Richard Bronosky wrote:
Ryan Steffes wrote:
The trick of the whole situation is that the only protections that
even kinda work are the ones that use bad data. However, it can't be
TOO bad or you wouldn't be able to play it at all, and the amount of
peopel who watch movies/listen to music on their computers is too
large a segment to ignore.
... Even the best CD copy protection isn't going to stop people from
connecting line-out to line-in -- old school tape recorder style.
Ditto for DVDs, it's not that hard to play your DVD out to PVR in.
Standard formats just can't be protected too much or they become
useless, and you aren't going to sell a new standard to people who
are very happy with the old standard. No one is going to be able to
force everyone to change their TV, stereo equipment, computer
hardware, car stereo, radios, boomboxes, dvd players, VHS players,
and put special DRM chips in everything, including ALL speakers and
microphones and video cameras. That's what you'd have to do to keep
any copies from being made ever.
Don't be so sure. The EFF may have won a battle with the "delay" of the
broadcast flag, but don't think that means we've won the DRM war.
Playback of "premium content" on Microsoft's next OS (currently called
Vista, unless MS decides it's easier to change the name than to pay off
the 10 or so companies sueing them for the name) is even more
constrained than playback would be under the broadcast flag. IMHO, it
was a brilliant move by the MPAA/RIAA to forget about trying to push
something through US law--which would only apply to a small fraction of
the world population--and instead make Microsoft--de facto standards
body of the world--the primary enforcer of content protection.
Vista includes "Output Content Protection" (OCP), which is nicely
summarized by MS at
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/stream/output_protect.mspx . If
you read the whitepaper available at the link, you'll notice all the
nefarious schemes that OCP incorporates--down-res'ing content output
over analog links (VGA), "fuzzing" the video output when connected via
digital link (DVI) to a device that does not support HDCP/HDMI (i.e.
most (all?) computer monitors in use today--meaning any money you spend
on a monitor is wasted, so there's your excuse to buy that HDCP-enabled
HDTV), encrypting the data as it's transmitted over the PCIe bus to the
graphics card, and similar stuff for audio (some of the details of the
audio protections are still to be determined).
The scary part is that there's nobody to oversee the proper application
of these restrictions. The entire system--from the design and
implementation of the protection scheme to the decision about what
constitutes acceptable use and even the decision to revoke
licenses/protection scheme that have been compromised--is in the hands
of corporations who have a vested interest in limiting what we can do
with their content. (OK, the FCC was bought out by the industry, and
did not/would not have made a good consumer-rights watchdog, but at
least the US government has many other arms--some of which were willing
to listen to consumer feedback regarding the broadcast flag.)
The OCP relies on MS Windows Media formats (audio and video), including
the Windows Media licensing scheme (which involves downloading licenses
from the Internet). The player is embedded within the OS--at a level
below the user application level--so every player has the same
quality--that quality MS provides--and applications only put up a
"remote control" interface to be used to pass commands to the player.
Couple that with the "Trusted Platform Module Service" in Vista (
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/pcdesign/TPM_secure.mspx
), and it's quite likely this content will not be playable on any system
other than Vista and "closed-box" consumer-embedded devices (i.e.
set-top HD-DVD/BD-R0M players, set-top cable/satellite boxes, etc.).
Since MS has already gotten the self-proclaimed DVD standards body (the
DVD Forum) to require support for MS WMV (the VC-1 CODEC, formerly known
as VC-9) in HD-DVD, and since Blu-Ray needed to do likewise to compete
with HD-DVD, there's a good chance that it will be hard to find any
content that doesn't use this type of protection.
The sad (funny?) part is that all these suckers buying Microsoft Windows
Media Center Edition PC's are getting systems that won't be able to
play any content in about 2 years. And the reason they won't work is
Microsoft, the company that's knowingly selling obsoleted systems at
inflated prices today.
There are two saving graces... The whitepaper constantly refers to the
need for obfuscation and secrecy of code (which is impossible--if it's
digital, it's vulnerable) and the scheme will affect all users of future
MS operating systems. Therefore, people outside the US--people who
aren't constrained by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act--will have
ample reason to work on compromising the scheme. (Since the broadcast
flag was US-only, compromising it really only made sense to someone in
the US, but that person would be forbidden by the DMCA from even
attempting such compromise.)
HDMI... all future video out will be similar to it. Shortly after
HD-DVD is defacto, DVDs will no longer be made. All HD-DVD players
will only output over a protected method... Analog cable too will
disappear and all the new cable and satellite receivers will also use
protected outputs... Then this mailing list will be discussions about
the kinds of file servers, gaming boxes and home automation/video
surveillance machines that people are converting their PVRs into.
It's sad, but it is coming. Pessimistic? No, informed.
Yep! I agree completely.
Mike
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