4 Microsoft Engineers Predicted DRM Would Fail 10 Years Ago 142
An anonymous reader writes "Ars is running an article about a paper written just over a decade ago by four engineers at Microsoft. In it, they talk about the darknet, and how it applies to distributing content online. They correctly predicted the uselessness of DRM: 'In the presence of an infinitely efficient darknet — which allows instantaneous transmission of objects to all interested users — even sophisticated DRM systems are inherently ineffective.' The paper's lead author, Peter Biddle, said he almost got fired over the paper at the time. 'Biddle tried to get buy-in from senior Microsoft executives prior to releasing the paper. But he says they didn't really understand the paper's implications — and particularly how it could strain relationships with content companies — until after it was released. Once the paper was released, Microsoft's got stuck in bureaucratic paralysis. Redmond neither repudiated Biddle's paper nor allowed him to publicly defend it.' The paper itself is available in .DOC format."
DRM is not useless (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM hasn't failed and isn't useless. It's quite successful at pissing off honest customers and turning them towards piracy and circumvention.
Re:DRM is not useless (Score:5, Funny)
That point is made in the conclusion of the actual paper. I know it's against the rules, but I read it.
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Indeed. I wonder how much more wealthy MS might have been if they had continued working on their previous promises, instead of pursuing the DRM pipedream.
I mean, they have spent a hideous amount of company resources to implement DRM in their main product, the Windows operating system; those resources could have been spent elsewhere on any number of features that really needed the extra attention. Instead, they were spent creating an alien DRM system in Windows, a place where the user (or even the admin) was
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DRM is not useless (Score:5, Insightful)
i point to netflix and Steam as examples of DRM done right. If you make the customer feel they are getting more value in their purchase and the DRM is unobtrusive and just rides along? Most won't care. look at how many had a fight over the Humble bundle and I was surprised to see how many agreed with me that it didn't matter because Steam gives value like chat, updates, matchmaking, etc and I know many pirates that once they got netflix haven't bothered, they have so many shows to watch now that frankly they could live in front of the set and never see it all, so why bother pirating more?
I think you are missing the point of DRM. The point of DRM is to stop unauthorized people from using or copying or distributing your software. That is its purpose. It was never intended as some kind of additional feature to get more people to buy your software as people like you claim Steam has done.
In terms of stopping pirates from using software DRM has been an almost complete failure. There is the rare exception where the developers themselves devoted a large percentage of their development time to weaving DRM into thousands of different places to intentionally make things difficult/tedious for crackers, but those are rare exceptions. For the most part DRM has been an utter failure.
When I want to buy a game that is only available on Steam I download it from TPB or KAT instead. The torrent version has an additional feature other than its lower cost: it allows me to install it without an internet connection. That's the kind of feature that I don't need all that often, but when I need it I really need it. So I rationally choose the version which offers me the most value: the DRM free version.
There will always be a significant percentage of sheeple who don't care about DRM, no matter how draconian it is. Even the must-always-be-connected-to-server DRM sells many copies. Obviously less intrusive forms of DRM like steam will have fewer people objecting to it, but that doesn't mean the publisher isn't losing a significant number of sales from people who refuse to pay for DRM or who don't have reliable (or any) internet connections. Obviously such publishers just don't care about those people. They are willing to lose some number of customers in order to have that warm fuzzy feeling that delaying the release of their software on TPB for an extra 12 hours seems to give them. If I were a stockholder I would not be happy with that decision.
Re:DRM is not useless (Score:5, Insightful)
The *stated* point of DRM is to keep people from pirating your software. The actual purpose of DRM is to maintain control over the user, thus using it to prevent used games sales, format shifting, playing on unauthorized devices, etc.
'digital rights'=copyright (Score:3)
It's about the 'rights' as they say down in LA
You all have it...no dispute...DRM is anchored in the concept of holding a 'copyright' to written music
The concept has been so abused that it gets confusing, and it's definitely about money at the core...money...power...control...whathaveyou...we all know their fsking game now, to me that's the important thing
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What a delightful little conspiracy theory, designed to give pirates a feeling of superiority because they've busted out of the evil intentions of evil corporations. You know what the most effective DRM on the market is? The PS3 DRM. It was broken once (four years after th
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If any money is made with DRM it is not because piracy is deterred by it, but because companies manage to enforce standards and lock people inside their ecosystems, in effect generating an artificial monopoly, which arguably should not be legally allowed.
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There are a great number of areas where your assertion "if the projections show it won't make more money, they won't do it" is false. Though somewhat flawed, the example of the legalisation of cannabis is a great example. The arguments put forward by the fanatics and Christian fundamentalists have long been soundly refuted by both economics and science (no, I don't think the former is a subset of the latter but that's another story). Two US states have finally bitten the bullet bu
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When I want to buy a game that is only available on Steam I download it from TPB or KAT instead. The torrent version has an additional feature other than its lower cost: it allows me to install it without an internet connection. That's the kind of feature that I don't need all that often, but when I need it I really need it.
You do realize that you're talking about really needing to play a game, right? What exactly would the consequence be of your having to wait until you have an internet connection to install a game?
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You need an internet connection to download it anyhow, why not just install it right then?
At least Steam doesn't make you be online whenever you boot the game up.... like some DRM.
Or - and here's a radical thought - buy the game (so as to show support for the game you 'really need' to play) and then pirate it to get the 'critical feature' of being able to install it from your EM-shielded bunker? The makers get to eat, you get to add your perceived value, the pirate 'community' gets to show that actually the
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Yeah, I think you're right - we all want the newest games (music, video, movies, tv) the moment it comes out - but if you can discipline yourself to wait you can get it at a bargain price surprisingly soon.
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You do realize that "having to wait" can be years? Or never. Waiting several years to play a game or use other DRMed software is not acceptable for software that I have paid for.
I'm guessing you've never lived in a location where internet service is either unavailable or impractical. I have. I don't "need" to play any game, but I sure as hell am not going to pay even $1 for one that won't allow me to use it whenever I want.
Basically the publishers want to fuck me in the ass and then get paid for it. I guess
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Has it not occured to you that:
1. A person can live in more than one place in a lifetime. Some of these places may not have internet connections easily available.
2. It is possible to download the game before you depart for the Never Never and yet still play the game after you arrive.
3. I never said I did not have an internet connection right now. The point is not about right now. It is that at some point in the future (in my case probably sometime in the next 2 years) I may wish to live in a location withou
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You are the reason why pages get slashdotted. I hope you are ashamed of yourself.
The money quote (Score:5, Interesting)
Te hoped that writing a paper saying so would reassure Microsoft's critics in the technical community that Redmond wasn't planning to lock down the PC in order to satisfy Hollywood. And by making it clear that the people behind Microsoft's "trusted computing" push were not fans of DRM, Biddle hoped he could persuade the technical community to consider other, more benign applications of the technology he was building.
snip
It didn't work out that way. "I almost got fired over the paper," Biddle told Ars. "It was extremely controversial." Biddle tried to get buy-in from senior Microsoft executives prior to releasing the paper. But he says they didn't really understand the paper's implications—and particularly how it could strain relationships with content companies—until after it was released. Once the paper was released, Microsoft's got stuck in bureaucratic paralysis. Redmond neither repudiated Biddle's paper nor allowed him to publicly defend it.
At the same time, "the community we thought would draw a connection never drew the connection," Biddle said, referring to anti-DRM activists. "Microsoft was taking so much heat around security and trustworthy computing, that I was not allowed to go out and talk about any of this stuff publicly. I couldn't explain 'guys, we're totally on your side. What we want is a program that's open.'"
The so called "community" is and was rabidly anti-Microsoft regardless of the actual merits of the case. There are umpteen journalists(eg. Farhad Manjoo of Slate), who railed endlessly against Palladium, but when Apple implemented the Palladium spec to the letter in the iPhone and iPad, locked out developers and users from their own machines, the exact same people went "OOH SHINY" were falling all over themselves singing its praises.
See http://www.salon.com/2002/07/11/palladium/ [salon.com] and http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/new_ipad_how_apple_s_tablet_strategy_parallels_its_unbeatable_ipod_success_.html [slate.com]
Now we have the slow decimation of user and developer freedom led over the past 5 years by the iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook,locked bootloaders on Android phones like the Droid, tablets etc., Windows Phone and now Windows RT. As they say, the first cut is the deepest, the war was lost when the public started buying iDevices in droves and they *still* can't keep them in stock. Now everyone can say if it's okay for the market leader Apple to do it, so can we. This is the harm with the "raise hell if it's MS, ignore and pump it if it's Apple etc." attitude of the community and Slashdot is no different for the most part. If, instead of playing fanboys and haters, if pundits and tech folks actually stood for openness like RMS did, we might have had a different future today.
The cat is out of the bag though. Apple charging 30% of even the services offered through apps is just the tip of the iceberg.
Re:The money quote (Score:5, Informative)
The fundamental misconception of the paper(which, as you note, Apple was first to demonstrate in a broad and serious way) is that DRM is about controlling exfiltration rather than controlling playback.
Yeah, obviously, even the people who design PAL hardware for thermonuclear warheads are going to have a difficult time designing DRM systems that will resist prolonged physical access by a sophisticated attacker. If they have to build such systems on a consumer electronics budget, forget about it.
However the 'break once, play everywhere' DRM defeat model implicitly assumes that computers will be 'default allow' devices. That, unless a given object is specifically encrypted/crippled/otherwise fucked with, they will happily do their best to work with what they are given.
This simply isn't true. Market forces have prevented going 'default deny' in certain highly competitive sectors(eg. nobody selling cheap DVD players can get away with selling DVD players that play only CSS-encrypted disks) and for certain legacy formats(it isn't really an 'mp3 player' if it doesn't play mp3s...); but it is increasingly the case that more sophisticated devices are 'default deny'.
None of today's consoles will boot an unsigned binary, even one otherwise compatible with their environment without modification to the system(sometimes a software crack, some are known only to possess hardware vulnerabilities requiring physical modification). The iDevices of the world will reject any .ipa executable package that isn't DRM-encumbered. You can strip off the "fairplay" all you like; but unless you have a jailbroken device or access to a trusted signing key, you aren't going to be running it... Microsoft's "Windows RT" will be the same thing for Windows style executables.
If anything, what the MS guys demonstrated is that (because of the 'darknet' consideration) 'Trusted Computing' as DRM is doomed to failure and its only real function is trusted computing as control.
Re:The money quote (Score:4, Informative)
I agree in general. However, for what it's worth, Windows RT can both sideload apps (they have to be signed by *somebody*, but the certificate can and often will be from an "untrusted" source) and execute unsigned desktop apps if they run in the app sandbox. The first is an official feature, intended for use either by developers or for internal (company, etc.) apps. The second is completely unofficial, but it works; "Metro-style" apps (which run in a sandbox) aren't supposed to be able to invoke arbitrary .EXEs. Somebody has figured out how to do it though, and it turns out that so long as the target EXE is within the sandbox's accessible portion of the filesystem and doesn't need to access anything outside of the sandbox, it works fine even if completely unsigned. Of course, it still needs to be recompiled for ARM, so no running arbitrary legacy programs yet unless you have the source code and build tools, but it works.
The question will be how MS responds to this. It's arguably completely safe to leave in place; even if somebody goes to the trouble to create malware that will run in this environment, the environment itself will keep it constrained. A sideloaded or store app could literally do just as much damage. If anything really malicious does pop up, they can add its definition to Defender. On the other hand... it's possible that they'll try and take a "you just *thought* it was your device" approach and block people from even doing that much. After all, given the need to recompile, you could argue that legacy malware wouldn't run anyhow, so there was no need to forbid third-party desktop apps in the first place. In any case, time will tell. Meanwhile, there's already work on other ways of unlocking Windows RT.
Overall, a very insightful post, and I almost modded it as such (hopefully somebody else will) but wanted to respond.
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yes it only loads signed executable until its jailbroken, as i recall their was a hacker a while back breaking each iOS update for each device, where to break it you just had to go to his page in the iphone browser. and apple in the end hired him to make him stop. drm don't work. just look at playstation they try to lock you out and a hacker just breaks it, Sony knows they cant stop him from doing it technological so they litigate him to death
Re:The money quote (Score:4, Informative)
The iDevices of the world will reject any .ipa executable package that isn't DRM-encumbered. You can strip off the "fairplay" all you like; but unless you have a jailbroken device or access to a trusted signing key, you aren't going to be running it...
That's not strictly true. Apple allows one to load "entitlements" on a device which can pair the device with your own signing key, and away from the appstore review process and DRM.
Sure, they have to generate the entitlement. But for $200 they'll generate you an entitlement that can be loaded on as many devices as you want (aimed at enterprise.)
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You couldn't be more right. I remember how much fuss was made against the DRM in Vista, which was fairly benign and had to be implemented to playback BluRay discs. Remember that debunked hitpiece of a paper written by an Australian professor? Many on Slashdot *still* believe that FUD and will say Windows 7 has a lot of DRM.
When Apple implemented lockdown DRM on *apps*, the Apple fans made sure to moderate and steer the discussion about the OH SHINY part and no one talks about it anymore.
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Apple charging 30% of even the services offered through apps is just the tip of the iceberg.
Okay you're correct in many ways except for this right here. Apple's 30% cut is an extremely great price point given the market share and central access it provides. You might not be aware that we've (developers) had to put up with much higher rates in the past from similar offerings that were only a fraction of the Apple ecosystem. While lockout may seem like "death", there are elements that I can't deny are far more beneficial and efficient than a pure open system.
Re:DRM is not useless (Score:4, Interesting)
I am going to be a devil's advocate again: It did work extremely well on the PS3, where a "complete" break wasn't achived until recently, and for a console that is almost five years old, that is a pretty good accomplishment.
Satellite is well protected with no "master cards" available on any black market. So far, no cracks are out there in any form.
The iPhone 5 has yet to have even a single usable JB. The 4S has had only limited windows of time where it was jailbreakable.
Even with e-readers, I've yet to see a cracked AZW file in the past two years. Amazon must be doing something right with their Kindle DRM. (I hope to be proven wrong, but I was curious about this earlier, did some quick searching and found any supposed decoders just were links to malware/Trojans.)
DRM is alive and well.
Re:DRM is not useless (Score:4, Informative)
Actually AZW has long been cracked. It was initially done to create DRM-free copies that Amazon could not revoke (remember the incident with 1984?). Of course, there are those who use it to share ebooks without permission to do so. There is even a plugin that integrates into Calibre to strip DRM out of your books,
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You mean the plugin that requires a version of the E-reader that isn't up to date, or the plugin that is a Trojan dropper? I wish there were a Calibre plugin that worked, but so far, there are none.
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There is a python script that works (need your kindle serial number).
Or you can use Kindle.DRM.Removal.v4.2.1.247-Lz0 (Basically a crappy gui to the same script).
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Also Microsoft's PlayReady DRM hasn't been broken to date.
Annoyed the crap out of me because I am forced to use windows media center with my crap cable provider who CCI flags every channel. I have instead resorted to usenet and now download my tv shows illegally, and plan to cancel cable soon. Sadly, my HDHomeRun is basically worthless.
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I remember removing the DRM from a PlayReady file 5 years ago.
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That's impressive considering PlayReady has only been out for 4 years.
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I doubt you did it 5 years ago, but it is possible you did it with an early revision of playready. Not due to a weakness in the protocol, but due to a flaw in the implementation.
If playready was still breakable, you'd be able to watch netflix in mono.
"useless" =! "alive and well" (Score:2)
Just because companies still try to use DRM doesn't make it useful...
It is currently in use in various forms, and as GP said...it's fsking good at one thing: PISSING OFF THE USER
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You seem to misunderstand what DRM, a.k.a. "copy protection", is advertised to do. It's about preventing copies of the content that is "protected" by DRM from becoming widely available to non-paying users.
The negative effects of implementing DRM systems, which is that users' devices remain out of their control (for most users), are alive and well. That doesn't mean that DRM is accomplishing its stated purpose.
Re:DRM is not useless (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM hasn't failed and isn't useless. It's quite successful at pissing off honest customers and turning them towards piracy and circumvention.
Not just DRM, but all the preview sh*t when I put a DVD in the player. I don't give a damn about all these other things, why do I have to sit there hammering the skip forward button and/or menu button? It's a great motivator toward ripping the content off the DVD, burning it on a blank and then watching it whenever I want to see the movie.
Disney one of the worst offenders.
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Disney movies won't play in my bluray player anymore. (Pixar/Disney.) Everything else does.
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s/piracy and circumvention/better products/
DRM is dumb. Charge a fair price and offer a better service, and people will buy it. If it's easier to get a better product through file sharing, then that is where people are going to go.
Media companies:
Just have certificate or password RSS feeds. Charge $5/month/feed. No DRM. You'll make money. I promise. Hell, even use torrent trackers for the feed links and you won't have to pay for the infrastructure yourself. Your own customers will actually offset th
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Or the opposite. I used to pirate, but now I use steam.
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If you are anti-DRM why buy the software in the first place? The reason you never hear of it here is because we are mostly techies. We know what DRM is and know to check for it before we buy the software. Only a non-geek would buy software and only later realize it has DRM.
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So, I can understand physical disk DRM causing occasional issues (buy the disk and lose/damage it) but honestly for network-based game DRM why does anyone really care? I have bought a few games from Steam for the PC, and a few Xbox Live games, and both times when I upgraded my PC or got a new Xbox it was trivial to re-download the game for the new device. Actually, in both cases I have the games installed on 2 PCs and consoles and as long as you don't try to use both at the same time it works fine.
Like *m
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And I'll never understand people willing to fork over hard earned dollars for DRM laden crap when a completely DRM-free version is available, and for free no less. I'll take the DRM-free version thank you very much. If I like the game or other software I'd be happy to reward the developer, but I don't give a shit about the publisher pushing the DRMed crap. They can just go to hell. Also I assume you have never lived in a location without internet service available. Or where it is available but it is not pra
alright, (Score:2)
Re:alright, (Score:5, Insightful)
The rest of their engineers.
Basically they had 4 employees who realized what the rest of the free world already knew. This is why MS products are so lousy, only 4 people in the whole place figured this out!
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The rest of the engineers didn't actually gave a crap about it as they were paid to implement those DRM. Ever had that feeling,"oh my this guys are paying me to do this, what a bunch of jacks, this will never work".
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"working on bullshit projects sucks out your soul."
Absolutly right. But still...
Working on real bullshit projects pays your bills, great still-to-be-seen unreal ones, do not.
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EVERY DAY
Every day.
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Senior management, apparently. ;)
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I'm not so sure they didn't.... there's no DRM on their OS (no activation, no keys, no problem re-installing it on more than one Mac). Compare that to MS who practically accuse you of piracy before you run your first update.
The DRM they do have (in the Mac App store, iOS apps at least) is so low-key that most people don't even know it's there. I can buy an app once and install it on any and all iOS devices, again and again, with no concern at all. If it's a Mac app, I can install it on up to 5 Macs at once.
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I. I was extremely frightened that they could shut the internet music up, with so enthusiac audience (customers) for DRM.
DRM really had a chance, it failed mostly not on "us" who were accustomed BSD/GPL etc, but on far too many competeting "standards". Then some DRM music stores shut down leaving customers with nothing (still someone bough zune after playsforsure ... go ahead, buy now the 8).
But then, loosers learned nothing and are now "buying" ebooks.
Just a couple of days ago there was a story in the news
10 Years ago? (Score:4, Insightful)
Try 20+ years ago... (Score:4, Insightful)
...hell, most of us knew that back when we were using nibblers on Commodore 64 boxes to copy stuff onto blank 720k floppies. ;)
DRM failure predicted 10 yrs ago? (Score:2)
Dunno...DRM failure was predicted many years before that (remember back when the DMCA was just a proposed bill?).
When it was predicted isn't the important part...it is WHO did the predicting; the Palladium team.
Re:DRM failure predicted 10 yrs ago? (Score:5, Interesting)
The DMCA has, in fact, prolonged the life of DRM by making it a literal crime to circumvent it. At least in the US.
Re:DRM failure predicted 10 yrs ago? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not from what I can see. AACS was cracked within a year or so of the arrival of Blu-ray and HD-DVD, with BD+ falling not long after. The DRM on most ebook formats was stripped within weeks or less.
The DMCA just makes sure that the tools to strip DRM are hosted outside the US.
Re:DRM failure predicted 10 yrs ago? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cool, tell me how to run unsigned code on my PS3 without having obsolete firmware or a hardware flasher.
(Hint: the hacks that "completely" cracked the PS3 didn't.)
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Cool, tell me how to run unsigned code on my PS3 without having obsolete firmware or a hardware flasher.
(Hint: the hacks that "completely" cracked the PS3 didn't.)
Without the DMCA, it just would have gone even faster and been even more hilariously one sided.
We might be able to tell you how to run unsigned code on your PS3, but the people/group that had the knowledge to do it said 'Fuck this, I don't want to sit in jail'.
infinitely efficient darknet (Score:3)
I like the sound of that.
HDCP is still here (Score:2)
Some DRM never goes away...
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Right, which is why you can't find HD films on The Pirate Bay and then stream the MKV to your television...
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http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sarcasm [reference.com]
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They still put CSS on DVDs. That doesn't mean it does anything to protect anything.
Re:HDCP is still here (Score:5, Insightful)
CSS isn't just about stopping piracy. It also requires a license to impliment legally (Being both patented, and covered under the DMCA or your national equivilent). The terms for this license include a number of other conditions, including mandating that players respect the region code byte and that they not provide the ability to skip videos in a certain navigational area usually used for anti-piracy warnings and studio logos. As an anti-piracy measure it is useless today, but it still serves to keep consumer electronics manufacturers (Who cannot afford to go underground to avoid lawsuits) more-or-less in compliance with the region system.
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These days it's even easier; you can walk into a supermarket and pick up a cheap Asian player that can be pu
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I wouldn't be surprised if you guys are paying a bit more because somebody has to make sure the hardware is region locked before it goes to the USA.
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Depending where you are, different laws apply. If you're in the US, it'll be the DMCA. If you're in Europe, it'll be whatever your country passed to impliment the EUCD. Much of the world has laws against circumvention technology, of one form or another.
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They still put CSS on DVDs. That doesn't mean it does anything to protect anything.
Sure it does. Or something does, anyway.
Whatever they put on DVDs protects at least a third of them from properly playing in my (windows) laptop DVD drive.
It may not deter copying, but it sure does something
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that why you use a player that ignores regions and bypasses css like vlc with libdvdcss
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AACS was cracked within a couple of years of BluRay being released.
BD+ was cracked not so very long after that.
DRM might not go away any time soon but it has failed.
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Search for "HDCP Master Key". Now HDCP is reduced to annoying honest people rather than copyright violators.
.doc file? (Score:5, Funny)
Couldn't they have torrented a pdf file to make their case?
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And use DRM in these documents? :)
Writing the obituary for their project (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically, for these folks, the darknet paper was just writing the obituary for the Palladium (trusted computing) project they were working on for Microsoft. They knew that it wouldn't stop piracy, so might as well explain why that is the case and move on...
Re:Writing the obituary for their project (Score:4, Insightful)
They failed to understand then the true purpose of Palladium. That one day, a distant descendent of the project would be used to make computers that are not capable of booting any untrusted operating system, and that Windows alone would be recognised as trusted by most motherboard manufacturers and OEMs. Palladium was always half about DRM and half about lock-in, over Intel's objection. It got so much bad press it was eventually renamed to NGSCB, and then quietly dropped, but some aspects do still remain.
Hearing: H.R. 6156-Retinal Decryption Device Req. (Score:2)
Was a pretty good talk (Score:5, Interesting)
The paper presentation at CCS 2002 was pretty good. I was one of the about 60 people in the room and 5 minutes in I had the feeling of witnessing history in the making. And yes, in the Q&A part, they did directly confirm that they thought DRM was completely doomed from the beginning.
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The paper presentation at CCS 2002 was pretty good. I was one of the about 60 people in the room and 5 minutes in I had the feeling of witnessing history in the making.
I suppose that feeling could have arisen from shock that people from a major corporation were being allowed to say it out loud. The basic point is fundamentally obvious to anyone who's taken an information theory course (or thought hard about it for a while). DRM, when implemented on a general-purpose computer wholly under the control of its owner, is an exercise in trying to give someone a piece of information and then take it back. It's impossible, period.
they did (Score:1)
What is the definition of "succeed" and "fail"? (Score:3)
If "success" means "no content copied", then of course nothing will work. That's an impossible goal.
What success actually means *economically* is "increase revenues, or prevent revenue loss, more than the cost of implementation." If you make it difficult enough for somebody who has the potential means and motivation to buy to avoid buying then it could be deemed a success. A teenager with nothing to lose (and no money) might not care about being busted for torrenting copyrighted content---but a family man with a mortgage, job and credit rating might care.
Electronic tags on handbags don't prevent 100% of shoplifting, and yet they're deployed fairly widely.
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DRM for books is the reason Amazon know has control of the publishing and authors get paid what Amazon wants. Amazon put DRM on
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Now some may say it saved music from free, but in singles were free like music videos and radio once was, lwe mat still have album sales. No one knows because every freaked instead of looking for other market solutions, so music is worth nothing now.
No, that wouldn't have helped. The problem with album sales is what it has been for 30 years now -- poor quality of music. It's become a situation where most of the good tracks on an album are the singles. So releasing the singles for free isn't going to increase sales of the full album.
Irony (Score:1)
I am reading a document,with libreoffice, written by Microsoft employees, published in doc format, ten years after the fact and actually agree. Great isn't it ?
Speaking truth to power. (Score:4, Insightful)
Another case in point, that speaking truth to power is usually costly for the Kassandras of the world.
Encouraging though that they did speak up.
DRM's rare successes (Score:3)
99.99999999999% of the time DRM is an utter failure, but what about those oh so rare exceptions?
I believe that many of those successes were 'protecting' software that just wasn't all that popular. Any sufficiently obscure software with DRM you pretty much have to crack yourself.
There have been occassional locked down hardware systems that have gone uncracked for years. The PS3 for instance.
I was dismayed to find that Audible.com's proprietary audio format: .aa/.aax, which supposedly is just a wrapper for mp3s, has gone uncracked for quite some time now. It remains 100% uncracked. However the quality of the 64 kbps .aax audio is high enough for its speech only content that the generation loss involved with burning to CD and re-encoding to mp3 is minimal. This workaround may be the reason no one has made any serious attempt to crack the .aax format.
Nevertheless it is disappointing. From the POV of Amazon/Audible the .aax format DRM has been a complete success. Their files cannot be distributed without generation loss. Is it possible they didn't anticipate that most people wouldn't particularly care about the minor loss in voice quality? Admittedly the higher quality 64 kbps .aax file is a somewhat recent addition. Before that there were only 32 kbps versions. Perhaps in that case the generation loss would have been much more noticeable.
DRM is great ! (Score:3)
Ambiguity (Score:2)
4 Microsoft Engineers Predicted DRM Would Fail 10 Years Ago
OK, and when did they predict that?
Seriously, shouldn't the sentence have read something like "4 Microsoft Engineers Predicted 10 Years Ago that DRM Would Fail"?
friends != 'darknet' & Napster/Metallica heari (Score:3)
I was there...and one of the Gnutella network founders from MIT testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee (after Lars and Shawn Fanning w/ 'M' hat)...he testified that the **infinitely copyable** nature of digital music files made DRM useless
These Microsoft guys get respect...but they were being **kind**...no damn "darknet" is necessary...trading with friends IS NOT A DARKNET
See, anyone is allowed to compile music on media and give to a friend...that's part of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act...and the Federal Government cannot define 'friend' just to control digital music...it is a non-starter
So...the labels/studios had to either 1) adapt business model beyond holding copyright **OR** 2) use DRM
We know the rest...
FYI it was the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to propose adaptations to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in July (?) of 2000...Senators Leahy and Hatch presided...I used my 'intern' badge to sneak into the press box :P
The precioooous ! (Score:5, Insightful)
So did Dilbert. 12 Years Ago (Score:2)
Dilbert: I'm inventing a new technology to prevent kids from seeing smut on the internet.
Dogbert: So, you're pitting your intelligence against the collective sex drive of all the teenagers who own computers?
Dilbert: What is your point?
Dogbert: Did you know that if you put a little hat on a snowball it can last a long time in hell?
Dilbert: Matt [a kid], your job is to text my new invention that blocks kids from seeing dirty pictures on the internet.
Dilbert turns to Alice: His youthful curiosity is no match f
Re: (Score:2)
Ooops. 16 years ago.
http://search.dilbert.com/search?p=R&srid=S3-USWSD02&lbc=dilbert&w=smut&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdilbert.com%2Fstrips%2Fcomic%2F1996-01-24%2F&rk=2&uid=75729047&sid=2&ts=custom&rsc=SZihVF4sjzoF0:Ar&method=and&isort=date&view=list&filter=type%3Acomic [dilbert.com]
Re: (Score:1)
... is made of tasty bacon.
Re: (Score:2)