DRM — It's Not Really About Piracy

shadowmage13 writes "Hollywood privately admits that DRM is not really about piracy. From the article: 'In a nutshell: DRM's sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you... Like all lies, there comes a point when the gig is up; the ruse is busted. For the movie studios, it's the moment they have to admit that it's not the piracy that worries them, but business models which don't squeeze every last cent out of customers.' You can take action on Digital Restrictions Management at DefectiveByDesign of the Free Software Foundation, Digital Freedom, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

It never was about piracy

It never was about piracy. It has always been about controling your customer. The industry knows that they dont lose nearly as much through piracy as they do by not controlling their consumers. Remember a consumer is a customer with no choice.

Re:Power to the artists???

No, that's a completely ridiculous suggestion, for several reasons.

1) Artists build upon other artists. Some of the best pieces of art are composites of other pieces of art (Shakespeare being the classic example). This super-DRM'ed world would contradict that fact and make it much harder for artists to do their work. It would also make it impossible to create such art forms as satire, abbreviation, etc.

2) This system would contradict one of the basic realities of this universe: ideas are infinitely duplicable at no cost other than the medium to store them. You can have all the DRM systems in the world - if your poem appears on my screen and I memorize it or write it down, I've made a copy. I can then repost it if I feel so inclined. Trying to control the technological gateways (enforcing DRM'ed hardware, etc) is ultimately a losing battle, like fighting the ocean with a broom.

3) Such a system, to work perfectly, would by definition require real-time, detailed monitoring of everyone's activities that have anything to do with so-called "intellectual property". Apart from the huge technical challenge that this would represent (can you even imagine any IT company implementing this when they can't even create a centralised system of patient records without screwing up - see NHS PfIT), this would be a huge infringement on everyone's privacy. Or rather, it would be a complete eradication of the very concept of privacy.

Daniel

Re:Power to the artists???

Some of the best pieces of art are composites of other pieces of art (Shakespeare being the classic example).

You clearly haven't seen his work in the original Klingon.

Re:Power to the artists???

1) Artists build upon other artists. Some of the best pieces of art are composites of other pieces of art (Shakespeare being the classic example). This super-DRM'ed world would contradict that fact and make it much harder for artists to do their work. It would also make it impossible to create such art forms as satire, abbreviation, etc.

DRM in now way stops artists from building upon the ideas of other artists (copyright may stop this with the extreme measures it has been extended to, but not DRM). Shakespeare did not need to be able to make an exact quality of copy of other artists' works to build off of them. Neither did any of the musicians in history need to be able to make an exact copy of something they heard to use it and build off of it. The idea of art building off of arts means that artists hear/see what other artists have done and use it for inspiration, not that they make an exact copy of it. Artists have never needed to be able to make exact duplicates of other's work to find inspiration from other's work in the past anymore than they do now.

Re:Power to the artists???

Why not give all authors almost complete control over their works?

Why should we? How do we benefit from this? There are three types of public benefits with regard to creative works: 1) to have as many as possible original works created and published; 2) to have as many as possible derivative works created and published, and; 3) to have no or as few as possible (and for as short a time) restrictions on the public with regard to those works.

If it causes more works to be created and published, then I am prepared to accept some limited, temporary restrictions, but only provided that the public benefit of the extra works outweighs the public harm of the restrictions. E.g. a million years more copyright that caused only one more work to be created and published would pretty certainly not be worth it; no matter how good that work was, we'd be better off without it.

You are suggesting that we give artists the ability to un-create and un-publish works, which would largely try to erase whatever public benefit the creation and publication of the work had resulted in. It would also amount to a permanent restriction on the public, since the work would be irrevocably lost and could never enter the public domain. So I fail to see how there is any public benefit whatsoever. Because of that, I fail to see why I shouldn't deride this as an insane idea, and you as an idiot for having come up with it. You seem to be pretty selfish and short-sighted. The utilitarian model of copyright, which I've described above, and which is the foundation and constitutional justification for the whole thing, is interested in how we can better society generally, by spreading knowledge. You seem to not care about that, even though for any individual on the planet, they will always receive more knowledge from the amassed contributions of others, than they can ever possibly hope to generate themselves. They might generate something new, but never a greater quantity. We don't stand on the shoulders of giants; we stand on the shoulders of all the other people who came before us. You want to kick that over.

Frankly, if your idea was so hot, why not use it in the patent field? Patents operate under the exact same utilitarian model as copyrights (save that it is concerned with the spread and use of inventions, rather than knowledge generally), so if your idea was good for one, then it would be good for the other, right? Well, some human being invented the wheel. Another invented walking upright. Another invented language. Another tamed fire. Why shouldn't we allow them, or their estates, to retract those inventions, turning us into crawling savage brutes, just to satisfy your moronic ideology? I wouldn't allow it, since I want to cultivate the greatest raw material (i.e. the most works, and the most inventions) to help society thrive. I don't give a crap about authors or inventors, save in how they can be exploited in furthering this cause. Since it seems the best way to exploit them is to give them rewards that are enough to encourage them to work, but not enough to outweigh the benefits of their work, that's what I do, and I do it happily, since society still gets the better part of the bargain.

Have fun living in a cave, man.

Re:Power to the artists???

0) If I bloody pay for this piece of shite that this so-called artist created, *I* decide when, where and how I use it. It's sold, it's mine, my copy is no longer owned by the creator and he'd better keep his hands from it. The only thing I am not allowed to do is copy it in order to give it to someone else, that's the only right the artist retains.

Re:Power to the artists???

Then imagine that there be a system that allowed the publishing artist to exactly and precisely control how their content was used and or was available so that the publishing artist could revoke something they put out there but for whatever reason now regret. What would be wrong with that? It would be total control in the hand of an artist. Afterall, it is their work. Why not give them ultimate control?

I always hated this argument. The reason being, no other industry works this way. When you buy your next car, does your dealer tell you that you can only drive it for three years and you cannot let more than 3 people drive it? (Leasing not included)

Sure, I'll give you the argument that you can't copy [or clone] a car (yet) but to let the originator decide exactly how their product will be played or not played is exactly what I don't want.

Don't buy the car analogy because they are in a different price bracket? Let's aim lower. Greeting Cards. You aren't given explicit instructions with your greeting card and told that you have to give the Happy Birthday card on your kid's birthday, and that day alone. You can buy the card and use it for any occasion if you want. It's always fun to give condolence cards for births, birthdays, or even weddings. :)

Re:Power to the artists???

> Greeting Cards. You aren't given explicit instructions with your greeting card

Even though they don't tell you this, most greeting card text is copyrighted by the person who wrote it or the company that paid for it to be written. You cannot, for instance, legally make your own greeting cards that use the text from existing cards, just with different pictures.

Re:Power to the artists???

Would that be too much control in the artists' hands? It'd be like it was before technology, in the sense that the artist'd control all aspects of their fruits. Their fruits lived and died with them. the audience never had ownership of the artists' work. They only had the pleasure and priviledge to listen, see and enjoy in the moment.

Art != Music (Whether or not music, especially contemporary music, is even a subset of art is a matter of opinion). Some of the greatest works of art in history were done 'for hire'.

Unless you want to see an end to persistent recordings, you're advocating the same sort of BS "have thier cake and eat it too" setup we have now, except instead of some industry suits reaping the cash, it's the artist himself. If I buy a painting, I expect the right to put it on my bathroom wall, wipe my mouth on it, or have my picture taken in front of it. Same for a recording. If I want to listen to it in my cd-less car stereo, on my Neuros, or on my GP2X, I'm going to. I expect to control my own purchase.

Re:Power to the artists???

These problem all reall stemmed from the Compact Disk and it replacing vinyl.

We all happily went out and rebought our existing music collection on CD as it was alot more convenient than LP's. And in the process we generated a constant revenue stream as stuff was gradually re-issued. The problem is that this is now coming to an end for the record companies as they have re-released almost everything. They have certainly run out of the stuff with serious mass appeal.

So they now have to look for a new way of extracting similar revenues that they have grown used to over the last 15 years out of a back catalog which most of us already own, possibly in more than one format. The problem is that they have already made it about as convenient as it needs to be and the quality is mostly there as well (Vinyl have better infrasonic performance).

So rather than try and go back to surviving off the revenues they get from new releases which would result in a huge drop in profits they need an alternative. Without an alternative the problems would be very far reaching. The stock market is used to constant revenue growth. If profits fall it is far worse for a company than if they had never risen in the first place, expecially if the fall is not likely to be temporary. This is frequently what drives companies under if they are unable to downsize quickly enough.

So faced with this dilemma the media publishing companies must find a way to keep the boon of the CD years going, and being that they didnt reinvest those record profits very wisely in new content production this is going to difficult. So they are choosing to try and keep the boom of the CD going by constantly selling us a new copy of stuff we already own indefinately.

If you contrast this with companies like BP (who sell Oil) you see that they have invested their profits much more wisely. BP are now the worlds largest producer of solar panels and have started describing themselves as an energy company rather than an oil company.

In a single phrase, "Diversify to survive".

Re:Power to the artists???

Huh... that seems very obvious, but I've never thought of that before. When you first said the problem originated with CDs, I assumed you meant because it was the first digital medium available to consumers, and therefore the first to allow duplication without degradation of sound quality, which allowed better "piracy".

But, if I can try to sum up your post, you're suggesting that CDs were the first new medium that offered significant improvement to cause consumers to re-buy the music they already owned. Therefore, the copyright owners grew dependant on the revenue stream of people re-buying their works, in spite of the fact that they already owned copies. Now that people are done replacing their records with CDs, record companies are trying to devise a new way to force consumers to continually re-buy a product in order to maintain that revenue stream.

That sounds right to me. It seems like the intention is to get you to buy a new copy of each song for every new device you buy. One works with iPods, a different one with your Zune, yet another for your PlayForSure device, and a fourth for your cell phone. This also seems to be the intention with HD DVD media. People have finally replaced their VHS tapes with DVDs, and now they expect you to replace your DVDs with HD.

To me, it seems worth noting the obvious: this is not what copyright law was meant for.

Re:Power to the artists???

Your argument falls flat when you take the print media into account. That is, unless you consider all technology and not just modern audio/video storage methods. Remember, copyright and publishing rights laws date back to the invention of the printing press.

Artists have always been at the mercy of their patrons. Whether it was aristocrats contracting compositions or keeping musicians on retainer, or writers accepting a commission to write a penny dreadful. Artists were often paid in advance.

There's also that dumb, dumb dream that you can take back what you said, or at least prevent it from being preserved for posterity. Much like how Tom Hanks tried to kill all reruns of Bosom Buddies, or how some composers like Richard Wagner tried to forbid others from playing their operas. Even your post here is now beyond your control.

Today, musicians earn more by playing concerts than by cutting albums. Most of the budding stars only make an album as a way of improving their image. Groups are discovering that non-DRM'ed music on the internet is an excellent way to generate interest.

No, the problem with studios is that they have grown accustomed to being the gatekeeper, and charging ruinous rates for using their distribution channels and production equipment. They are already losing control of production exclusivity. Now they are losing control of distribution. It's all about staving off the inevitable.

Re:Power to the artists???

If there were a total artist control type of rights management this idiot could retrieve (forever extinghuish the existence) the now-regrettable work posted to the Internet.

Unfortunately for DRM to really work, and based on industry attempts so far, the analogy of being able to 'revoke' a post from a webhost falls short. Rather, DRM requires that the content creator has a back-door into your desktop computer that will let them erase the text of their comment that you have cut-and-pasted and any screenshots of their post that you might have made.

I don't object to an artist being able to remove a song from their own download service. But their right to control file access stops at the edge of my machine.

Re:Power to the artists???

Yes, but the thing is the artist could let the art lapse into public domain if they desired it so. If they didn't let it then, well, it'd be forgotten like many other works of ancient times.

I suggest you read up on the reason copyright laws have time limits. It is SPECIFICALLY so that works do NOT get lost forever.

I din't mean to imply this would happen tomorrow but a decade or two from now when certainly things could be watermarked (and recognized) appropriately and furthermore most vehicles of media would be connected one way or another. Given IPv6 it's not impossible.

So the only way to enjoy published works in your version of the modern world is to be connected 24x7x365 to the internet. No thanks.

And what would be wrong with being able to revoke/retrive an embarassing video or soundbite?

What would be wrong with rewriting history? Maybe we can pretend that Sadam was a kind and generous man that was good to his people. Maybe Paris Hilton wants to pretend that she is not a slut, or Mel Gibson wants to pretend that he didn't make anti-semitic remarks. There is nothing wrong with wanting to take back what you said, it's called an apology. There is nothing wrong with stupid teens posting embarrassing videos of themselves either, and later in life saying that we ALL do stupid stuff when we are kids. You learn from those mistakes. Your "system" attempts to eliminate consequences of doing bad / stupid stuff - sorry, that's just not a good thing for society.

Artists would have to reimburse the prorated amount owed the consumer.

So an artist that goes on a drug binge and goes crazy can take away my purchased right to listen to music he sold me back when he was sane? I don't want that, even if I DO get a partial refund. Considering how many artists are nuts to begin with, this is not a far-fetched scenario.

DRM is bad, M'Kay? There are no redeeming values. You can attempt to create some bizzaro perfect-world scenarios where it could possibly work with a gazillion exceptions and conditions, but we do not live in a perfect world.

Re:It never was about piracy

But Ben Affleck says the reason his movie Dare Devil or Gigli didn't make a lot of money is because of piracy. Piracy is bad for everyone from the actors (making millions) down to the guy who sells you popcorn at the movies (making hundreds). I for one say forget all those anti-DRM organizations and keep pirating these 2 great movies.

Correction: Spin, It was about piracy by the ....

It was about real piracy, by the media industry and government, to rape human rights and pillage bank accounts of the unrepresented pitiful defenseless public.

OK more spin for US, EU, UN them; All megalomania persons in industry, government, and religion demand a semiliterate servile exploitable public or at least an oppressed fearful culture of hostages suffering with mass-hysteria Stockholm syndrome (identifying with the oppressors as good, fair, and reasonable).

Re:YET ANOTHER MISLEADING HEADLINE

Try reading the artcile a little more closely:

According to him, an unnamed studio executive said that a major reason why studios weren't jumping on board with the iTunes Store and other similar services is that their DRM is too lax. "[Apple's] user rules just scare the heck out of us."

Ars Technica's Ken Fisher adds: " It's not piracy that's the concern, it's their ability to control how you use the content you purchase."

It seems to me that is a reasonable interpretation of the "unnamed executive's" comment that the DRM is "too lax", because if "piracy" were a major reason for Hollywood's wanting DRM then its relative stringency or laxity would not be such an important issue for Hollywood. However, if what they are really after is the maximum possible control over users then the relative laxity of a DRM standard *will* bother them - because, for example, they mightn't want a customer to enjoy the content on more than one device without purchasing more than one copy.

Therefore, the summary by shaowmage13 -

"Hollywood privately admits that DRM is not really about piracy."

... and is, moreover, merely the same as Ars Technica's headline with a slightly different word order:

"Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn't about piracy"

The comment from the "unnamed executive" _is_ as good as an admission of that, as has been shown above. The headline Slashdot used "DRM - it's not really about piracy" doesn't directly comment on what anyone has said - privately or not - but states an opinion on what DRM is "about". It's an opinion that is reasonably substantiated by the Ars Technica article.

As for the British gutter press you'd find far more offensive and dishonest articles there than at Slashdot. At least Slashdot sticks to technology and related matters and hasn't, so far as I know, been involved in concealing Stalin's purges from the reading public, as the British newspaper the Guardian was.

Like Region Coding, Then

Because THAT worked wonders for release timing, content control and market restrictions, didn't it.*

*Though having a decent TV that can handle PAL and NTSC helps, in the UK they're 6 bob a throw i can tell ye!

Re:Like Region Coding, Then

When I look at the VHS examples of long back, and the more recent DVD-region-encoding failure, it just looks like one big, sad cycle repeating itself every generation or so.
Even if we get over the current mess (Trusted Computing, RIAA etc), it looks like as if the big media dinosaurs will never really learn to adapt. Each time a new technology pops up that threatens their stable position, they panic immediately and create a huge fuss in trying to maintain the staus quo.
If only they weren't so powerful already, they'd probably have died off by now; replaced by smarter, quicker companies that didn't have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world.

Re:Like Region Coding, Then

Once they loose this battle, they are gone for good; they are aware of that, and so they are squeezing every penny out of the established customer base.

They won't necessarily disappear. However they will be forced to adapt and therefore to change. And nobody likes to change, especially for something that hasn't been tried before and might prove to be expensive for an unknown return.

Something like the big studios are useful because they have the financial backing for large scale projects (in movies mostly, it's less necessary in music unless you have to heavily market something inherently worthless). If they were to die it would be problematic for that industry. The high budget films would be starved for funding. This could well translate into a decrease in quality and originality as only "safe" films would be produced.

Re:Like Region Coding, Then

This is insightful. In addition to the big funding, quality at the user level is also an issue. The 19 inch boxes in many home sjust wont cut it for a movie with a grand vision. Lots of people can't afford nice home theater setups, but they can spend 10 bucks to see a movie at the local cineplex. As soon as a viewing venue with limited supply comes into play(the movie theater) then distribution becomes an issue.

Though it's true that wide distribution over the internet could theoretically drive movie theaters to show an idie film, the actual practice is that distribution is difficult, even if you assume theaters are open to talking with anyone (not likely). Even if an indie film made enough money in home distribution to give theaters reason to believe they'd have a good audience, proper negotiation channels just don't exist between an indie film maker and the massive number of theaters in the country, or world even. The indie film has to partner with someone big enough to ensure the film will get a wide release.

The internet doesn't help in this environment. With such an important distribution channel locked up tight by the big guys, the movie maker who decides to avoid the big companies will miss out on about half of his revenue stream. Considering how hard it is for movies to make money (most films are not "Star Wars"), this kind of a loss is a real problem.

Music is a little different because bands control performances and the internet is a perfect distribution channel that doesn't require a big label. But how will people know the band exists and that new music is available? How are people going to find out what this new band sounds like? Podcasts exist now, and internet radio over wireless is at least a possibility, but which ones are the big podcasts or internet radio stations that large numbers of people listen to?

If you want to reach an audience larger than the neighborhood bars, you need your music to be heard by large numbers of people. Although that can happen virally, viral word of mouth only works for a small number of bands and songs at a time and only really works at all for people who have buddies who like to pester them about music. If you want to get the word out about your band, you have to go to an outlet that's popular enough that lots of people will listen to it. Whatever outlet becomes becomes most popular becomes a bottleneck. Whenever a bottleneck exists, large companies are going to try to, and will usually succeed in controlling it, just like they do with radio stations now.

Once again, a band certainly could go it alone, and I applaud those that do, but not being able to get that large listening audience is going to keep most small bands small. It will mean that labels will be able to continue to offer a very compelling service, for a very steep price, if a band wants to hit it big.

As long as you have scarcity and revenue, you'll have big companies trying, and largely succeeding, in controlling the two. I think indies can become much larger than they are now thanks to the internet, but it's highly unlikely they'll become the dominant source of entertainment.

TW

Re:Like Region Coding, Then

in the UK they're 6 bob a throw i can tell ye!

Care to translate?

Re:Like Region Coding, Then

Inexpensive.

Re:Like Region Coding, Then

Could you dumb it down a notch?

Six bob a throw.

Re:Like Region Coding, Then

Bob = informal name for a Shilling. Although no longer used (*) (since 1971, when British money went decimal), the shilling was worth 1/20 of a pound; that is, 5p in post-decimalisation money (**)

So the original poster was claiming we can buy DVDs for £0.30; he was quite definitely being tongue-in-cheek, unless he meant blank ones :-)

(*) Fascinating facts #1! Although the concept of a shilling disappeared in 1971, the one and two shilling coins remained in circulation until the early 1990s, as they were identical in size, composition and value to the new 5p and 10p coins. They disappeared when the 5 and 10p coins were reduced in size.
(*) Fascinating facts #2!!!!! That was 12 old pennies (12d)... pre-decimalisation there were 240 pence in the pound. No, I don't remember any of this, I'm not that old :-)

Re:Like Region Coding, Then

having an uncontrolled yorkshireman moment

Care to translate?

Re:Like Region Coding, Then

This is almost like Region coded Slashdot..

Re:Like Region Coding, Then

I was under the impression that pal VCRS were made to handle NTSC by slowing down from 30 FPS to 25

No, they just convert the colour representation to PAL and output a PAL signal at 30fps. Older TVs (and some newer cheap 14" and smaller TVs) are simple enough that this just works (with a black band top and bottom due to fewer lines on the screen) and newer TVs are designed for it, adjusting their vertical scan to fit the picture on the screen perfectly.

Pretty much all PAL DVD players will output either PAL60 or NTSC if you put an NTSC disc in (modulo region coding issues), and all but the cheapest PAL TVs these days will handle both.

In other news...

... "Tobacco industry privately admits smoking actually not very healthy at all."

RTFA?

"Hollywood privately admits that DRM is not really about piracy. From the article:

I just read the article - there is no cited evidence that anyone from Hollywood has ever said this. It may be true, yes, and I agree with the conclusions of the article itself, but this isn't some sort of sensational scoop.

MPAA executives have never admitted that piracy isn't the motivation for DRM. The current generation will never admit that: piracy is their excuse and they will stick to it. DRM is part of their business model and it won't go anywhere until it results in a shareholder-awakening loss of money.

If people prefer to pirate stuff, that means the DRM is not restrictive enough to stop them. That is the only thing they'll ever tell you, and the only thing you'll hear from the media outlets that they own.

IRTFALITFA

I Read The F***ing Articles Linked In The F***ing Article, and there is still no such admission from anyone.

I do, however, also agree with the articles conclusion that DRM isn't about piracy, if only because it's so ineffective to be laughable. It's always been, and obviously so, to make the people who do spend, spend more than they should.

Why chase people who won't buy jack, when you can shaft the people who do for more? It's less effort.

Re:RTFA?

MPAA executives have never admitted that piracy isn't the motivation for DRM. The current generation will never admit that: piracy is their excuse and they will stick to it. DRM is part of their business model and it won't go anywhere until it results in a shareholder-awakening loss of money.

I'm less concerned with piracy and more concerned with the death of the used movie and music market. With DRM, how am I supposed to resell music that I've purchased to the local place that used to buy my used CDs when I was sick of them? How do I sell my DVDs when I'm tired of watching that movie? I've paid either nearly full or even full price for the movie or music, yet I've lost the right to resell the content in the secondary market? Will the studio or record company unlock that content from its DRM chains so that I can resell it upon request?

Re:RTFA?

MPAA executives have never admitted that piracy isn't the motivation for DRM.

"DRMs' primary role is not about keeping copyrighted content off P2P networks. DRMs support an orderly market for facilitating efficient economic transactions between content producers and content consumers."
Dan Glickman, Motion Picture Association of America [bbc.co.uk]

Re:RTFA?

MPAA executives have never admitted that piracy isn't the motivation for DRM.

From an interview with the Vice President of Technology at Universal Pictures, Jerry Pierce:

Different studios have different philosophies in this area. It is our view that we have to provide customers a rich experience so they can do what they want to do within their home. We don't expect them to make copies of HD DVDs for their friends. And we don't think customers want to do that either. So, DRM needs to give them some restrictions beyond what both the customer and we believe are the proper usage rules. That's what we need to achieve. DRMs enable business models, they don't stop piracy. And we want to make sure that we have a rich one without making it so easy so that you can violate what we agreed on when you purchased a movie.

The full interview is here [tgdaily.com].

Here is a quote from another interview with Fritz Attaway, an MPAA exec:

Consumers should have a choice to either own a copy of a movie for multiple viewing, or to just view it one time for a much lower price. And movie companies want to provide that choice, and many more. But without DRM, every transaction would have to be priced as a sale, not just of one copy but of many copies, in order to account for unrestrained copying...

With regard to your comment that many DRM technologies can be circumvented by commercial pirates, you are correct, but DRM is not intended to prevent commercial piracy. It is intended to insure that most consumers will keep the deal they make with movie distributors. Like the lock on your door, they are not a guarantee against theft, but they "keep honest people honest."

The source of that interview is here [wsj.com].

Re:RTFA?

DRM is part of their business model and it won't go anywhere until it results in a shareholder-awakening loss of money.


You mean like the leak that sprung up with emusic? Bands that are anit-DRM and tired of being ripped off by the RIAA are starting to go inde. Bare Naked Ladies and others have jumped ship. I wonder how far the bands and consumers will migrate away from the RIAA cartel?

DRM is incompatible with so much stuff, many items are still born. The DAT is a good example. Vista and Blu-Ray may be the next still born. Blue-Ray may be limited to just a few SONY titles and games for the Playstation. It's going to be too much incompatiblily to work on Vista as not enough people are going to spring for all the trusted DRM hardware to make it work. That nice high res monitor and sound system you have are incompatible with the DRM requirements. I have serious doubts the Blu-Ray and HD DVD format war will be won by either. Plain old DVD's will win this one by a landslide. They just work in the computer, in DVD players with your TV set, and portable DVD players.

HD stuff and it's DRM simply won't work in most hardware due to the lack of a full secure digital signal path all the way to the display. The wrong monitor or video card or bad combination will keep the adoption rate very low for a long time. Maybe it will sell as well as the DAT.

Trying to outcompete 15yo

It's no news that a bunch of 15yo with P2P clients and MySpace profiles are able to do a better job at promoting and distributing music than the publishing companies. The answer? Make the distribution of the digital content difficult again! That reminds me of that time when my countrymen tried to make rivers run uphill.

Whaaa?

Oh my god! They're so right! How come nobody on slashdot ever figured any of this out? Good thing I caught this story, I'm so logging off the net right now and writing to my congressman!

well duh...

no body

Bias

This article forces you to believe the crap it's not telling you before it doesn't tell you it. The headline is entirely misleading. Hollywood hasn't admitted anything of the sort, and his source for this information is a reference to another journalist's unnamed source! What kind of journalism is that? From the following quote he extrapolated far too much:

"His user rules just scare the heck out of us"

Now, it's entirely possible that DRM is about exactly what they say it's about. What's not true however is that Hollywood is admitting this. The article is forcing you to accept the journalists bias hoping you don't exercise your critical thinking skills and question it. Whether it's true or not - the journalist needs to get his act together and get better sources than some other journalists dodgy source.

Now somebody might argue: "well we know they're doing it, what does it matter if the journalist exaggerates a quote from an unnamed source". I think it matters a great deal. When you're right you should be able to prove it very easily. Otherwise you have to accept that no matter how you feel on the matter you may be wrong, or there's just not enough evidence to imply anything.

Re:Bias

Hollywood hasn't admitted anything of the sort

"DRMs' primary role is not about keeping copyrighted content off P2P networks. DRMs support an orderly market for facilitating efficient economic transactions between content producers and content consumers. "
Dan Glickman, Motion Picture Association of America [bbc.co.uk]

not about piracy? really?

with itunes (and other services) you can burn tracks you've purchased to CD, load them up on portable devices, listen to them on multiple computers....

for the most part - it seems to me you can do just about anything that would constitute "fair use" - am I missing something here?

I'm not saying I "like" DRM - I think it's just a reality of the market (counting the RIAA suing grandmas as a "market" force). no one's (OK, almost no one) is going to sell you a pre-ripped MP3 - ready to share via limewire.

I'm playing around with some services that offer $15 / month all-you-can-eat music. this wouldn't be possible without some heavy DRM. seriously - that guy with the horns and the cape - not so bad...

Mirrors my views exactly

DRM is meant to prevent interoperability, raise barriers for entry to markets and force "upgrades" of your media when playback devices are upgraded.

Just look at iTunes; you can burn the music to CDs and rip to mp3. This is no copy protection - only a mild barrier to make it more likely that the average customer does _not_ buy another brand of mp3 player.

As others have pointed out, the article headline is misleading. Hollywood won't admit any such thing.

mutiple sales

They want to sell you the DVD version, the PSP version, the special edition, the remastered edition, the directors cut, the laser disc version, the VHS version. Next will be the HD-DVD, and Blueray versions. Followed by the hologram version, err, maybe. If anyone has been most successful at this, its George Lucas, how many of us own more than one version of the first Star Wars trilogy?

Re:mutiple sales

Except, oh right, creating scarcity to allow creators to profit was the original constitutional purpose of copyright

Insightful, up to that point.

According to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, 1787: "the Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

You've swallowed Hollywood's line. Profit is supposed to be a carrot to "promote the progress of science and useful arts", not the purpose, though these days you'd never know that.

As for TFA, yes, what a load of crap. When did musings in random blogs become newsworthy?

Consumers losing control

The real risks of DRM come into play when consumers lose control of the devices they legitimately assume will have traditional functionality. Why on earth should my cellphone, a digital communication device be unable to share MY data freely with other networks? So I have to PAY for a ringtone or PAY to upload a picture I just took? Why should my wifi-enabled Zune not be able to "squirt" MY data to any nearby Zune?

That's bad enough, but the most dangerous outcome here is when I can no longer wipe and then reinstall a free operating system onto a general purpose computing device. The people might be forced to pay the microsoft tax, but we will not give up our free software.

F__k em

The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more customers will slip through your fingers.

Some thoughts.

How the movie and music industry must long for the days of vinyl records and videotapes. In those days, they could produce movies and music, sell them to their customers and after 10 to 15 years, if you used the tapes and records enough, they could sell them again to you. Was there any piracy then ? Hell yes. Records were copied on to audio cassettes and with 2 videorecorders you could easily copy any videotape. Now, with media being spread in a digital form, they lost that kind of control over their sales. And the industry is going to do whatever it takes, to try to get the tapes and vinyl back, in the form of DRM.

Re:Some thoughts.

They used to have fits about tapes and vinyl copying too. It's always happened. Their main problem is that selling media in any form will always be a business which experiences lots of unauthorised copying of its products if you use their traditional distribution method (being monolithic companies selling media at high price through a limited number of channels)

The problem they have is that faced with this undeniable fact they have decided to focus on an unrealistic solution, being drm. The plain fact is that drm will only cause problems for legitimate users, not unauthorised copiers.
Circumvention being illegal is no problem. There will always be someone, somewhere who figures it out, and finding that person in time to stop dissemination of their solution is a game that will be lost before they start, every time.

DRM then is so they can continue to attract investors. It gives them something to say in pitches. 'We have solution x to this problem that will ensure a return on your investment' and so on. The fact that historically such solutions have a 100% faliure rate isn't something they can even think about, so they're trapped.

Looking at this from an evolutionary standpoint, they're screwed, and heading to extinction. Simply demanding that the world be other than it is can only have that result. What system will emerge in its place I don't know, but I strongly suspect that the current crop of p2p companies/products will form the basis of a new media empire.

The current media industries are trying to get into this feild, but for years all they've been doing is trying to stop it, whilst the p2p producers have been innovating like crazy. That means the p2p guys are already ahead in the next wave of media production/distribution, and very likely to stay there.

I think you're all wrong

I think they insist on DRM simply because they're convinced that limitting the number of people who can watch something is better. But they haven't researched. They just take it as a self evident truth. It's become more of a religion than a business strategy.

DRM is just another word for nothing left to lose

DRM is a funny thing. It's like trying to make a Tsunami go away by yelling at it. I guess that both Hollywood and the music industry, suffer from their historical misbehaviour towards users. Take the questionable pricing as an example - regardless of manufacturing costs. I assume that it costs less to mass produce DVDs and CDs than the late VHS and vinyl records - still prices haven't dropped. DRM is all about piracy - but it's a lost battle, that ship has sailed long ago...

Specious logic.

"There is simply no evidence whatsoever that DRM slows piracy. In fact, all of the evidence suggests the opposite, and arguments that DRM "keeps honest people honest" are frankly insulting. If they're already honest, they don't need DRM."

Arstechnic knows this is poor logic. If people are already honest, then there's no need for ANY laws of any kind. No speeding laws because people are already honest. No embezzlement, or fraud laws because people are honest.

Also I would like to see "all of the evidence" for myself, instead of some "unamed source". This is not "Deep Throat", or "Watergate". Let's not let our standards slip because we really want the outcome to be a certain way.

In today's edition...

In-depth studies at the Institute For The Blindingly Obvious have confirmed that large corporations may sometimes behave in ways that do not benefit the users of their products. Followup studies reveal that despite the fact that this is blindingly obvious, many people uncritically believe anything they see on TeeVee. Sometime in May 2007, we expect the release of a groundbreaking study by our sister organization, the Ric Romero University Of Things Everyone Already Knows, which will purportedly claim that music and film labels are obsolete in the Internet Era. Stay tuned for the Institute's investigative segment, where our undercover reporters hope to either confirm or dispel rumors that many executives in the entertainment business are megalomaniacs and/or control freaks.

Other stories coming up on the 11 o'clock segment: That hot girl you met in the AOL chatroom? She wasn't hot, and she was a he. This shocking story of one nerd's attempt to meet a real woman. Also, the sky is blue and bears shit in the woods.

>>> But seriously, the entire MAFIAA business model is built around controlling you (the buyer's) access to the artist's work. The Internet shatters that, and they're terrified by the realization that they are now redundant elements in a capitalist system.

Customer lock-in

Yes, that, and customer lock-in to proprietary DRM are some pieces of the DRM puzzle.

When you see Microsoft switching from their PlaysForSure DRM to Zune's own for its marketplace as that player is released without quoting security problems with the PlaysForSure tech, you know there are other things under the hood. Similarly, Apple is reluctant to opening up their FairPlay (why do they keep picking oxymorons for these techs?) standard to others because it could impair Apple's market dominance.

It's really sad that outside organizations to keep market competition, business practices, as well as user rights in check aren't more involved in this.

Well, Duh

Amusingly, it's why DRM schemes and this digital home thing Microsoft funnily thinks is coming will never work. The content owners want you to buy your films and music all over again, or even better, to rent your own content to you. Stop paying and you have no content. It's how a lot of Windows Media based stores work, and as soon as people realise it, they immediately stop paying.

The only DRM scheme that works is Apple's, and that's because they were clever enough not to get down on their knees in front of the studios and promise them anything, which is what Microsoft has done.

What bothers me the most is that Congress ...

is partaking in this and pushing for DRM everywhere and lose of fair rights. It use to be the dems who pushed this. But anymore these days, the neo-cons (who are the majority of the republicans) are also behind it. It seems to be that rather than fight each and every one of these initiivies, we need to cut the beast off at the knees. The only way that I can think to do that is to prevent money flow from lobbyist to congress reps. And the only way to prevent all of the is to implement Joel Hefley's ideas on corruption prevention. All in all, if we want America to be the land of the people, and by the people, and for the people, we are going to have pony up the funding of the election process. Otherwise, this will remain the land of the high bidder, of the highest bidder, and for the highest bidder.

DRM - It's Not Really About Piracy

TFA - It's Not Really About What It Says In The Title

Stunned!

Stunned! Stunned I tell ya!

If you were to tell me that the Boy Gates has $50 billion in the bank I wouldn't be more Stunned!

Duh

Of course it's not about preventing piracy. It's just that 'digital, economic enslavement of end users' isn't as sexy of a company line.

No more DRM?

Damnit! Another stealth upgrade from Apple? Sarbane! Oxley! Get in here!

Well, we don't really have to put up with it.

I don't want to start a flame war, but to me it's really simple:

Why the hell are you going to pay for a music file with DRM if you can get it for free trough P2P ? If the music studios played it nicely and gave us the ability to download music in good compression formats (or even flac uncompressed) without DRM, then well, we would have no moral excuses not to buy the music from the artist we like. But since we are paying to get some crappie format that will only play in computer X and portable player Y, then sorry guys, but I think it's moral very acceptable to just get it for free.

If music studios want to make us pay 2, 3 or even more times for the same music ... then my answer is "I'll not pay you even once!".

Where?

Where in any of the articles does "Hollywood" "admit" anything?

Support piratebay.org

The guys at piratebay.org want to buy Sealand to make a copyright-free nation. Even if this is a joke, it makes you wonder.
http://buysealand.com/ [buysealand.com]

DRM is piracy

It seems to me that DRM is about piracy, about pirating users' rights to sell them back to the users.

I'd say RMD is piracy, DRM is theft.

Interesting timing

Seeing as how the Doom9 folks are finding HD-DVD volume and title keys so quickly...

Self-Defeating

The main problem with DRM is how self-defeating the current model is. If they really want to do the whole thing right it needs to:

• Be a universal standard. DRM now is used mostly to lock users down to one class of devices. But it really needs to work between companies and between devices. That video you download off of iTunes should work on your 360 and on your TiVO and on your PSP.
• Allow users to do what they want with it, just prevent mass-sharing. But convenience sharing, like bringing it to a friends house, the companies don't realize how important that is.
• Work on people's current systems, or at most, require a minor upgrade. This is where HDCP breaks apart entirely. You need to build a new PC from the ground up, including your MONITOR, to be able to play HDCP content. That's just crazy.
• You can't put people in chains unless they've done something wrong

Unless ALL of these things come to pass, DRM is an unworkable mess and will cause the companies involved in it to fail miserably.

DRMed content: Purchasing a license to use?

I would like an answer to this question. Is a person purchasing a DVD or a license for to view and/or use the DVD (for that matter any other DRMed content)?

Maybe some tax laws need to be explored to answer this. IANAL, but I question who owns the DVD or and DRMed content when purchased from a store. I've always thought that ownership changed hands when the taxes were paid. In the case of purchases from a store, or for that matter any purchase that included sales tax.

If you are only purchasing a license and not ownership, why would you be paying taxes on the item. Do DVDs and/or other DRMed items tell you that you are only purchasing a license to view and/or use the material it contains?

When I purchase an item and pay the taxes on said item, I consider myself the owner of that item unless I am told prior to the purchase that I'm only getting a license to view and/or use that item rather than gaining ownership of said item. When I buy a book or magazine, I own that book or magazine when I pay it and that includes the sales tax at which time the ownership of the physical item changes hands. I also understand copyright laws and fair rights. Why do electronic formats, which have the same copyright protections as written material, have the ability to take my fair use rights away from me? The only answer I can come up with is that when purchasing electronic formats that are DRMed, I'm purchasing a license to use and not ownership.

But if I don't have ownership rights to the item, then someone else still retains ownership rights to that item. Since the item in question is only a copy, then that person that retains ownership of many copies of the item. Those items are an asset to the owner and taxes must be paid at sometime on those assets. If I'm only paying a sales tax on a license, then owner must be paying taxes on the ownership of all the copies he/she makes. Are the people that are selling licenses of DRMed material paying the taxes for ownership of those assets? Or did they pay the taxes on the materials needed to make the copies before the copies were made?

The point is, if someone else retains ownership of items they sell you, and you pay the taxes on the items, that someone is retaining ownership of assets and getting others to pay their taxes for them.

missleading topic

Well besides the topic being a little missleading to say the least, I thought it was clear to everyone that Hollywood/Media (refered as 'they' from now on) is there to make money , no matter what, see sony for example, DRM and copy protection mechanisms are there so that you must buy several copies of the same thing , for DVD, for your PSP and so on. One of the most absurd things ive seen is the fact that it is Forbiden to try to circunvent the DVD encryption mechanism, you own a copy but if you want to make a backup you are a criminal. The sole porpose of DRM is to sell, there is NOTHING that 'they' do that has the sole purpose of beneficting the user. You think that the platinum titles are there to benefict the poor player ? WRONG !!!! they exist for 1) ressel a overly exauthed title 2) Screw up the used market.

Another reason for DRM

Another reason why the media corps want more DRM in more places is to further cement the position of the **AA as the "gatekeeper" of the worlds media.
A notable recent example is the new rules they want that mean that all streaming radio stations (regardless of what content they play, RIAA or otherwise) must have DRM.

My thoughts and musings

Well, here we go:

The full article is a blog? I think sometimes that the heads at slashdot have been kidnapped by forum trolls. Let's stir up some trouble with DRM and see how many days it will stay on the front page!

DRM and piracy: It's been said before, but to reiterate - DRM doesn't stop piracy. For that matter, gun laws don't stop criminals from obtaining guns, and airport security doesn't stop actual terrorists.

DRM and consumers: What a load of bull. We're not doing this to stop piracy, we're doing it to give the user more choices... yea right. What they are doing is locking down media so that they can sell more copies of it. Because hell, if you can sell someone more than one bible, you might as well try to sell them more than one copy of Star Wars. I know lots of people that have more than one copy of World of Warcraft, so that they can play the game twice at the same time. The funny thing is, of all "DRM" schemes, the MMORPG is the one that actually works - you buy the account, or you can't play. The account is verified online, and thus keygens quickly fail as duplicates can't simultaneously play, and there's no real offline/LAN game. The lesson? Some people have more money than they know what to do with - and the media giants have resorted to milking them because the media market in general is pretty well saturated.

Supply and demand

The use of DRM follows basic economics. The value of your product is regulated by supply and demand. The latest single from famous artist may be in high demand but that demand is nullify by the unlimited supply cause by releasing it unencumbered. Obviously, record company want to be able to control that supply via DRM to maximize profit from the demand. This is nothing new because in the days of vinyl records they could readily control that supply. In the digital age, they can easily lose control of the supply via a ripping utility and a P2P network. In everyone's interest, they should have control of the supply in so much as to perserve the value of making music. However, that control should be balance against consumer rights. The fear is that they will wield that power without regard to consumer rights or feedback. Moreover, that fear is boosted the inclusion of Microsoft- a company infamous for using its monopoly without regard to the consumer- and its efforts to set the DRM standard. But, we as a consumer have to figure a way to assert our will in system. I think we can by just not buying the content unless the terms appeal to us. I will never by song with time limit on it or a movie that requires a special display. Maybe the content providers won't bat a eye at the lost of a single sale but, if enough people do it, then they will listen. In a way, we do vote with our wallets as evident by the success of iTunes and FairPlay DRM. Fairplay is still DRM but it does give the consumer enough flexibility to use the content within their needs. I think that might be the best balance to give content providers control of the supply and consumers the right to do whatever with the content purchased.

An explanation would be nice

Saying they're selling our rights back to us or squeezing every cent they can out of customers evokes an emotional response, but it would be better if they actually explain how that happens.

For example, incorporating regional lockouts into copy protection, so it is integral to the game/DVD disc, but still allows the company to charge inflated rates in certain regions and keep people from importing from a cheaper region even if the content is the same.

Well DUH!

I (any many others)could fill the front page with previous comments I made to that effect, and If I could find them all, I would. And now, after all this time, it's just starting to sink in? When are people going to see the real purpose of IP law? Talk about your delayed reaction... Well, maybe now we can start to make the move towards abolishment. It's well past time for that.

There's a word for this

> squeeze every last cent out of customers

This is called "capitalism".

It's a good thing.

We're experiencing a crunch. The old way of distributing movies and music is simply not going to survive much longer, so the people who depend on that way for their paychecks are panicking. They don't have to worry about their reputation ten years from now, so they're going to squeeze the consumer for every cent.

This process increases the pressure on the inchoative industry that will replace them. The more they squeeze, the more the consumer begs for an alternative, and the more that consumer will pay for the alternative when it arrives. (A common myth is that this will make the alternative arrive faster; what actually happens is that the alternative is released earlier when it is still incomplete and unreliable. The average consumer doesn't quite know the difference, but those of us who build these technologies do.)

Over time, the consumers end up paying roughly the same amount. Individual consumers may pay more, but not much more. If the industry didn't squeeze so hard, it would keep more customers and continue making money for a longer time - but less of it. Meanwhile, the alternative would still arrive, but consumers wouldn't flock to it and it wouldn't command as high a price.

In twenty years, the result - being more or less inevitable - will be roughly the same. All the media conglomerates are doing right now is driving themselves out of business faster, and arranging for the earliest alternative technology companies to get rich. The consumer will end up with the same end result, so I tend to view the transfer of wealth to the alternative technology companies as a net win overall.

It's sort of like the alternative O/S situation we had when Red Hat got massive. People who would otherwise have bought Microsoft products bought Red Hat instead. They still spent the same amount of money overall, but the Red Hat consumers got more for their investment. Companies that wouldn't have bought anything bought Red Hat. In the end, we got the scenario we have today: Linux has pretty much gotten where it's going to go, Microsoft is still the dominant force with no signs of failure in the near future, and the Mac is slowly carving a swath out of both. In the next couple years, this will stabilise, and we'll have that O/S market for the next twenty years. Even if there had been no Red Hat, things would have ended up very much the same way. Linux was a disruptive technology, but Red Hat was not in any way disruptive - just a momentary blip on the radar.

The media know that something disruptive is about to break. They don't know what. They don't know when. They just know it's all about to fall over and die, so they're grabbing all they can carry before they have to desert the sinking ship.

Not customers - competition

Ed Felten had a good point about this last spring:

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1007 [freedom-to-tinker.com]

Private cracking and file-sharing will likely always be possible. But businesses can't operate in private - they have to offer services in public. So having the ability to sue and withhold licenses from competitors means that you have bigger shares of marketplace for whatever you're using DRM to encumber. Customers can't be stopped - but competition sure can. That's a real point, too.

For us in the retail industry...

I'm proud to say that I've never intentionally sold a Zune. Any time somebody is interested, they get to hear about the WiFi and the 3 plays in 3 days DRM for all music, even if they recorded it themselves. The common response? "That's gay. You have any other MP3 players?"

I'm also pushing Linux on anybody asking about Vista, bit it's kinda difficult since my store doesn't sell Linux...

Any suggestions for other 'product swaps'? Any favorite music players out there? (We have Creative Zen, Sansa, Muvo, iRiver, and the new Walkman).

I'm intentionally ommiting the name of where I work, and replies should too as I don't want to affect their Google pagerank, but they have naming rights to a rather large basketball and hockey stadium in Los Angeles.

The worst thing about DRM is...

...that it hurts the only people that in a sane world should profit from music and movies: The people creating it. It was never about the money men (taking chances on new artists with hit potential) or the distribution chain. They are just middle men that should profit a little bit from their niche.

Today artists don't need a professional studio, nor do they need a huge upfront loan. Many new artists finance their own albums (usually because the big labels never take chances anymore) and they only need retail distribution (unless they intend to sell exclusively from their website). This model leaves no room for the big labels and they know it.

Same thing in the movie business. Most of the better movies are made as independent productions, usually with a fairly limited budget and they only need some form of distribution. Why the major studios pour hundreds of millions into huge productions with overrated stars and too many special effects - and no story - remain a mystery. But they want a return on those investments and as the sales usually don't match the expectations, they need to squeeze the consumer even more, and DRM is great at that.

Hearsay At Best

A Slashdot submitter says that Arstechnica says that Businessweek's Ronald Grover says that an unnamed studio executive admitted DRM is not about piracy.

Even if we skip the verifiable chain, we're still left with Ronald Grover says that an unnamed studio executive admitted DRM is not about piracy.

Very few responses to this submission comment on the article, instead issues about DRM are discussed directly.

Re:On a scale of 1 to 10...

K heres the thing. Bias is a thing that alters perception of reality. Once your perception of reality has been altered, you can't decide what's unjust and what isn't.

Saying you're biassed against what is unjust is basically saying that whatever bias made you choose wrongly the things that you will believe to be unjust, you will now double and then redouble your blind determination to re-inforce that wrong belief, so that you become a bigot and a talking head that spouts dogma.

DRM doesn't prevent massive *anything*.

If making it slightly difficult for you to create backups keeps people from easily doing massive copying and distribution without permission, isn't that a fair trade-off?

DRM doesn't prevent people from easily doing massive copying and distribution at all.

It makes it harder for the first person to "rip" that first copy, but once it's done preventing anyone else from "ripping" that copy is irrelevant.

And DRM does much much more than "making it slightly difficult for you to create backups".

It makes it impossible for you to keep a copy of a work indefinitely. Your copy is only usable as long as the company that made the DRMed document still exists. If you think this doesn't matter you need to talk to a historian.

It makes it impossible for you to view the work except through a specific application. I have precisely one DRM-protected e-book now... I recently deleted the Microsoft Reader documents I owned, because they're worthless now I don't have a Pocket PC. Oh, that's right, you want me to buy another copy for that. Why should I?

It makes it impossible for you to use a work in ways the application doesn't want you to. If I own a movie, why shouldn't I be able "enter" it by feeding captured scenes into a VR viewer? Because you want me to have to pay again for the VR version of the movie (if you ever bother making one)?

How many times should I have to buy The White Album anyway?