Sony Repents Over CD Debacle 227
schnikies79 writes "Sony BMG is rethinking its anti-piracy policy following weeks of criticism over the copy protection used on CDs. The head of Sony BMG's global digital business, Thomas Hesse, told the BBC that the company was 're-evaluating' its current methods. This follows widespread condemnation of the way anti-piracy software on some Sony CDs installs itself on computers. The admission came as Sony faced more censure over the security failings of one of its copy protection programs."
Ed Felton got it correct. (Score:5, Informative)
So if you're designing a CD DRM system based on active protection, you face two main technical problems:
1. You have to get your software installed, even though the user doesn't want it.
2. Once your software is installed, you have to keep it from being uninstalled, even though the user wants it gone.
These are the same two technical problems that spyware designers face.
You can read the rest of his fascinating article here. [p2pnet.net]
Re:Not too hard (Score:5, Informative)
>
> The odd part is that we've already had two high quality audio formats for years now: DVD-Audio and SACD. Neither of those formats are selling very well.
Because everything is "good enough" these days.
I'm no audiophile, but on decent headphones, I can't tell LAME-encoded MP3 at 320kbps from CDs. Most of the time, I have difficulty telling LAME-encoded MP3 at 192kbps from the CD sources.
I've had this conversation with about dozen friends and cow orkers over the years, and found that about half of this admittedly-limited group can't hear the difference between Xing-encoded 128kbps (which to my ears, is unlistenably compression-artifacted) from CD, and that there are some who can't even hear the difference on headphones, never mind the crap desktop PC speakers most of these people are using.
Expecting people like me to pay a premium for the improvements in the audio fidelity offered by DVD-A/SACD versus CDDA is too much. Audio's reached the stage of "good enough" that only a small amount of the market is willing to pay a premium for anything better.
The initially-small market means that it's unlikely that economies of scale will develop, ensuring that the price gap between "better than CDDA" and "CDDA" will forever remain too wide to entice folks like me (never mind my 128kbps Xing friends) into it.
Re:Not too hard (Score:5, Informative)
Setting aside the fact that while such watermarking schemes aren't *easy* to break, they're *possible* to break by a skilled cryptographer, the real flaw in this vision is that the drive manufacturers won't play along. There's no money in it for them.
If we adopt a trusted computing scheme that really works to defeat rootkits (which the drive manufacturers *do* have a reason to go along with), no doubt the DRM crowd will try to take advantage of it. The thing is: such a scheme will only sell if it gives the owner of the computer the master keys. If you can't run a program to detect and defeat DRM, you can't run a program to detect and defeat rootkits. Sony demonstrated this pretty clearly.
So it's not just watermarking, it's any DRM scheme on a general-purpose computer. No one is going to pay extra for such a thing, and that means no drive manufacturer is going to try to force the technology needed for *real* DRM on the public: it's a money losing prospect.
Re:Insufficient response (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not too hard (Score:3, Informative)