DRM: "I can't let you do that, Dave"... (1 Viewer)

[MattAlbie60]

I wouldn't worry about it. I mean, this is just a little company like Amazon that's dealing with this kind of thing. I'm sure bigger companies won't have any problems

 

[Al.Anderson]

Same story with books -
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/amazons-remote-wipe-of-customers-kindle-highlights-perils-of-drm/
I really hate DRM. And my dislike for downloadable content is increasing daily.

 

[schan1269]

I remember a while back there was this "same scenario" with an online SACD/DVD-A hi-res stream provider.
You could pay per use like you do with Spotify. And you could create playlists with another "fee" to keep certain songs active without an internet connection. That made people "assume" () they had bought their music...
I learned long ago not to trust streaming schemes.

 

[Sam Posten]

Keep a close eye:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/a-supreme-court-clash-could-change-what-ownership-means/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/jailbreaking-now-legal-under-dmca-for-smartphones-but-not-tablets/
http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/26/3554770/ebook-typos

 

[Sam Posten]

Agree with him or not, nobody else in the world is thinking through Copyright from the user's point of view like Doctorow:

The first thing is that if you let someone else put a lock on your file, and if that person doesn’t give you the key, that lock can’t be there for your benefit. That lock will eventually be used against you. And so, for example, Apple and Audible won’t allow you to sell audiobooks without their DRM on it — without their digital lock on it. And because it’s illegal to remove a digital lock, what that’s really doing is tying all of your customers, as someone who makes audiobooks, to their platform.
And so if later on someone has a better platform, what you are doing is guessing or hoping or betting that all the people who have ever bought your audiobooks in the old platform follow you to the new one, even though it means maintaining two separate library management tools, or else throwing away all their old audiobooks, including the ones you sold them. So as someone who invests in making this media, if you’re a publisher or studio or a newspaper or a record label, you really need to focus on making sure that you’re not handing control over your business to a company who doesn’t really contribute to the business; they just put locks on it.
The next piece of advice is that although fame won’t make you rich, you can’t get rich in the arts without fame. On the one hand there are lots of people whose works have been widely downloaded and who didn’t make any money from it, but all the people who made money in the arts made money by being widely known to their audiences. And the internet allows us to have all kinds of paths to have our work discovered and shared among audiences, and promoted within those audiences. It’s still up to us to figure out how to turn that into money, but without the fame you don’t even have the opportunity to do that.
And the copyright laws that the entertainment industry has been agitating for — particularly the ones that make it more expensive to operate any of these services like Blogger or Google or Facebook or YouTube, because they require that you pay unimaginable armies of lawyers to make sure that nothing uploaded infringes on copyright — that what those end up doing is putting independent distribution and independent audience discovery outside of the reach of individual artists, such that you always have to sign up with a label or a studio or a publisher to get a decent deal, or to reach an audience at all, and that when they control all of the distribution channels and all the audience discovery and audience interaction channels, that they can basically command incredibly abusive terms from the artists that they deal with. And so it’s really in artists’ interests that the intermediaries — the people who sit between us and our audiences — have low barriers to entry, so that they’re continuously being disrupted and there are lots of new businesses entering all the time and vying for our business.
And then the third one is that information doesn’t want to be free but people do, and that when we focus on the question of “information” when we make internet policy, instead of recognizing — as you see in Pirate Cinema — that the internet is really fundamentally about everything that we do in the 21st century — not just how we entertain ourselves — that we end up putting everyone at risk. That designing devices, for example, to prevent copying involves designing devices that hide things from their users.

And here is where Sam looks like a goddam psychic! Waaaaaaait for it!

You can’t design a device that when you say, “Copy the file please, HAL,” and it says, “I can’t let you do that, Dave,” you can’t design that device in a way that’s effective if there’s a program called “HAL 9000″ on the desktop that you can just drag into the trash. So it has to be able to hide programs and processes from users.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/11/geeks-guide-cory-doctorow/all/

 

[Sam Posten]

It occurs to me that a line from another Sci Fi classic is also related to DRM:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. [laughs] Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like [coughs] tears in rain. Time to die

DRM'ed content expires when you do!

 

[Sam Posten]

bleh
http://gamepolitics.com/2012/12/18/ea-maxis-ama-reddit-turns-sharply-discussion-drm-simcity#.UNDM8He1XkY

 

[Todd H]

As hard as many of us at HTF fought against DIVX back in the '90's, it's frustrating to know that there are many people here who have no problem with the studios latest schemes. That's why I absolutely refuse to buy into any of the DRMed streaming systems. Give me a disc that I can rip, store on my server, and then store until needed again later. I'll ALWAYS choose a physical copy over a copy in the "cloud" any day. I guess I'm just old-fashioned that way.

 

[Al.Anderson]

Give me a disc that I can rip, store on my server, and then store until needed again later.

Amen brother!

 

[Sam Posten]

The current legal situation:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/12/first-sale-under-siege-if-you-bought-it-you-should-own-it

 

[Sam Posten]

Good question:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/12/the-music-industry-dropped-drm-years-ago-so-why-does-it-persist-on-e-books/

One of the major elements that drove the death of DRM was the ability to put music tracks in any format, in any device. Similarly, some speculate that it will take more time for enough e-book owners who want to share their favorite reads and be frustrated at that experience.
Currently, Amazon only allows lending of e-books of certain titles, and that can only be done once. The Barnes & Noble Nook has a similar lending policy—iBooks is even worse, as it doesn't have a lending feature to speak of.
"That's a farce—that's not what borrowing a book is," Higgins noted.

 

[Sam Posten]

"Designed to maintain scarcity for digital goods" /facepalm http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-wins-patent-reselling-lending-used-digital-goods/

 

[Sam Posten]

Fair and balanced look at where we stand, from someone who comes out in favor of DRM done right: http://blog.alanquatermain.me/2013/02/14/ebook-drm-and-undrm/

 

[Sam Posten]

Le sigh: http://boingboing.net/2013/02/20/indie-booksellers-sue-amazon-a.html

 

[Sam Posten]

I got a bad feeling about this....
http://freeculture.org/blog/2013/04/23/dont-let-the-myths-fool-you-the-w3cs-plan-for-drm-in-html5-is-a-betrayal-to-all-web-users/

 

[Sam Posten]

Today marks the day the free and open web died:
http://boingboing.net/2013/10/02/w3c-green-lights-adding-drm-to.html?

 

[Towergrove]

Today marks the day the free and open web died:
http://boingboing.net/2013/10/02/w3c-green-lights-adding-drm-to.html?

Not sure how this effects me, someone who doesnt copy or alter others works for my use or benefit and someone who purchases my media?

 

[Jesse Skeen]

As hard as many of us at HTF fought against DIVX back in the '90's, it's frustrating to know that there are many people here who have no problem with the studios latest schemes.

I've been thinking the same thing for a long time. I'll admit streaming video is good for rentals, and certainly a good substitute for cable TV, but what really annoys me is how many recent movies have been released on this several weeks before they're available on disc, certainly to drive people to switch to buying movies that way. Buying a movie this way is much like how unlocked DIVX discs worked- you could only play those on YOUR registered devices, and the right to play them could be taken away at any time for any reason and of course now with DIVX being history you can't play them at all. Vudu had several adult videos available but they were taken off-line after Wal-Mart bought the company, and anyone who had 'bought' them can now no longer watch them, though at least they issued refunds for them that time. I would rather buy a movie on VHS than through some streaming system!

 

[Sam Posten]

Not sure how this effects me, someone who doesnt copy or alter others works for my use or benefit and someone who purchases my media?

Essentially it marks the beginning of commercial interests driving the development of HTML. Instead of being pursued for the common good it is now tainted by special interests.

Imagine how different things would have been had Flash been made an HTML foundation yet still in the hands of Adobe.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/lowering-your-standards

http://freeculture.org/blog/2013/04/23/dont-let-the-myths-fool-you-the-w3cs-plan-for-drm-in-html5-is-a-betrayal-to-all-web-users/

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/04/24/209234/whats-actually-wrong-with-drm-in-html5

 

[Al.Anderson]

I was kind of, sort of, for it because I hate Flash and assumed the W3C was going to define the encryption protocols, presumably with a PKE approach. But now that I see that they are offloading that function to commercial CDM providers I think this is a horrible idea. (And the commercial CDM architecture is probbaly why we no longer hear Adobe fighting the approach.)

I can forsee where browsers have to be licenced, like DVD/BR players are, limiting future development. I think commcial CDM leaves the end-user open to poor and potentially unsecure software. And the end result is one step closer to lockdown of all data. It won't happen anytime soon, but I can see a day where you won't be able to purchase content, it will all be streamed.

The one thought that always amuses and keeps me going in these conversations is the image of every music industry executive ever collectively pounding their heads on their desks saying, "Damn! Damn! Damn!