3G phones: Send Anywhere, But Not Anything 134
glengyron writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting the success of an Australian company in developing Digital Rights Management for the next generation of mobile phones. Imagine if you could only forward email once, or not at all: these are the kind of restrictions being built into the next generaion of mobile phones. Read the article here. ODRL? Orwellian Digital Rights Language."
Disney has something to teach RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
"If we don't provide consumers with our product in a timely manner, pirates will," Eisner said.
This after Eisner was quoted as saying Disney will not let "the threat of piracy keep it from aggressively pursuing business strategies based on new digital technologies, even if that meant rethinking its current business models."
Someone should forward this to our friends in the music industry.
proper definition of "DRM" (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we please stop defining it DRM as digital rights management, and start referring to it under the more proper name of digital restriction(s) management?
I got this new definition from Robert Thompson [ttgnet.com].
Holy crap! (Score:5, Interesting)
At least, I've never seen this before. Is it just me?
This could be a Good Thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider for a moment that when people could be taking pictures of you with their cell phones at any time and at any place, some basic rights management within this very limited domain of cell phones and messaging might be extremely beneficial.
Let's say I take a quick snap of myself and my new girlfriend, and send it off to my pal across town so he can see how much fun we're having. Do I want that image to reach my parents? Do I want my ex girlfriend to see it? How about my co-workers and enemies? I'd rather not, thanks.
By giving the sender some basic control over where the content goes once it leaves his phone, we would be enhancing the sender's privacy. And, of course, all such "DRM" technologies must be taken with a grain of salt, because you and I and any other techie worth his weight in 3.5" floppies knows that any copy-protection scheme is breakable. The DRM technologies introduced to date have been far from confidence-inspiring. So DRM within this domain is more of a basic privacy tool than an Orwellian move to own your cell phone.
As for my preferred intepretation of the DRM moniker -- I've always been fond of "Digital Rights Removal Mechanism."
restrictions != legal permission to forward (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
DRM is a good idea for this usage (Score:2, Interesting)
Girlfriend/wife/significant other sends you a 'hot' voice/video message for your eyes only.
If her parents / colleagues / friends / family got a forwarded copy (possibly by accident) it could ruin her reputation, cause her to lose her job, etc.
DRM would be effective in this scenario.
Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd: (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I at one point was getting several dozen a day of the usual chain letter/joke/picture Fwd:Fwd:Fwd (ad naseum). Putting a filter to delete anything with more than one Fwd: in it cut my junkmail down to virtually nothing. I used to complain that users were worse than spammers - some 'friends' were in the habit of sending me a dozen of these 'gems' at a time.
Of course, in the past 12 months this has all changed. I'm now the lucky recipient of at least a dozen spam a day, and it's getting worse every week. 40% my ass, more like 80% in my case.
Re:imagine (Score:3, Interesting)
I can forsee the day when we will all be running a monitoring program which detects when a time/forwarding/other stupidly restricted deocument is being displayed and automatically snaps the image to a proof database.
Even if palladium etc stops such an app running on the pc, a digital cam (or better, analog!) will still suffice.
Bad move (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't know how 3G is going to be taken up in great numbers if they don't let it proliferate with free and adult content.
Re:I won't buy a DRM enabled phone. (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately, in that case I believe you won't be able to buy or use a phone at all, at least not a 3G phone. Currently working for a major mobile phone vendor, I can assure you that DRM is a cruical part of the platform.
When it comes to downloading applications, there is more to it than just DRM. Restrictions is set up to not allowing users to include them, foremost for safety reasons (at least from the vendor's point of view, operators might probably include some business aspects there as well). Imagine a trojan running wild calling expensive toll numbers without your knowledge. We are not just talking major embarrassment here, we are talking major phone bills, and potential network crash. Therefore, only apps checked and approved by the operator are allowed to be downloaded. One exception is java apps, since the virtual machine can be set up to restrict hazardous safety behavior.
ODRL - Rights expression language (Score:4, Interesting)
It could also be used in many positive and creative ways (an exercise left for the reader).
But it is not an access control technology (DRM) in of itself.
There is another XML based rights expression language being pushed by DRM vendor ContentGuard called XrML [xrml.org] - which they own but 'freely' licence.
The real question is: Can a rights expression language express unregulated uses?
What should the defacto position on which an instance of expressed rights (in ORML or XrML) be?
Can a rights expression language express that the content is no longer covered by copyright in the EU?
Larry Lessig's Free Culture [randomfoo.net] discusses the unregulated side of this issue.
Re:DRM is a good idea for this usage (Score:1, Interesting)
Want your things safe? Put it into a safe!
I don't see why I must drop my rights to protect your lazyness!!
Re:This could be a Good Thing (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish I could make a blanket reply to all of these posts, because many of them make a good case against my argument. I've chosen to respond to yours because it has the most addressable points, the most coherency and the highest score (leading more people to read it, hopefully).
The most vocal rebuttal thus far has been If your friend is willing to forward private material, then he's no friend at all. Along the same lines is If you don't want your friend to forward private photos, then tell him as much. In a black-and-white world, both of these statements would be perfectly valid. But even my best friends have been known to suffer momentary lapses of judgement. And there are numerous other cases where I might send something to my friend, and it would be unclear to him whether he's allowed to forward it or not. I only raised the spectre of the ex-girlfriend because it seemed to be a case where I most unambiguously did not my content forwarded. And I'd rather have a way to concretely enforce that restriction with a moderate level of confidence, than rely on my friend's reading and obeying whatever written instructions I attached to the photo. If I had truly sensitive information, you wouldn't catch me sending it via such an insecure medium in the first place. Without end-to-end encryption, I'm disinclined to put any of my secrets on the wire: spoken, written or otherwise.
Also -- the truth of the matter is that I'm a homosexual. If someone sent a picture of me and my boyfriend to my ex-girlfriend I'd probably be relieved, because it might send her the message she seems so dense about receiving. But that's neither here nor there; I just felt like injecting some reality into an otherwise hypothetical discussion.
Regarding the potential negative impact of ODRL: going from previous experience, we can be sure than the deep-pocketed acolytes of the embrace-and-extend god will use their multiply hyphenated power to turn this technology against us. They don't want to control every aspect of our lives; for the most part they're just after our money, and they want control over any aspect of our lives where money is involved.
But let's take a step back and examine the domain once again. We buy cell phones that speak to only one network provider and use trivial encryption; we have no guarantee of privacy to begin with. Those of us unfortunate enough to be living in the United States of Ashcroft know with absolute certainty that everything we say, write or do with our cell phones is recorded and scanned for keywords as a matter of course.
The scant content that is available to those of us lucky enough to have a 3G phone is either already heavily protected or it's utter tripe that isn't worth stealing in the first place. Network connectivity and a central authority are both inherent to the platform, and we can be reasonably certain that any content made available to us will take advantage of that fact, and strictly enforce the licensing terms. Our cell phones are not a free or open platform to begin with.
This point was driven home when I called my provider (Verizon) to enquire about becoming a BREW developer -- BREW is a sort of cut-rate alternative to Java for cell phones -- and was told that the entry fee into the program was US$3,000 not including development tools or software licenses, and that all software must be digitally signed by Verizon before it would run on any phone.
By standardizing DRM description language, we at least are guaranteed a few sanity checks: if I want to give my ringtone to my friend who's using Cingular because I don't want it anymore, at least both of our networks speak the same DRM language. And if I do want to download some premium content, I will find that more is available to me because producers have greater confidence in the system. And if the same DRM technology enhances my control over my own content, then it's all the better.
Re:This could be a Good Thing (Score:3, Interesting)
The real issue surrounding DRM is control and I think you make that point very clearly with these statements. The "battle lines" seem to be drawn around trust versus control. I believe that those are the two sides of the balance when it comes to online justice. As an idealist, I favor trust and as a pragmatist you favor control (although I think you favor a balanced control...not utter control). Finding the balance between these two extremes is probably the best thing we can do for the future. (Of course, it doesn't help the debate when Intel's definition of DRM is described as "Trusted Computing".)
I'm a heterosexual Christian with a Southern Baptist upbringing and yet here we are having an intelligent, civil discussion about technology. I fear we might be creating a Slashdot Paradox. :)
"United States of Ashcroft"...ROFL! How appropriate given today's environment. I happen to work for a large telecom company and I can tell you that your privacy is equally violated with wireline phones. I have the ability to listen to every call placed in the USAshcroft. I also have a documented procedure to allow governmental agencies to listen to your calls. I don't have the time, interest, or ethical deficiency to listen to calls for fun and neither do my coworkers. And I have not been asked to perform an emergency call trace for the government in over 4 years.
So yes, of course you are correct that the centralized nature of cell phone service today obliviates any expectation of privacy.
And again, I totally agree with only one qualification...that's the case TODAY. At one time, only IBM offered the PC and customers were locked into them. At one time, mainframe vendors were incompatible. History tends to favor the end-to-end philosophy (the PC, the Web, GNU/Linux) where the control is decentralized.