Re: DRM will not be legislated
Read a great article on Slashdot about the recent DRM workshop, http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/18/1219257, by al3x: As the talks began, I was brimming with the enthusiasm and anger of an activist, overjoyed at shaking hands with the legendary Richard Stallman, thrilled with the turnout of the New Yorkers for Fair Use. My enthusiasm and solidarity, however, was to be short lived Comments from the RIAA's Mitch Glazier that there is balance in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), drew cries and disgusted laughter from the peanut gallery, who at that point had already been informed that any public comments could be submitted online. Even those in support of Fair Use and similar ideas began to be frustrated with the constant background commentary and ill-conceived outbursts of the New Yorkers for Fair Use and, to my dismay, Richard Stallman, who proved to be as socially awkward as his critics and fans alike report. Perhaps such behavior is entertaining in a Linux User Group meeting or academic debate, but fellow activists hissed at Stallman and the New Yorkers, suggesting that their constant interjections weren't helping. And indeed, as discussion progressed, I felt that my representatives were not Stallman and NY Fair Use crowd, nor Graham Spencer from DigitalConsumer.org, whose three comments were timid and without impact. No, I found my voice through Rob Reid, Founder and Chairman of Listen.com, whose realistic thinking and positive suggestions were echoed by Johnathan Potter, Executive Director of DiMA, and backed up on the technical front by Tom Patton of Phillips. Reid argued that piracy was simply a reality of the content industry landscape, and that it was the job of content producers and the tech industry to offer consumers something better than free. We charge $10 a month for our service, and the competition is beating us by $10 a month. We've got to give customers a better experience than the P2P file-sharing networks, Reid suggested. As the rare individual who gave up piracy when I gave up RIAA music and MPAA movies, opting instead for a legal and consumer-friendly Emusic.com account, I found myself clapping in approval. Reading this and the other comments on the meeting, a few facts come through: that the content companies are much more worried about closing the analog hole than mandating traditional DRM software systems; that the prospects for any legislation on these issues are uncertain given the tremendous consumer opposition; and that extremist consumer activists are hurting their cause by conjuring up farfetched scenarios that expose them as kooks. (That last point certainly applies to those here who continue to predict that the government will take away general purpose computing capabilities, allow only approved software to run, and ban the use of Perl and Python without a license. Try visiting the real world sometime!) It is also good to see that the voices of sanity are being more and more recognized, like the Listen.com executive above. The cyber liberty community must come out strongly against piracy of content and support experiments which encourage people to pay for what they download. It is no longer tenable to claim that intellectual property is obsolete or evil, or to point to the complaints of a few musicians as justification for ignoring the creative rights of an entire industry. There is still a very good chance that we can have a future where people will happily pay for legal content instead of making do with bootleg pirate recordings, and that this can happen without legislation and without hurting consumer choice. Such an outcome would be the best for all concerned: for consumers, for tech companies, for artists and for content licensees. Anything else will be a disaster for one or more of these groups, which will ultimately hurt everyone. Let's hope the EFF is listening to the kinds of clear-sighted commentary quoted above.
Re: DRM will not be legislated
AARG! Anonymous wrote: David Wagner wrote: The Hollings bill was interesting not for its success or failure, but for what it reveals the content companies' agenda. The CBDTPA, available in text form at http://www.politechbot.com/docs/cbdtpa/hollings.s2048.032102.html, does not explicitly call for legislating DRM. What's your point? If you think the CBDTPA wasn't about legislating DRM or something like it, we must be from different planets. I'll elaborate. CBDTPA delegated power to the FCC to specify standards that all digital devices would have to implement. It is not at all surprising that CBDTPA was drafted to allow the FCC great freedom in choosing the technical details as necessary to achieve the bill's objectives. It is equally clear that supporters of the bill were pushing for some mandatory Fritz chip, do-not-copy bit, Macrovision protection, copy protection, or other DRM-like technical measure. This issue is not going away quietly.
Re: DRM will not be legislated
David Wagner wrote: Anonymous wrote: Legislation of DRM is not in the cards, [...] Care to support this claim? (the Hollings bill and the DMCA requirement for Macrovision in every VCR come to mind as evidence to the contrary) The line you quoted was the summary from a message which described the detailed reasoning that supported the claim. To reiterate and lay out the points explicitly: - Legislating DRM would be extremely expensive in the current environment as it would require phasing out all computers presently in use. This provides a huge practical burden and barrier for any legislation along these lines. - Some have opposed voluntary DRM because they believe that it would reduce the barrier above. Once DRM systems are voluntarily installed in a substantial number of systems, it would be a relatively small step to mandate them in all systems. - But this is false reasoning; if DRM is so successful as to be present in a substantial number of systems, it is not necessary to legislate it. - Further, even if it is legislated, that will not stop piracy. No practical DRM system will prevent people from running arbitrary 3rd party software (despite absurd arguments by fanatics that the government seeks to remove Turing complete computing capabilities from the population). - Neither the content nor technology companies have incentive to support legislation, as they still must convince people that paying for content is superior to pirating it. Legislating DRM will not help them in this battle, as piracy will still be an alternative. - What would help them legislatively is some kind of enforced watermarking technology, so that the initial ripping of content is impossible (this also requires closing the analog hole). Only by intervening at this first step can they hope to break the piracy chain, and this is the real purpose of the Hollings bill. See also the recent work by the BPDG. But this is not DRM in the sense we are discussing it here. Those were the points made earlier in support of the summary statement quoted above. As far as the Hollings bill in particular, the most notable aspect of it was the tremendous opposition from virtually every sector of the economy. The Hollings bill was not just a failure, it was a massive, DOA, stinking heap of failure which had not even the slightest chance of success. If anything, the failure of the Hollings bill fully supports the thesis that legislation of DRM is not going to happen. As for Macrovision, this is an example of watermarking technology and as mentioned above, it does make sense to legislate along these lines (although it is questionable whether it can work in the long run - Macrovision defeaters are widely available). It represents an attempt to close the analog hole. The point is that this is not a simple-minded or unreflective analysis. We are looking specifically at the kind of DRM enabled by the TCPA. This means the ability to run content viewing software that imposes DRM rules which might limit the number of views, or require pay per view, or require data to be deleted if it is copied elsewhere, etc. The point of TCPA and Palladium is for the remote content provider to be assured that the software it is talking to across the net is a trusted piece of software which will enforce the rules. It is this kind of DRM to which the analysis above is directed. This DRM does not prevent piracy using any of the techniques available today, or via exploiting bugs and flaws in future technology. It does not and can not prevent people from running file sharing programs and making pirated content available on the Internet (at least without crippling computers to the point where necessary business functionality is lost, which would mean sending the country into a deep depression and making it an obsolete competitor on world markets, i.e. it won't happen). This kind of DRM can nevertheless succeed on a voluntary basis by providing good quality for good value, in conjunction with technological and legal attacks on P2P systems such as are in their infancy now. All of these arguments have been made in the past few weeks on this list. Hopefully reiterating them in one place will be helpful to those who have overlooked them in the past.
Re: DRM will not be legislated
Anonymous wrote: Legislation of DRM is not in the cards, [...] Care to support this claim? (the Hollings bill and the DMCA requirement for Macrovision in every VCR come to mind as evidence to the contrary)
Re: DRM will not be legislated
On Mon, 8 Jul 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Voluntary DRM can never stop piracy. With voluntary DRM, people can break once on one machine, then run the latest Napster replacement on the every machine on the internet in non DRM mode, and copy that file that was ripped on one machine, to every machine. Obviously. But if the content is on a private net hooked into private boxes, putting the data onto the public web becomes a touch more difficult. Voluntary DRM is only useful to the content industry as a stepping stone to compulsory DRM Only in some executive's wet dream. And they've got enough problems dealing with their accounting division right now :-) Voluntary DRM is only useful to the industry to reach the point where they can say Only copyright pirates, terrorists, drug trafficers, child pornographers, tax evaders, and money launderers need to run their machines in non DRM mode. And if they can't deliver enough product to make DRM worth while, they never get that far do they. If the economics works, they don't need laws, and if the economics don't work, they won't get laws. When the big boys figure out how to deliver their stuff with better quality and more coolness than P2P, they'll make plenty of money. Shit, we might even convince them it's worth while running fiber to every home on the planet. If they don't, they're toast anyway. Teenagers can wait all day and night for a few songs, but the rest of us don't have time to waste on it. With enough bandwidth, DRM becomes irrelevant. The recorded past isn't where the cash is, the instantaneous *now* is where the money gets collected. Someday they'll figure it out, but I suspect it'll be a teenager that hits 'em over the head with the 2x4. Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
Re: DRM will not be legislated
On Monday, July 8, 2002, at 04:01 PM, Anonymous wrote: be available. A substantial number of consumers will voluntarily adopt DRM if it lets them have a Napster-style system of music on demand, with wide variety and convenient downloads, as long as the songs are not too expensive. I doubt it. Napster was popular because people like FREE STUFF! There were services in Tower Records as long ago as 10 years ago, and repeated efforts since, which allowed a patron to pick a set of songs and have them recorded onto a customized CD. Cost was comparable to a CD. They all failed. People who were heavy users of Napster, collecting thousands of songs (or more), will not be too interested in a system which charges them a 50 cents or a dollar per song. And casual users just won't bother. I expect something like this will happen, but it doesn't significantly alter the main issue. Oh, and it little or nothing to do with DRM circuitry. Most of those who download songs will be doing so to put on to their MP3 players, their iPods, their own CD-Rs. While the latest Pentium 5 and Opteron machines may or may not have DRM circuitry, it's likely that the very target market for downloaded music will be using older machines for many years to come. --Tim May The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else. --Frederic Bastiat
