AMD's New DRM 382
DefectiveByDesign writes "Remember how AMD said they'd make use of ATI's GPU technology to make better technology? Well, not all change is progress. InfoWorld's Tom Yager reports that AMD plans to block access to the framebuffer in hardware to help enforce DRM schemes, such as allowing more restricted playback of Sony Blu-Ray disks. They can pry my Print Screen key from my cold, dead fingers."
Bread & Circuses (Score:4, Insightful)
The drooling masses will eat up the slop fed to them so they can watch their DRM'd BluRay edition of Friends and Threes Company.
Re:Why do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the choice between two identically performing chips, one of which restricts your ability to do something, I'd bet most people would choose to get the unrestricted one
In time mass acceptance by the techno-illiterate will destroy any choice. There are are only two major PC CPU manufacturers, both are big fans of limiting your control of what you buy.
Re:AMD. (Score:1, Insightful)
-d
Re:Why do this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Abstract of article (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why do this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, looking at their current cash reserves, and their first quarter issues, I would think a large infusion from particular sources would be a boon for them.
This will make choices much much easier when buying a card for a serious gamer, Nvidia or nothing, in particular people who want to use fraps or similar to make in game action vids.
I (in the past) purchased AMD products because from my testing, they were just as good for my uses as Intel and I wanted to help keep "the little guy" going by supporting them (so long as it doesn't cost me $$$), guess what, the little guy is playing the big boy games now, and not the fun kind.
Re:Why do this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why do this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps there's some new layer of DRM in the offing. Here's a possible scenario: Apple's movie downloads are of limited quality, perhaps partly because the studios don't want high-resolution rips made. (They already know that you can get low-resolution rips off the DVD.)
So Apple says to AMD, "We'll start supporting your chips if you give us something to take to the studios so they'll let us have high-resolution movies."
That's just a guess, but it highlights exactly what your question is bringing up: this is a useless feature without a lot of support. So I've got to assume that somebody has plans to use it to offer content that they wouldn't otherwise release for fear of having it ripped.
(Or, alternatively, somebody had threatened to pull their existing content unless future computers are made more secure against this mode of ripping.)
That's still odd. You'd expect this to come from an OS vendor, who tells both AMD and Intel what to do about it. Which implies that Intel is planning something similar soon, and that both will offer a driver so that the OS can use it to enforce whatever DRM scheme they have in mind.
Re:Why do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're a major corporation with any trade secrets at all (which is to say, any major corporation), your obvious best choice is to buy systems with this technology. As home users we may have an ethical right to total root access to our personal systems; but when we go to work, if our sysadmins aren't locking down our systems from spying (which can be between divisions in a corporation, too), then they aren't doing their jobs. And you'd probably rather that the IRS were using security measures along these lines, too. This is good tech in a business or government context.
We just need laws regarding hardware ownership clarified so that it becomes illegal to implement restrictions on equipment which the equipment owner - whether person or corporation - can't disable at will. That wouldn't interfere with corporate- and government-owned systems being properly locked down, while preserving the property rights of individuals.
Does this even work? (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll see it like this, really (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Chip A who isn't restricted,
2. Chip B who is restricted to comply with some DRM scheme.
What Joe Sixpack and Jane Housewife will see it as, and what the marketting machine will sell it to them as, is:
1. Chip A which doesn't play BlueRay and HD-DVD movies, or plays it with a crappy pixelated resolution, worse than an old DVD
2. Chip B which plays BlueRay and HD-DVD movies in MediaPlayer with no problems. In 1080p, even.
Why, _of_ _course_ Chip B is better. It's obviously so much more powerful too. I mean, it obviously has all the horsepower to play 1080p, unlike Chip A who's obviously so underpowered that it has to play the same movies at a decreased resolution.
Re:Why do this? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not about the customers (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's fairly obvious that it's about AMD Live! versus Intel's Viiv. Each of those two brands is trying to be the ultimate living room multimedia PC. I think that customers haven't really caught on (why would we... who needs an expensive fully decked-out hot and noisy desktop PC masquerading as a media appliance in their living room?), but they seem convinced that this is where the market is going with or without the consumer. I think the whole media center PC has very little thought for the customer, and this AMD DRM issue highlights that very well.
It's funny how Vista is being hailed as the future for the media PC... I used to be able to watch DVDs perfectly well on my P3 (600MHz, 128 MB RAM) back when it was running Windows 98. But a few years ago I "upgraded" to XP, and now it won't play the same DVDs. It has a very hard time with most video content. But MS (along with AMD and Intel) wants us to believe that we need the next super-shiny version of their software, which gets less and less efficient with each release, in order to keep up with the time and have the media experience of the future. Sure, HD content requires more horsepower to decode and display, but if they didn't keep fattening up the OS, and the player software, and the whole Media Center environment, it wouldn't need that much more horweposer. From my experience, my 2.6Ghz P4 with 2GB of RAM can't even play videos in the Vista Media Center at all. Any PC related living room media devices should be small, quiet, run cool, and be inexpensive, and not have lots of bright lights. But of course all the hardware manufacturers want to push the latest hot, fast hardware... because it's the fastest. They want your attention to be drawn to the PC so you know how cool it is. Lame.
So to make a long story short, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and all the rest want to cram the media experience down our throats... This seems to me like it's the equivalent of Circuit City's DIVX [wikipedia.org], only the players involved are much bigger, and mostly working together to make an inescapable dragnet. They want to make their own brands successful (Win MCE, AMD Live! Viiv), and they know that the average consumer doesn't even know why he or she would care about Viiv or Live. So they want to make all PCs move in this direction, and if they can't get the consumers excited about it, they can at least get the content providers excited about it, so they don't have the same fate as DIVX.
Re:from MPAA to DELL (Score:4, Insightful)
Then again, Dell/HP/Compaq/Gateway do stand to make or lose quite a bit based on "Ooh shiny!" from home/residential/non-corporate users and their desire for HD-everything. Dell, though, should be able to make something of a stand given how many companies I've seen that have massive Dell-based infrastructures in place and doubtless have contracts with Dell for all their kit.
Hmm, I wonder if any media companies are among Dell's corporate customers. That could make for an interesting scenario. Almost mutually-assured destruction. "Want to force your DRM terms on us/our chipmakers? That's funny, we can't seem to find any records of your volume discount or, oh, what's this, even your on-site service agreements."
Re:Why do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now take away the explanations, and tell them that AMD is coming out with some super awesome new AMD MegaLIVE!++ media PC that will automagically buy and download every movie and TV show they ever wanted to watch, and will let them listen to music and watch movies everywhere they go, and it will cure cancer, stop global warming, end our dependence on foreign oil, and bring about world peace. They'll say "That sounds cool, I don't really need it, but if it could be included in the next computer I was going to buy anyway, maybe I'd like that.
The marketing hype isn't going to mention the drawbacks, and it will be louder than any outcry from pissed-off Slashdot-reading customers.
Re:Why do this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It won't be just AMD (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why do this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Thats almost too basic, but thats the principle here. AMD's move will make it easier for volume distributors to adopt them, as DRM slowly but surely becomes a part of our lives. AMD will more than likely have huge support from content producers such as Sony, and BMG. With that support comes money and advertising.
Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
I work for a major corporation. Why don't we bother with this DRM sort of thing? The short list:
Often, the truly valuable things in a company are the ideas and business strategies. This is low bandwidth information. The others - such as code, source masks, etc... already have the legal protection afforded trade secrets and copyrights. While it might not be practical to hand copy source code, this kind of espionage is rare and not very valuable. If company A stole company B's source code, company B would probably have a pretty good legal case against company A. However, the case for stealing ideas is a bit murkier and harder to prove.
Re:Why do this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why do this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Having "In God We Trust" on our currency and "Under God" in our Pledge is not perfect freedom of religion.
Try Some Reading Comprehension (Score:1, Insightful)
I win. You lose.
Re:Vista: the cowtow starts now (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree sorta (Score:3, Insightful)
My point is simply that this cycle doesn't get as firm a foothold when the market is (relatively) free, i.e. when there is not a monopoly engaging in anticompetitive behavior and raising artificial barriers to entry.
Re:Why do this? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's misleading.
Where did you buy your last car? Let's assume it's a Honda. Did you buy your Honda car from Honda? I'll bet you didn't. Honda doesn't sell to end-users, only to volume customers. You probably bought your car from a local dealership. These companies are Honda's customer, not you. That means for Honda, resellers are the vast majority of their sales.
That doesn't mean Honda doesn't want your business, nor that they don't stand to benefit from it. If people stop buying cars from resellers, Honda stops being able to sell cars to resellers. If you buy an AMD CPU standalone, you're an AMD customer, and it would make sense for them to listen to you.
Poor Little Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
"Things like the BluRay consortium". That would inlcude the HD-DVD group right? Only, Microsoft are members of that consortium. So maybe it's ok to be mad in that case. It's not like this feature is going to be BluRay only, after all.
And after all is said and done, Microsoft surely do seem to have a passion for hardware that restricts what the users can do. Remember Paladium? Microsoft were founder members of the TPCA. And they've gifted the world with no shortage of software DRM. There's the Plays For Sure fiasco, and all the helpful DRM features built into windows media player... And somehow I can't help think that if they were opposed to the idea, they could do something about it. Then there's
Microsoft may not be solely to blame in this instance, but somehow I have difficulties buying into this image of them as weak and helpless, adrift at the mercy of Market Forces.
Re:Poor Little Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
But both the BluRay and HD-DVD consortiums had to include DRM otherwise the studios had made it very clear that they would not produce HD content on those standards. So again, blaming Microsoft is missing the target, the real villains are the MPAA and the studios. I don't think MS is blamesless by any means when it comes to DRM, as you rightly point out their music-DRM efforts have been a fiasco of their own making. But just blaming MS for everything that's wrong with DRM is just plain wrong.
Re:Poor Little Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
AMD supporting DRM however will not be viewed as reducing freedom. It will be viewed as adding the freedom to access DRM protected content.