SDMI And Manufacturing Fallout

An Anonymous Coward writes "Just read that some hardware manufacturers are starting to get impatient about the approal of the SDMI encyrption method since it delays their products from going to market. Thus, this causes lost market opportunity and sales due to the delay. See the EETimes story."

SDMI is Today's SET

[pbryan]

Anyone remember the Secure Electronic Transaction initiative? This was Visa's and MasterCard's magic technology to allow secure transactions on the insecure Internet. They warned those doing electronic commerce with plain ol' SSL that SSL was just a short-term kludge until SET was finalized and implemented.

It turned out that those who were going to have to actually implement SET revolted against this initiative as they realized the implications of the full implemnetation. Furthermore, SET wound up being bogged-down in bureaucratic procedure, much as SDMI is now.

What continues to surprise me about SDMI is the continued insistance that the Emperor has clothes. Just as CSS was subverted, so shall SDMI. This is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of mathematical fact.

Bottom line: if the watermark is audible, then it degrades the quality of the audio; if the watermark is inaudible, then it can be compressed out. So the choice will be "protect" the music with an audible watermark, or have the "protection" subverted.

Remember, Your vote counts

[Technician]

In other words, you get what you pay for. If you buy SMDI stuff, you will get more SMDI stuff. I vote with my pocketbook. I will not buy any SDMI audio player, ripper, converter etc. Any content sold in ANY SDMI format will not be purchased by me. If you want to sell music to me, put it on Vinyl, CD, or any other format that can fully be used freely on all my MP3 devices. I am voting on this one. Please do not vote against me. I am voting for less expensive players that use smaller files that will work in my car, computer and personal MP3 player.

Don't bloat and lock the music. I won't buy it.

Re:Becoming more common?

[radja]

you're right.. look at what's happening with DVD players.. here in the netherlands, almost no player is sold with region-codes enabled..

//rdj

Screw SDMI then

[billcopc]

If stupid ole' RIAA is too slow in finalizing SDMI, then fsck it. The manufacturers don't need approval from the RIAA to produce their hardware. If they're fearing lawsuits, I'm thinking that all the hardware manufacturers surely have more legal firepower than the RIAA's vaporous swiss bank assets. If someone with minimal authority was threatening MY company, you can be damned sure I'd stomp all over that obstacle before my business starts sinking into debt.

It's not lawsuits.

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

It's the possibility of being shut out of a giant charge into a digital format by the recording industry at large. If you, as a hardware company, sink a shitload of money into making MP3 players or whatever, and suddenly everyone starts using formats that are explicitly denied the ability to play on your device, you are a bit out of luck.

This is highly unlikely, however, as anyone who follows this stuff knows. For once, the market is leading the producers in the choice of format they use, and certainly for a little while, CDs and MP3 are going to be "it".

--Perianwyr Stormcrow

Becoming more common?

[innocent_white_lamb]

We may see more of this in the future. I hope that we do, frankly.

When someone sees that his market share is being eroded or stolen away by someone whose product is "non-compliant" but which works fine and when "compliant" hardware becomes too limiting for the average consumer and the machine of choice becomes the non-compliant product, well the nature of the market is that the non-compliant hardware will take over and push the compliant hardware out.

People may be dumb, but they are not stupid, overall. There are, for example, an awful lot of CD players in the world, and a lot of audio CD's have been sold. Audio CD's took over from the LP record because there were clear advantages to the music purchasing public - improved sound quality, smaller physical format, and better durability. Not to mention ease of track-switching, etc.

However, when the only "improvement" is to restrict the customers' ability to actually use the equipment (regardless of whether the use is "appropriate" in the view of the content provider) then there will be (hopefully) consumer resistance to that kind of a change.

This is a good thing, in my opinion. And in-fighting and disagreement among those who are trying to devise the restrictive specifications can only be beneficial to the consumer. The longer it takes for a restrictive "standard" to be developed, the more firmly entrenched the existing non-restricted standard becomes. And then you get into the situation where Joe Customer says, "What do you mean I can't do X? Screw that, I'm sticking with what I have."

So my reaction to this article, overall, is "Carry on boys, by all means."

Re:Screw SDMI then

[billcopc]

But why would anyone willingly participate in SDMI besides the RIAA's own incestful corporate offspring ? They can't vaporize every single MP3 encoder out there, if manufacturers continue producing non-SDMI compliant audio players then people will continue downloading non-SDMI compliant music. And even if SDMI-watermarking becomes popular and widespread (perhaps with pay-per-Napster), someone out there will reverse it and release a 1-click SDMI-remover for us old-school MP3-CD people to use. Copy protection has, and always will be a complete waste of time. Software can be patched, hardware can be bypassed.