is no such restriction. If you purchase a DVD you have a legally protected provision for fair use. If you have to write your own software or use someone else’s, so be it (as long as that software doesn’t violate copyright). If you have to reverse engineer to produce that software, so be it.
The original poster implied that OSS users would be blocked from enjoying digital content on their OSes of choice. In countries where circumvention/unlicensed implementations are legal (so by all means, use them), OSS wouldn’t be blocked as long as someone created a conforming implementation or just circumvented the protections. In the US and other countries with similar laws, OSS still would not be blocked because users could (illegally) use the same implementations/circumventions that are legally available to other countries, but they should support and encourage implementations that are legal in their countries. A side-effect of such encouragement is the growth of a legal market for such software in the OSS community,possibly a growth in userbase because of it, and possibly an increase in commercial support of OSS OSes.
Edited 2006-01-01 02:45
This is great. The tougher DRM restrictions become the quicker people will become sick of the whole thing and the more people that are affected by this the more politicians will have to listen.
For once more we have a DRM related article on OSAlert with so many people commenting if it is worthy or legal to circumvent copy-protection technologies. I think most of the time we miss the point. The point is we have choice. When I want to buy a table for example I go to several places selling tables and choose the one that fits my needs. Music (and all other forms of art) are no different. RIAA and MPAA are supposed to represent not just the (supposedly more) greedy corporations but also the artists. An artist is someone that wants to communicate something to me. If he can’t find ways to make it easily accessible it is not my problem. It’s the artist’s problem. I am not implying that all art should be totally free, but it surely should be accessible. This concept, in music (and other forms of art) was (is and will be) expressed by many artists. Most of them belong to underground scenes (and a good reason is that most of the time associations like RIAA don’t want us to know there are voices like these). But all artists communicate ideas.
If this is supposed to be a site where people know they have a choice then don’t choose just your OS or CPU manufacturer, choose what content you have access to and ways people choose to communicate.
PS. Sorry for my English, not native speaker….
PS. 2 Of course I am not implying that only underground art is worth the effort. But the point is in the ideas… what is art after all?
Many have commented that countries not recognizing DMCA will produce DRM-free devices, as before. They overlook a new feature of modern DRM: each individual device manufactured will have a unique key, and this key can be revoked so it doesn’t play new media. This means that any such non-DRM recognizing device that saw widespread distribution would lose its ability to play new media. Now, I see two ways for a company to create a commercial product that circumvents this. After considerable reverse-engineering effort, they could create a device that can be programmed with a new key after sale. This would require those who purchase the device to also purchase a legal device, open it up and slurp the key off some interconnect on the hardware. The new engineering techniques used in new devices (such as storing the key in-cpu) will make this impossibly difficult even for those who commonly mod hardware today. An alternative would be for the company selling this device to purchase a legal device and do the key retrieval themselves, but this has the downside of being probably illegal even in non-DMCA countries, and also driving the price of these devices up dramatically.
Another feature of this technology is that it will be impossible to rip content and post it on public bittorrent trackers or other filesharing systems without running a high risk of losing your key’s legitimacy.
Just wanted to point this out, since most previous posters seem too optimistic about the prospects of this technology being hacked. The situation is without a doubt considerably more grim than it was previously. With significant engineering effort on the part of both experts and consumers and a large cost hike, it is feasible to hack this technology. But its so difficult that an insignificant number will do it, and so the DRM people have won.
All I can say is I really hope that DRM pisses off consumers and they reject it so swiftly that Microsoft, Apple, and Holywood lose billions…….. This is total bs, when I buycontent, Ill do whatever the hell I ant with it, and if I lose to many rights here (the usa), I’ll move to where I have those rights.
I am a freedom fighter and I will do whatever necessary to maintain freedom…….. for Christ sake, if I had the money I would launch a full scale add campaign against DRM.
I’m not saying I am pro piracy, but when I buy a dvd, I’ll play it however the hell I feel like, weather it be on libdvdcss or however. I paid for it…… I’ll do what I want with it.
this DRM restriction is ridiculous and penalizes innocent people, it’s not right.
DRM has instances where it is useful, but it will be so much abused that it will make life hell for everybody except the law breaking pirates who are savy enough to get around the DRM
Drm is about somthing much worse im my eyes its not just a way to control what you do with your media/content its a way to control what media/content you can see. Its about censorship and big brothers ultimate control. Think about it if someone wants to release content and it doesnt include drm that content wont be allowed to play on 99% of equipment.(no there wont be LEGAL ways around it thaks to the DMCA) If you want to make documentaries speak out against a tyranical government say somthing about a corporation that is doing somthing wrong etc it will be nearly impossible and you will have NO anonimity.
The reason i moved away from Microsoft products is their move to include more and more drm, trusted computing all those things that take away or encumber my freedom. And as soon as linux and the bsd’s move towards DRM and the like i guess ill havbe to either keep my old os and hardware going as long as possible or give up on computers all together.