Re: What's Wrong With Content Protection
On Sat, 20 Jan 2001 10:41:52 -0800 [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I will make a partial rebuttal to John Gilmore's article on the problems with content protection schemes. [..snip..] I understand that John and others worry that consumers will not actually be able to make choices and decisions, because all products available to them will have content protection built in. But this amounts to the belief that industry will form a cartel which seeks to sell products which make consumers unhappy, intentionally delivering devices which consumers dislike, smug in their belief that their cartel is 100% effective and that no competition is possible. Without the enforcement of laws like the DMCA, such a situation is highly unstable. There is a huge incentive to produce devices which don't observe the restrictions and which give consumers more power. These devices will be popular with consumers and the cartel will be broken. Not necessarily... The problem is that the CPSA (Content Protection System Architecture) proposes to encrypt all content (by the content producers). Player manufacturers will require a license on the decryption function, which they'll only get if they also implement copy protection. So devices without copy protection cannot legally decrypt the content, and therefore cannot play any of the popular content out there. These products will not sell on the market. Jaap-Henk -- Jaap-Henk Hoepman | Come sail your ships around me Dept. of Computer Science | And burn your bridges down University of Twente | Nick Cave - "Ship Song" Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] === WWW: www.cs.utwente.nl/~hoepman Phone: +31 53 4893795 === Secr: +31 53 4893770 === Fax: +31 53 4894590 PGP ID: 0xF52E26DD Fingerprint: 1AED DDEB C7F1 DBB3 0556 4732 4217 ABEF
Re: What's Wrong With Content Protection
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 05:29 AM 1/22/01 GMT, David Wagner wrote: Free markets may be the best hope we've got (or they may not), but in any case, wouldn't it be fair to say that reliance on free markets to eliminate content protection is a little risky? [...] Now suppose that there's basically one dominant hardware manufacturer, and the content industry offers to pay a kickback to the manufacturer of 20% of the cost of a drive, per drive sold, if the manufacturer agrees to stop selling unrestricted hard drives. An agreement not to produce a product doesn't sound like free market to me. It sounds like something the Justice Dept should prosecute. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 6.5.2 iQA/AwUBOmvNYXPxfjyW5ytxEQJj8QCgp4ties2ILM35Kz8mrT++vCJTyWMAoIK7 u1G1eT6fsokImPqHjYHFZ6Su =2yIk -END PGP SIGNATURE- +--+ |Carl M. Ellison [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://world.std.com/~cme | |PGP: 08FF BA05 599B 49D2 23C6 6FFD 36BA D342 | +--Officer, officer, arrest that man. He's whistling a dirty song.-+
Re: What's Wrong With Content Protection
I will make a partial rebuttal to John Gilmore's article on the problems with content protection schemes. I distinguish between schemes which are enforced by legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), versus schemes which rely on technological means and market competition to attract customers. John attacks both kinds of mechanisms equally. But there is a fundamental difference between them. The DMCA and similar laws are the real problem in this area. They allow companies to eliminate competition and are running roughshod over free speech rights. I applaud the efforts of John, the EFF, and other parties in working to overturn or limit the range of applicability of these laws. But when we deal with content protection which is provided on a competitive basis in the marketplace, it is another matter. In that case it is ultimately a question of satisfying the desires of the consumer which determines which products will succeed. When DVD players were first released there was an alternative scheme called DIVX which would provide limitations on your viewing of the DVD disks you bought. In exchange, you could purchase the disks for about $5 rather than $20 and up for conventional disks. Nevertheless there was strong consumer backlash against the device and it ultimately failed in the marketplace. Shortly, portable MP3 players will have the option of providing support for the mechanisms designed by the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). To succeed, SDMI players must convince consumers that they are more useful to them than MP3 players which lack these restrictions. Only if consumers prefer devices which enforce content protection will these devices succeed. The nature of the marketplace means that there will inherently be a competition between the various technologies which can be used. In a free market, if content protection wins, it is because people are more willing to buy it than the alternatives. When companies develop content protection technologies, it is only their own well being which is threatened. The technology may fail, as DIVX did, which only hurts the companies. Or it may succeed, in which case consumers prefer the the new technology to the alternatives. We should not attempt to second guess consumer preferences and say that they are making the wrong decision for themselves. We should respect the rights of the people in the marketplace to make their own decisions. I understand that John and others worry that consumers will not actually be able to make choices and decisions, because all products available to them will have content protection built in. But this amounts to the belief that industry will form a cartel which seeks to sell products which make consumers unhappy, intentionally delivering devices which consumers dislike, smug in their belief that their cartel is 100% effective and that no competition is possible. Without the enforcement of laws like the DMCA, such a situation is highly unstable. There is a huge incentive to produce devices which don't observe the restrictions and which give consumers more power. These devices will be popular with consumers and the cartel will be broken. The key to allowing competition in the marketplace is to eliminate laws like DMCA which allow manufacturers to enforce limitations on their competitors. That is why John's and others' work is so important in fighting these laws. Take away these legal teeth and force the companies to compete in a free and fair market for consumer dollars, and we will see companies supplying devices which consumers want. This is where I believe John should be focusing his energy. Working to oppose technical standards for content protection is a waste of time, by comparison. It dilutes his efforts and muddies the philosophical principles involved. When they judge a technology only on the basis of how much it will restrict what they can do, it makes it appear that opponents of content protection are interested only in getting for free content which others have worked hard to produce. A superior principle says, yes, you can create content protection systems, and you can try to convince consumers that their best interests are served by adopting them. Let all parties compete freely and openly and let the best system win. Judge their activities by the means and not by the ends. If you are truly confident that a world without content protection is the best, trust consumers to come to understand and believe this as well. Don't try to use the legal system yourself to force this outcome. Hal Finney
Re: What's Wrong With Content Protection
Excellent essay. I feel smarter for having read it. I would say that I think that there are some breaks in the clouds you describe so well. 1) If most of these copy-protection schemes are schemes, and not laws, then the free market will route around them (The free market is about as adaptable to censorship as the Internet is). For example, if the major disk manufacturers begin selling only hard drives w/ encryption built in, some upstart company will become extremely rich selling hard drives that do not have encryption built in. People will set up Napster-like sharing systems offshore - in China, Libya, Iraq, Sealand, etc - anyplace that loathes the US and would love to cause economic chaos. Since P2P systems are nearly infrastructure free, it will be possible to run huge file sharing systems w/out huge infrastructure investments. And, of course, music is only the first of many formats that is vulnerable to this. Divx ;-) and Divx ;-) II are both going to make it harder for content providers to fully protect the content. Frankly, I also suspect that the quality of HDTV will be lost on the vast majority of people - if they can get something that operates at their convenience, and is still of decent quality, they will almost overwhelmingly choose that over an inconvenient, obnoxious, expensive high-quality system. As far as I am concerned, technology set up content for a checkmate about 4 moves ago, but it is still about 12 moves before the content providers realize it and concede. Ebay, and Ebay-like solutions will allow the "peer to peer" transport of "illegal" goods, in a way that is impossible to track in a "free" country. All it takes is _one_ person breaking an encryption scheme, and with the use of technology, that content will be available worldwide in days. Some enterprising content providers will recognize this and get fabulously rich off of _not_ screwing over the customer, and everyone will eventually realize that they were idiots, and things will continue to muddle along. This is not even counting the likely fact that over time, the content produced by modern content giants will become quaint and curious, like silent movies and radio pictures. Of course, this assumes that a free market continues to exist. W/out a free market, it will be possible for content providers to control content, but no one will be able to afford to buy it. jb
Re: What's Wrong With Content Protection
John -- Great essay... thanks for replying at such length! I'm going to decline your (perhaps rhetorical) invitation to provide a devils-advocate counter-argument, because I'm not the right person to do so; I am far too liberal in my own views to be a fair representative of the "dark side". In any case, I was asking more for an education (which you have generously provided) than an argument. Cheers, Ron Rivest
Re: What's Wrong With Content Protection
John Gilmore wrote: Few or no manufacturers are willing to put ordinary digital audio recorders on the market -- you see lots of MP3 *players* but where are the stereo MP3 *recorders*? They've been chilled into nonexistence by the threat of lawsuits. The ones that claim to record, record only "voice quality monaural". Which is ironic, because there's any amount of free software out there that will do it. We don't need their steenkin' MP3 recorders. :-) Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
