DRM - Digital Rights Management

Toshiba's HD DVD Payoff

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:46:17 -0600

Consumer Warning

High definition televisions, HDTV, have been available in the United States for nearly a decade. Very few consumers purchased those early units but in the last three years there has been an huge increase in the numbers and percentages of US homes with HDTV. However, many consumers still do not watch high definition programming on their HDTV. Many consumers either do not know that they need HD programming to take advantage of their television's features or do not know how to get HD programming. It is a challenging consumer education problem that many companies are trying to solve and/or use to their advantage.

Consider the current situation for HD programming. Broadcast television is now mostly broadcast in digital and a fair amount of that is high definition but most consumers do not know the difference between SD digital broadcasts and HD digital broadcasts. The FCC has not spent nearly enough money trying to help this situation. Cable companies now offer at least a few HD channels along with their digital packages but the quality and selection tend to be poor. Both DirecTV and Dish Network satellite services offer decent high definition packages that seem to be the best offer to get HD services to watch on a daily basis. What about movies though?

For just under two years there has been a format war going on to determine how you will get your HD movies. For years DVD has been the standard movie format and before that there was VHS and now there is Blu-ray. You might ask, Why do we need a new format?, and I will tell you. Televisions before HDTV were analog units that were mostly square. These analog units had a rough maximum resolution of about 720x480 pixels. This resolution was not really available to anyone though because everyone watched broadcast television which was transmitted at 440x480 pixels. When VHS tapes came out it was also an analog system but only was capable of presenting a 330x480 pixel image. Later DVD was released and finally we had a format that was capable of displaying the full quality of our analog televisions. The content on a DVD is stored digitally at 720x480 pixels and is converted into an analog signal that analog televisions can view. Having the maximum analog TV resolution is the reason that DVD movies look so much better than VHS movies.

Now we have high definition televisions and both the size and maximum resolution have changed. These televisions are no longer square but are wide screen and have a maximum resolution of 1920x1080. Compared to standard definition televisions, HD televisions are capable of showing 6 times as many pixels on the screen. Most people are amazed by how much better a full high definition image is when compared to standard definition. But to get all of this information to these televisions requires a new disk format that can hold at least 6 times as much information as a DVD. This is why we need Blu-ray. Blu-ray disks can hold up to 50 gigabytes of information compared to the 9 gigabytes of information that a DVD can hold: roughly 6 times more on the Blu-ray. Perfect fit right?

Well you would think but it is not that simple. See there were two competing formats, Blu-ray and HD DVD, that wanted to replace DVD and both had a pretty good shot right up until last week. On January 4, 2007 Warner Brothers Entertainment released a statement that they would become a Blu-ray exclusive studio. This move took with it New Line Cinema and HBO which are both part of the Time-Warner corporation. This leaves HD DVD with only Universal and Paramount as backers that are making movies in that format. Now approximately 75% of all Hollywood movie studios are releasing high definition movies exclusively on the Blu-ray format. Also it is being reported that both Universal and Paramount are working to end their contracts with HD DVD and it is expected that those announcements will come as early as February. Effectively the format war has ended and Blu-ray has become the HD Movie standard. All of Hollywood and the consumer electronics industry are ready to move forward with the Blu-ray HD movie standard.

However, we should never under estimate the power of greed in big corporations.

There are only two real backers of HD DVD. These companies are Toshiba and Microsoft and these two companies have spent the last two years battling a PR war against the Blu-ray disk association (BDA). For its part, Microsoft does not care about physical media. Microsoft was using HD DVD to weaken its competitors and nothing more. Microsoft promoted HD DVD in an attempt to weaken the appeal of the Playstation 3 which includes a Blu-ray player and competes directly with Microsoft's Xbox system. Microsoft also promoted HD DVD in order to weaken physical media in general because it competes with download services that are much more lucrative for Microsoft. For its part, Toshiba holds the majority of the hardware patents on HD DVD and had the format become the DVD replacement then Toshiba would have earned billions in patent royalties.

So what should Toshiba do now? The right thing to do would be to release Universal and Paramount from any contract and begin making dual format players to transition the 750,000 HD DVD owners to Blu-ray. But that is not what they are doing now. Toshiba has announced plans to run an advertising campaign and to slash prices on their players. Consumers can now get an entry level HD DVD player for as little as $130 with 7 free movies. That makes an HD DVD player very attractive to unsuspecting consumers that do not know about the studio situation I have described here. This means that Toshiba will probably sell tens of thousands of these players over the next few weeks.

By some estimates these low prices mean that Toshiba will be losing as much as $100 per player! So why would Toshiba do this? Why would Toshiba continue to lose money trying to sell players for a format war that they have already lost? To earn one big payday!

Toshiba knows that it can never win but that does not mean they cannot make a huge amount of money. The longer Toshiba can afford to extend this format war the more bargaining power they have with the Blu-ray Disk Association (BDA). At some point Toshiba will have a discussion with the BDA and Toshiba will agree to sell Blu-ray players. In exchange Toshiba will expect the BDA to give them some cash. The more HD DVD customers that Toshiba has, the larger that payoff will be.

Toshiba does not care about those thousands of users that purchase HD DVD between now and the HD DVD D-day. Toshiba's opinion is that those people can still use the players up conversion features for regular DVDs and to watch the existing HD DVD movies that are out there. Furthermore, when those consumers are ready to get a Blu-ray player Toshiba will offer them a combo player that will play those old HD DVD movies and therefore double dip those consumers for a little extra cash.

That is it. Everything that Toshiba does between now and the announced cancellation of HD DVD will be anti-consumer. Toshiba is attempting to build a bargaining chip that will pay off in the next few months from the BDA and in a year or two from their loyal customers. So take our advice and DO NOT buy one of those cheap HD DVD players. If you want a next generation DVD player get yourself a Blu-ray player. Here at DRM Blog we recommend getting the Playstation 3 if you are getting a player now but if you can wait a few months then the Panasonic BD50 looks like a really good machine.

Toshiba, we ask you to do the right thing for consumers and drop this silly format war.

It Has Been A While

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Tue, 4 Dec 2007 18:03:54 -0600

It has been quite a while since I posted new original content on the .com side of DRM Blog, and even the .org site has been neglected for months at a time. I must admit that being a voice against DRM turned out to be much more work than I expected, but I think that it has been worth the effort. When I started this site I had much more free time than I do now. Having a full time job, running my own side business, and maintaining a family life all seem to suck the motivation for writing out of me. But here we are, quickly coming up on the three year anniversary of DRM Blog, and it seems appropriate to take a look back at what has happened in that time. Since starting this site lots of things have changed in the DRM world so I thought I would give you my perspective on the state of things.

When I launched this site I was very narrowly focused on the music industry. We tend to focus on the things that bother us the most, and I have always been a huge music lover and music consumer. The idea of paying for music that you could not use in all of your players was something that was unthinkable for me. I grew up in a time when cassette tapes, records, and CDs could be played on any matching device from any manufacturer. You did not have to worry about having to buy your music from the same company that made your player. Even now I wonder how manufacturers thought that could be a good thing for consumers. The only consumer electronics sector that I know of that works this way is the console gaming industry. You can only buy games for your Playstation from Sony and you can only buy games for your Xbox from Microsoft; however, even these industries are under pressure to change their ways. "We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible", says Gerhard Florin, director of international publishing for Electronic Art, during an interview with BBC News.

As time moved on I realized that DRM was not just an issue with music and so I began to look at other areas of interest. I considered all of the places where DRM is used and it seemed to me then and still seems to me now that the only places that DRM is really a problem is in consumer purchased media and hardware. The reason for this is that most consumers do not have the time, energy, or technical ability to understand every new piece of technology. The same can be said for many businesses I suppose but there are lots of services for businesses to help them make the right decision about hardware and software. This is why consulting is such a growing industry: it pays to be an expert in something. So after all this time, I think that helping consumers make the right decision should still be the focus of this site.

In music related DRM there have been several small changes and one really big change. The companies that make up the music industry oligopoly have finally started selling digital music without DRM. Yahoo was the first to try special DRM-free music purchases, but these were limited to a handful of singles that were used more as promotion for a new album than an actual attempt to sell consumer-friendly music. Finally, earlier this year, Apple started selling DRM-free tracks from EMI. Each DRM-free track was encoded at a higher bit rate and cost thirty cents more than a DRM-laden track. The straw that seems to have broken the camel's back is the Amazon's MP3 store which sells all of their tracks DRM-free and for as little as $0.89.

As good as things have gotten for music lovers, things seem to have gotten worse for movie lovers. Basically all of the digital video stores are horrible. All of the films are wrapped in DRM that only works with that store's software, and in most cases this software is shoddy and cumbersome. As with most DRM'd music, you never actually own the movie. You have a limited license to use it in the way that the seller wants you to use it. This license can also be revoked at any point along the way and you have to pray that the company you purchased from stays in business. With all of this bad news, there is one brighter spot for movie watchers. If you do not want to buy your movies but would rather rent your movies, then Amazon's Unbox seems to work well. I am not sure how I feel about Amazon Unbox rental program. On one hand it is very convenient to rent a movie without having to go to the store or wait days for it to be delivered from Netflix; on the other hand the prices seem to be really expensive for what you are getting. Most movies are $4 to rent for 24 hours and there is a limit to the number of times you can watch them. If you actually did go rent the physical disc then you could watch it as many times as you wanted.

In the end renting these movies serves a purpose. This actually seems to be one place that DRM is providing a product for consumers that some consumers want. On that note, there is one other place that DRM appears to be a small success: music subscription services. Services such as Yahoo Music Unlimited appear to be doing a small but profitable business. Basically these services allow you to rent music. You pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee and you then have access to all of the music in the service's library. The catch, of course, is that once you stop paying for the service you no longer have access to the service. One major catch with both types of rental services is that they are limited to one device at a time. This means that only one of the five computers in my house can access the service at one time. This limitation makes these services a tough sell with the people in my house.

Finally I want to touch on digital broadcasts and high definition media (HDM). Most people are unaware of the fact that the television industry in the United States is about to undergo a massive change. The process of switching from standard definition analog broadcast television to high definition digital broadcast television has been under way for nearly a decade. However, the majority of televisions in the USA are still analog sets. The FCC and Congress have agreed on the date of February 17, 2009 as the blackout date for all analog broadcasts. After that date people with analog televisions will either need to get a digital tuner or switch to satellite or cable. If you have family members or friends that still get their television through an antenna then please help inform them of the upcoming changes.

Another thing that most people do not know is that DVD is at the end of its life. DVD was designed to provide the best possible image and sound quality for analog televisions but it cannot deliver the quality of image possible on new high definition televisions. There is an ongoing war between three rival groups that want to be the replacement for DVD: movie download services, HD DVD, and Blu-ray disc. All three have advantages and disadvantages that have been discussed all over the internet so I will not discuss them again here; however, they all have nasty DRM in common. Blu-ray appears to offer the most to the consumer but it may also have the worst DRM. I own a PS3 which has a Blu-ray drive and the experience is very fulfilling. I have had zero problems with the DRM on any of the games or movies but I have not tried to make back-ups yet either. This is primarily because I do not have a Blu-ray drive in my computer but the makers of AnyDVD appear to have cracked the DRM on both HD DVD and Blu-ray so making back-ups should not be a problem in the future.

So, that is about it for this post. I have several new articles planned and I hope to keep DRM Blog updated regularly from here on out. If you guys have comments or question please post them and I will try to respond.

Thanks, Jimmy.

Jessica - She's no Morgan, but She'll Have to Do

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 14:15:31 -0500

I've never thought of Jessica Simpson as the poster child for the anti-DRM movement. I'd always hoped someone possessing sardonic wit and individuality would step forward, like Morgan Webb of XPlay fame. But more people know the name Jessica Simpson, and we'll take almost all the help we can get.

After much cajoling, Yahoo Music has convinced Sony to release one digital single without the accompanying digital rights management. Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair" will sell for $1.99 (compared to the standard price of $0.99). Pro-DRM companies such as Jupiter Research have been quick to dismiss the news as a short-term gimmick that will have little to no effect on the long-term online music market.

I disagree.

As online music distributors (alternatives to iTunes Music Store) get stronger, so too grows their ability to influence the market and thus music labels. Yahoo has expressed their DRM-free preference before. General manager Dave Goldberg spoke at Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles in February and implored music labels to decrease their demand for and usage of digital rights management, "DRM is not a consumer value proposition, it's a consumer cost. It creates a nice barrier of entry for the tech companies, rather than something that's beneficial to labels, artists or consumers." This sentiment was mirrored with the words of product management director Ian Rogers who wrote on the Yahoo Blog, "Our position is simple: DRM doesn't add value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc) or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform."

Obviously Yahoo had the market presence to convince Sony to release "A Public Affair" without DRM. Sony may still be attempting to atone for their DRM rootkit blunder, but both Sony and Yahoo have the diversity and the dollars to take risks that go against the mold.

Yahoo claims that the increased price is based on the song's customizable nature - the ability to select a version with a particular name in the lyrics. However, depending on the results of this social experiment, record labels and distributors alike may discover that there is a market for DRM-free media for which customers would gladly pay extra. We've said before on www.DRMBlog.com that we'd pay even retail CD-level prices just to be able to download and own DRM-free files, especially if we could choose the bit-rate. We're not the only ones who would choose to pay higher prices for convenience, quality, and the confidence of being able to play their files on any device.

I don't expect digital rights management to disappear overnight. However, the market is shaped by the language of public opinion. Music labels and DRM-vendors are fighting a losing war against the public image that digital rights management has made for itself. Customers hate invasions of privacy and technology that makes their purchasing decisions more complicated, which is the only thing that DRM actually accomplishes. The lawsuits initiated by the RIAA have made martyrs of casual downloaders while Sony's rootkit debacle made DRM not just a household word, but a detested one. Each mistake that the recording industry has made over the last couple years has brought more and more negative attention to digital rights management. Each miscalculation had led us to this one experiment conducted by Yahoo and Sony and Jessica Simpson.

The name of Jessica Simpson has never had the ability to part the folds of my wallet, but tonight, I will surrender my dollars to her to support Yahoo, to support Sony, and to support non-DRM alternatives. Join me.

Author — Ginger Cox

The DRM Cycle

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 01:11:15 -0500

Unless you're reading DRMBlog for the first time, it's obvious that we support liberal fair use rights; however, we do not condone nor do we support any type of piracy. Content owners should have all of their copyrights held intact. Of equal importance are the rights of the user and their ability to access, back-up, and use material that they have legitimate access to whether those items are purchased, borrowed, or in the public domain. If a user wants a copyrighted piece of material, there should purchase of either a physical copy or a licensed copy of said material at a fair market value. The fair market price should be (but often is not) determined by market forces. If the consumer thinks the price is too high, the consumer should choose not purchase the material and select other material the consumer should never steal the material. Likewise if the owner thinks the price is too low, the owner can raise the price or pull the material off the market the owner should never steal the rights of the consumer by putting DRM on the material or license the material with an overly restrictive license agreement. This is how things would work in a better world.

As you might have guessed, the current world doesn't run so smoothly. Content owners are often very restrictive with their licenses and over protective of their perceived rights. Often the content owners are very large corporations. These two things combine and lead many consumers to think that content owners are just greedy corporations that will do anything they can to make a dollar while by taking away the consumer's rights. At the same time there is a thriving black market that offers most of this material for very low costs with almost no restrictions. When a consumer is faced with these two options, many choose the cheaper and easier path of pirated media. In response content owners become more protective and restrictive and the cycle continues with more consumers choosing pirated files instead of their cumbersome and overly expensive DRM'd legitimate counterparts.

Originally content owners began to require DRM as a method to help stop piracy. It has been shown over and over again that professional pirates ignore, bypass or remove DRM of all kinds and have non-DRM versions of the protected material available within days of the release of the official material; often, the pirated version is available before the official material is released. So the only people who are hurt by DRM are the legitimate consumers who are stripped of their fair use rights such as being able to make backup copies. The cycle continues to spin, content owners continue to tighten restrictions, and more consumers turn to pirated material.

Case in Point

Last week in Sweden the police raided the network operations center (NOC) of PRQ Inet (prq.se) and seized all of the servers and networking equipment. PRQ hosted 300 business websites, one of which was the Pirate Bay (thepiratebay.org). The MPAA claims that the Pirate Bay is illegal and has convinced the Swedish police that the PRQ owners and the Pirate Bay owners are one in the same. So instead of confiscating only the servers used for hosting the one targetted website, the Swedish police confiscated everything in the NOC. All of the legitimate businesses that PRQ once hosted are out of luck and have no recourse but to wait for the police to release their servers and their data.

So what was the Pirate Bay doing to warrant disruption of so many businesses? According to a press release from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) the Pirate Bay was one of the worlds largest and most well known facilitators of online piracy. The Pirate Bay claims in their own words that they are the World's Largest Bit Torrent Tracker, which the MPAA says has enabled the illegal swapping of millions of illegal copyrighted movies, music, software, and games. The Pirate Bay does not actually distribute the pirated material but serves as a search engine to others that do host the pirated material. The links to the material were provided as torrent files that when opened by a Bit Torrent client would download the material to the user's computer.

According to the MPAA press release the Pirate Bay is the 312th most popular website in the US. To put this in perspective, Best Buy's website is ranked 256 while Circuit City's website is ranked 369. These stores are the number one and number three largest electronics retailers in the US. So shutting down PRQ's servers to get to the Pirate Bay is considered by most copyright holders to be a huge success. The MPAA held a press conference to herald the shutdown and to praise the Swedish police for their work.

The Pirate Bay claims they are operating within the bounds of Swedish law and have done nothing wrong. They plan to continue to offer their bit torrent search engine service and fight what they consider to be an attack on their rights. In fact, less than a week later the Pirate Bay is now back online and is experiencing a sizable new influx of users due to all the free advertising that this event has created. It is uncertain how long they will be able to continue operating, but as of now they are more popular than ever before. The cycle continues.

Message to Content Owners

Restrictive DRM repulses your legitimate consumer base. These are the people that pay for your product and make you money. Everytime you tighten the DRM noose, you are strangling your own lifeblood. Those consumers that pull away from you will either stop using your content altogether or they will run to the pirates for what they want. Instead of starting a public relations battle that you cannot win, you should rethink the unacceptable restrictions you are trying to place on fair use. Stop spurning your customers and sending them into the ever-open arms of pirates.

You should concentrate your efforts on stopping the real threat. The real threat to your business is not file sharers but organized crime and local leaks in your pipeline who actually make a profit from piracy. They sell your own wares cheaper and faster than your outdated infrastructure can. Remove your restrictions, lower your prices, speed up your release schedules, and make your products easier to purchase so that pirated versions don't look so attractive to fans. We applaud your recent hastening of DVD releases of movies and the combination CD/DVD audio releases. It is these sorts of changes that will bring customers back to you while chasing file sharers makes you look weak and grasping.

"The bad news is that you're up against a dedicated foe that is younger and smarter that you are and will be alive when you're dead. You're 55 years old and these kids are 17 and they're just smarter than you. So you're gonna lose that one." - John Perry Barlow (Lyricist for 'The Grateful Dead') (Co-founder the Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Authors - Jimmy Palmer and Ginger Cox

Output Content Protection (DRM) and Windows Vista

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Fri, 26 May 2006 13:36:58 -0500

Every year Microsoft holds a conference known as Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). Microsoft uses this conference to let hardware vendors know what to expect from Windows in regard to hardware. All of the major computer vendors and manufacturers attend this event and use the information gathered to make plans for the next year as to what to build. Obviously this conference is not the only factor taken into account when deciding what hardware to sell, but considering Window's massive market share in the PC world it is extremely important. For its part, Microsoft is very forthcoming with information during these conferences because billions of dollars are at stake. If there is not appropriate hardware for Windows to operate on, then both the PC vendors and Microsoft lose out.

This year's conference took place this week, May 22-24, in Seattle, Washington. In advance of the conference Microsoft released the hardware specifications needed to run their new operating system known as Windows Vista. There are dozens of new features in Vista, but unlike all previous versions of Windows not all features will work on all hardware. Microsoft is currently using the terminology "Vista Experience" to describe what features will be available to users and the "experience" depends on how "good" your computer hardware is. In general there are two categories of hardware when it comes to Vista: Capable and Premium.

Vista capable PCs will have a modern processor operating at a minimum of 800 megahertz that uses the x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) instruction set. The graphics card will be DirectX 9 capable with sufficient memory and processing power to display 800x600 pixel resolution. The PC must have at least 512MB of memory and a hard disk drive with 15GB of free storage space. Finally the system must have an optical drive that is either a CD-ROM or a DVD. A Vista premium PC will have at least a 1000 megahertz processor with 1GB of memory. Both configurations require an optical drive — CD for Capable and DVD for Premium. However, the video card specifications caught our attention. The premium experience calls for a Windows Aero Capable video card.

Windows Aero is a new graphical user interface that Microsoft developed to make things prettier and provide greater options to programmers. Most people that have seen this GUI remark at how similar it is to Apple's OSX interface. There are five things that Microsoft lists as requirements for a GPU to be Aero capable.

DirectX 9-class GPU
A Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) driver
Pixel Shader 2.0 support in the hardware
32 bits per pixel GPU
Adequate memory

There are two pieces of information from this list that you should wonder about: Memory and WDDM. Adequate memory is pretty easy. Pick the resolution you want to run and here are the memory requirements:

480,000 - 1,310,720 pixels = 800x600 - 1280x1024 = 64MB minimum memory
up to 2,304,000 pixels = up to 1900x1200 = 128MB minimum memory
over 2,304,000 pixels = over 1900x1200 = 256MB minimum memory

These numbers are pretty straightforward and should let you know that you will have to have a decent video card to run Vista. This is because Microsoft decided to put in quite a few special effects with Aero that require GPU instead of CPU power to work.

A WDDM driver is a bit more complicated. There are many reasons that drivers in Vista are going to be different than other Windows, but it boils down to Microsoft completely reworking the window manager and window rendering subsystem. In one way this is a good thing. It should help prevent non-responsive applications from locking up the entire system and causing reboot situations. However, as with all things we report on DRM Blog, there is DRM lurking just under the surface. In this instance the DRM's name is Output Protection Management (OPM).

Its amazing how complicated things seem when you use acronyms instead of the actual words to describe something. OPM is an umbrella term that includes PVP, PAP, PVP-UAB, SAP, and PUMA. No problem right?

PVP - Protected Video Path
PAP - Protected Audio Path
PVP-UAB - PVP User-Accessible Bus
SAP - Secure Audio Path
PUMA - Protected User Mode Audio

Now you should see that all these acronyms actually are all under the umbrella term DRM. I will not go into detail about these technologies, but will simply point out that they will all affect your "Vista Experience" if you do not have compatible hardware.

It seems that Microsoft left a little information out with their published specifications. If you want your new Vista PC to partake in "premium content" then you must have a video card and driver combination that is PVP-OPM and PVP-UAB certified. At the 2005 WinHCE Microsoft handed out an interesting document that describes OPM in all its incarnations and what a video card vendor must do to be certified.

To get a certificate, a graphics card or GPU manufacturer will first have to sign a legal document (read contract) that specifies that the hardware or driver in question meets all of the specifications laid out in the "Compliance Rules" document. This compliance document is part of this legal contract. As it turns out, there is no testing done by Microsoft. It's an an honor system backed by a legal contract. "Content protection is about links in a chain" with each member of the PC industry being responsible "to protect premium content, to ensure that the content industry will trust its content to the PC". If a "valid report of content leakage occurs" then Microsoft will have no option but to "revoke the driver's ability to play high-level premium content". Microsoft claims that this is in the best interest for for hardware vendors and driver developers as this revocation process will "protect against actions that a content provider might take" if a leakage occurs.

The document goes on to say that the compliance rules also have a "Content Industry Agreement" for video hardware robustness and that certification can only be given to manufacturers who meet those rules. There could be several reasons for the content industry to require a certain amount of robustness in video hardware. However, the only logical one is that it will take a lot of horsepower to down sample high-definition video and audio on the fly. This is linked to the HDCP protection flag that we discussed in our last article.

Once again the consumer is the one paying for DRM and most people will never know about it. But the fun does not stop there. "If you are a graphics chip manufacturer", it is your responsibility as one of the trusted links in the PC chain to make sure that you are not selling your chips to any rogue elements who are going to make "hacker-friendly graphics boards". Logically, according to Microsoft, the easiest way to do this is to ensure that your GPU performs encryption in the chip itself. Apparently, it is also important that both the driver certificate and the private key both be "obfuscated". In fact, Microsoft has come up with an obfuscation tool that they use for their Certified Output Protection Protocol (COPP). It is assumed that the driver makers will use this same tool when obfuscating their key.

If this makes no sense to you, don't worry. The simple answer is that this is all part of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing effort. If you look up the meaning of trustworthy computing you will find marketing terms such as security, privacy, reliability, and best business practices. Don't believe the hype. It just means that all the DRM now has a pretty ribbon wrapped around it with a good name. The only trust taking place here is between very large companies that want to sell you content, hardware, and software that violates your privacy, artificially inflates prices, and makes it illegal for you to tinker with.

Author - Jimmy Palmer

HDTV and HDCP and DRM Questions

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Tue, 23 May 2006 11:32:22 -0500

After our last post concerning HDCP we received some very good questions that I will attempt to answer. I hope that this clarifies some of the unclear issues.

I have a 50" HD Plasma and the Digital HD Receiver from Comcast Cable and the receiver is connected to the television through component cables. Am I receiving "real" HD broadcasts?

If you are paying for digital HD-cable then yes, you are almost certainly getting HD broadcasts. I do not know how many channels you would get in HD as that will mostly depend on your subscription package. Stations like HBO and ESPN are available in HD almost everywhere. The broadcast version of HDCP is known as the broadcast flag. The broadcast flag was approved by the FCC in 2004 but the implementation was halted by a federal court on the grounds that the action over stepped the FCC charter. As of know the broadcast flag is not scheduled to be implemented; however, several bills have been introduced to congress that would either extend the FCC's power or make the broadcast flag into law. Talked to your congressman lately?

So if i buy the higher price PS3 and have a HDMI connection then I will have a true High Definition picture even although my television is not HDCP enabled?

I have a Pioneer PDP-1530 High Definition television that I purchased in May 2004. It has HDMI inputs will it play an HDCP protected movie or not?

If you have HDMI connections on your television and on your player then you will get true High Definition picture. In theory, any television that has an HDMI port is also HDCP compatible. You should also be getting true digital audio also since both the video and audio run across the HDMI cable. Unlike previous analog connections you do not need a separate fiber-optic cable for digital sound.

Am I going to have to have an HDCP compliant stereo?

Again, in theory, the new HD movies will come with very high quality digital audio tracks that contain up to 8 distinct audio tracks. The audio can also be protected by HDCP and down-sampled. If you are not feeding HDMI into your sound system then you probably are not getting all possible audio quality. Do you need a new HDCP/HDMI sound system? If you want to be guaranteed the best possible sound then your home theater sound system must have HDMI inputs. I think the better question to ask is "Do I have the speakers to play HD audio?". To take advantage of 7.1 surround you need 8 speakers: right front, center front, left front, right side, left side, right rear, left rear, and a sub-woofer. Very few home theaters have enough room to properly take advantage of 6 speakers and even fewer have room for all 8 that 7.1 surround requires. With that said, if you have the room and an HDMI audio system and properly placed speakers and a good sub then the experience can be well worth the effort.

Good News --err-- Good Rumors

I would like to stress that this information is not official; in fact, this information is rumor and conjecture. According to Spiegel Online, a German-language magazine, most major Hollywood studios have made a back-room handshake deal concerning the Image Constraint Token (ICT). ICT is the protection flag used in HDCP. According to this deal the studios would not implement ICT on any movie until at least 2010. The reasoning behind this thought is that Hollywood does not want to loose a large portion of its customer base over a downgraded signal. It turns out that the early adopters of HD televisions are some of the people that buy the most movies and these would be the people most affected by ICT. The second part of the reasoning is that companies like Sony and Microsoft would not be releasing HD products that could not play HD movies.

However, since none of the studios have officially announced this and none of the consumer electronics companies have announced this then I do not believe it. Why would these companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a DRM system that they do not intend to use? I am sure that there have been several meetings to discuss this potential problem; however, my guess is that most of the discussion has involved legal liability if the ICT is actually implemented. I can only imagine that there will be several law suits that come about when HDCP DRM is fully utilized.

Author: Jimmy Palmer

DTV + HDTV + HDMI + HDCP + DVI = BAD DRM

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Mon, 15 May 2006 06:27:08 -0500

Do you own a high-definition television? Are you going to be buying a high-definition television soon? How do you know if the image you are seeing on your television is actually high-definition? What do all of those acronyms mean? And how might your picture quality be affected with a new DRM additive?

DTV + HDTV
High-definition television (HDTV) is a standard to which all new televisions in the United States will be required to adhere. The standard features two primary changes from the system currently in use. The first change is from analog to digital and the second is a change in the picture and sound quality. Televisions will be phased into this new standard over time; however, the FCC has set a deadline of March 1, 2007 for when all new televisions will be required to have a digital tuner. A digital tuner means that the television will be able to receive digital broadcasts. This is very important since all analog broadcasts will be turned off no later than April 7, 2009. This is the date set by Congress when all television stations must relinquish their analog broadcast licenses. If you do not have a digital tuner by this date then you will not be able to receive television with an antennae. The digital transmission part of HDTV is very clear and agreed upon.

The second part of HDTV, the better picture and sound, is not quite so clear. The easiest way to understand the quality difference is to examine pixel densities. Every image you see on a television screen is created using a series of small colored dots (pixels). The more pixels you can squeeze into a smaller box, the better the picture will look. In general, if you compare two analog televisions of equal quality side by side using the same video the smaller television will appear to have the better picture. This is because both televisions have the same number of pixels but the smaller television has them closer together. There is one other issue that affects the picture quality and that is how quickly the image is refreshed on the screen.

The current analog standard calls for the picture to be updated completely 30 times every second. This is accomplished by drawing one half of the image 60 times every second. This process is called interlacing and has been the standard in the US for fifty years; however, some televisions are capable of redrawing the entire picture 60 times every second, which is known as progressive scanning. So with this in mind, here are the resolutions that both analog and digital systems are capable of using.

300 pixels x 360 pixels - VHS quality - standard VCRs record and play at this level
460 pixels x 360 pixels - Broadcast television - your local television station transmits this
560 pixels x 360 pixels - Laserdisc quality - if you do not know what an LD is, don't worry
720 pixels x 360 pixels - DVD quality - this is why DVDs look so much better than tape
640 pixels x 480 pixels - 480i or 480p - DTV either interlaced (i) or progressive (p)
1280 pixels x 720 pixels - 720i or 720p - DTV either interlaced (i) or progressive (p)
1920 pixels x 1080 pixels - 1080i or 1080p - DTV either interlaced (i) or progressive (p)

There is some disagreement as to where in this list HDTV actually begins. Generally the question is if 480 pixels is enough to qualify for the HDTV designation. I will not get into that argument but to say that anything 720 and above will make a very dramatic image quality difference over analog television while anything less than 720 is basically DVD quality.

HDMI + HDCP + DVI
So you have a television that has a digital tuner and is listed as being 1080i compatible. Congratulations! Are you watching HDTV? The answer is "maybe". As it turns out, the companies that make television programs and movies do not trust you and me. In fact, they think that given the chance you will steal from them and that they must protect themselves in any way they can. To this end the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) specifaction from Intel is a DRM scheme used to ensure that content traveling between HD devices is secure from copying. To connect these HD device you must use digital interconnect cables. Currently there are only two interconnects that can be used: Digital Visual Interface (DVI) or high-definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI). DVI is primarily used to connect digital monitors to computers and HDMI is the standard used for home theater equipment.

In an earlier DRM article we talked about the two new competing DRM standards that are coming out this year. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD are both advertised as being capable of playing movies back in full 1080p resolution. This is the best possible resolution available in the HDTV standard.

To get a license to use HDCP, the licensee must agree to not only keep their HDCP keys secret but they must also agree to limit the capability of their products. When a studio creates a movie, there is an option to activate a protection flag. This flag is in place to prevent the full HD quality from being transmitted to any device that is not connected using HDCP; and, as it turns out, very few HD televisions have HDMI or DVI connections. Also, if this flag is activated, then the player must downgrade any signal that is leaving the device on an analog connection. Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players honor this flag and will only output video at 540p - and as we know 540p is not really high-definition. Broadcast high-definition would not be immune to this either; in fact, the FCC had planned to use HDCP in conjunction with the Broadcast Flag to force a 480p restriction.

What's The Problem?

The problem is that for nearly a decade now electronics manufacturers have been selling televisions that have been advertised as being HD-Ready, HD-Capable, HD-Compatible, etc. Very few of those televisions have either DVI or HDMI and the Federal Communications Commission approved HDCP as a "Digital Output Protection Technology" on August 4th, 2004. To make matters worse the electronics manufacturers are still making non-HDCP compliant devices and are not warning people about this issue. In fact if you look at the computer graphics industry the two leaders are ATI and NVIDIA. As of this writing there was no card from either of these companies that was HDCP ready.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was held last week and a couple of announcments spurred the creation of this post. E3 is "the world's premiere trade event exclusively dedicated to showcasing interactive entertainment". Primarily this show is for video game hardware manufacturers, software makers, and the industry press. The last two years at E3 have been dominated by talk from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft about their new console gaming devices. Both Sony and Microsoft have boasted about their ability to play games in HD. Playing games in HD is very true on these machines and games on bath machines look great; however, both Microsoft and Sony are releasing products to playback high-definition movie discs as well. Microsoft is releasing an HD-DVD add-on player for the XBox 360 while Sony's PS3 is coming standard with a Blu-Ray player.

There is a problem for both companies. Sony is releasing two versions of the PS3. The lower priced version does not have HDMI outputs but the higher priced version does. The XBox 360 does not have any HDMI outputs on either of the two models that are currently available. Furthermore, neither the XBox nor the PlayStation have DVI outputs. So according to the HDCP standard, neither the lower priced PS3 nor the XBox can display true HD movie content when the protection flag is set.

Both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray organizations are quick to point out that none of the first movies that are being released actually implement the protection flag and assure us there is nothing to worry about. The fact remains that all HDCP devices must comply with the protection flag, and the protection flag is turned on by the content makers and not the hardware makers. There is nothing illegal about what these electronics manufacturers are doing but it is certainly unethical that they are not educating their customers.

If you think this is not a problem or that the buyer should beware then please consider some recent research from Scientific-Atlanta and Forrester Research. By the end of 2006 there will be 16 million U.S. households with HDTV sets and at that time only 7 million of them will actually be getting HDTV reception. Of the people that have HDTV sets now only 51% were actually using any of their HD capability. Twenty-Five percent of the people with HDTV were hooked up to standard cable but thought they were watching HDTV because at the beginning of television shows they saw a message that said "Broadcast in HDTV where available". Finally, nearly 20% of all the people with HDTV sets had no idea that they needed additional equipment to see high-definition video. It is unethical to not educate your customers. In my opinion, there is no difference between what these electronics companies are doing and the shady salespeople who prey on senior citizen's retirement accounts.

Jimmy Palmer

ERM Follow-Up

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 13:07:19 -0500

In recent weeks we have moved DRM Blog and in the move it is possible that some comments might have been lost. We deeply regret this and apologize if your comment is missing. We have restored the comments that we knew were missing; however, if your comment is gone please feel free to repost it. Please accept our apology and know that we read all comments and unless they are considered spam comments are not deleted.

In my previous post I suggested a possible good use for DRM. I suggested that DRM might be useful for business to business uses. I said that a person could use this technology to perhaps protect business documents. Dave Bailey responded to this with the following comment.

So let me see if i understand your point, its a good use of DRM to protect your IP, but its a poor use of DRM protect someone else's. If you replace business proposal with music/movie, print with rip, and share with distribute via internet, you have what the Music and Movie industry are doing.

The only difference between good and bad in your argument is whether you are on the producing or receiving side. It would be good for the whole world to learn of your business proposal, people would modify it and make it better, the best business people would be better able to make the most money out of it, students could learn from it.

I appreciate the idea here but I disagree with Mr. Bailey. The difference is not in who owns the IP. Every IP owner has the right to protect their property in the way that they see fit. I suggest the difference between a good (fair) use of DRM and a bad (unfair) use of DRM is whether the DRM is used to protect rights or remove rights.

The business documents I refer to in my post are not covered by copyright. There is no protection on those documents other than the NDA or privacy statement that the end user might have signed. If the end user breaks one of these agreements then the document owner has a right to challenge the end user in CIVIL court. If the document owner can prove that end user is liable then the document owner can collect damages.

Movies and music on the other hand are covered by copyright. It is a CRIMINAL offense to distribute a song via the internet. This is called piracy. It is a criminal offense to make an illegal copy of a movie. Remember those FBI warnings at the beginning of VHS tapes; $500,000 fine and x years in prison? Copyrighted IP has been protected in this county for decades initially through civil court and now in criminal court. Non-copyrighted material does not share the same luxury. The business proposal is a personal document not a commercial transaction. If I sold or licensed my business proposal to a user then I would agree with Mr. Bailey completely.

Now consider what rights you, the consumer, have when purchasing a license to IP. Music, movies, and software are the most common consumer IP purchases so I will use those as examples. When you purchase one of these products, you have the right to make personal backups. You have the right to let friends listen to or view the content you purchased. You have the right to let friends use your software on your computer. You also have the right to use this IP on any make or model of hardware that is capable of accessing the content you purchased. DRM can and is being used to remove some of these rights from consumers and it is for this reason that DRM on IP is a bad thing.

Many people will argue that their DRM scheme is fair and they can do whatever they want with the content they purchased. Their DRM agreement allows them to burn X copies to CD and they can authorize X computers for use. What most of these people do not know is that their DRM agreement also says that any or all of these rights can be revoked at any time. Another thing that most of these people do not know is that they do not actually own the digital copy for which they just payed 99 cents they are being allowed to use this content so long as the IP owners allow.

One last difference between the use of ERM to protect non-copyright works and DRM to protect copyrighted material is the DMCA. The Digital Millinium Copyright Act makes it a criminal offense to remove DRM, and other protection schemes, from copyrighted material. In effect this gives IP owners the right to legally change copyright law for each piece of IP that they license. This means that it is now the IP owners who are determining what your rights are and not Congress or the Courts. Either way you look at this scenario it looks very bad for consumers.

Author: Jimmy Palmer

Good Uses for DRM

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Fri, 2 Sep 2005 15:36:26 -0500

I know you never thought you would see an article with this title on our site, but surprise, here it is. As we have argued over and over again, digital rights management only serves to restrict and remove rights from innocent users. With that in mind, there may still be places where limiting a persons rights is acceptable. Generally these are only acceptable in business to business areas where the information is confidential.

Consider a situation where I want to send a business proposal to a potential investor. I want this investor to be able to read the proposal but I do not want him to be able to print the document or send it to anyone else. In other words I want to restrict what he can do with the document I send him. If this document is wrapped in a good DRM then I could easily accomplish this. Historically I would just encrypt the document and send it securely over email; however, once the document is decrypted the user can do whatever he wants with it.

This B2B document management is generally referred to as Enterprise Rights Management (ERM). We here at DRM Blog do not have a problem with this type of restrictive technology in principal. However, we still have doubts that it will work as advertised, and the ability to implement this technology is beyond most small entities.

So what would we want to accomplish by using DRM or ERM?

To control who can read or print a document.
To control when a person can read or print a document.
To control how many times a person can read or print a document.

There are really only two ways to accomplish this. One is to use a stand alone document reader application that reads the documents and enforces the DRM that is embedded into the document. The other is to use a document reader application that phones home for its license.

Let us consider the phone-home method. To accomplish this you must have three pieces of software: a server, a client, and a producer. The server software would run on a publicly available machine that can be connected to across the internet; think specialized web server. The client is designed to run on the end-users computer. This software allows the end-user to read and print the documents but will always connect to the server to make sure the person has the proper rights to do so; think Media Player 10 for documents. Finally there is the producer software which is used to actually create the document. The document would be uploaded to the server and the server would wrap the document in DRM and serve it to the end-user.

Now let us consider the stand-alone option. To accomplish this you need only two pieces of software: a client and a producer. The producer would create the document and embed all of the DRM information into the document. The client would read the document and allow the user to access the document according to these embedded rules. To get a document to an end-user, a person would just email it or send a disk. This system is simpler than the phone-home system but does not allow for changing DRM rules after the document is created. Also, to lock the document to one end-user, the producer would have to have that end-users client access key. Without this access key then anyone with a client could access the document.

We do not see any reason that ERM or DRM could not be used for sending business documents between users. However, the problems and limitations of the technology must be fully understood before it is embraced. As with all DRM schemes, there are holes in the security, and no DRM will protect against someone who is determined to exploit those holes. DRM is like a locked door; it will not keep out the real criminal, but it will convince honest people to stay out. A determined person with rights to read the document could just use a pencil and paper to copy the protected document. In this regard, the file is safe but the content is not protected. A determined person without any rights would just find a way to crack the DRM encryption scheme. In the end if a digital copy of a document exists, even if it's protected with enterprise rights management, it is susceptible to being read, printed, and shared.

Author - Jimmy Palmer

Hacked

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 18:28:46 -0500

Getting hacked is like getting rolled or teepeed or whatever regional colloquialism you use to call that act of getting toilet paper strewn about your yard on Homecoming weekend. The guy/girl who hacks you either really likes you or really hates you.

In this case, we don't know which. Sometime today, DRMBlog.com got hacked by "PRI[ll".

Hats off to you. You succeeded in hacking our buggy, easy-to-use-in-a-pinch, free blogging software, Serendipity.

So, just to let our readers know, we'll be taking a bit to figure out where the hole is and possibly building/finding a new CMS. We'll be back, promise.

-ginger

DRM - Only 33% Off! Students Welcome!

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 06:58:24 -0500

I was all set to write a "Happy 1st Birthday to DRMBlog" post when I read this article by ZDNet and decided to postpone the birthday celebration. Perhaps when my mindset gets past livid and moves into only-slightly-less-enraged, I'll announce the idea I've been kicking around for DRMBlog's birthday.

Let me 'splain. No, it is too much. Let me sum up. Several university bookstores are testing out a new program from publishers that sells several of their most popular books and textbooks in electronic form. The student purchases a card that is assigned a book title that the student is then able to download. Starts out cool, I agree, until you find out that they include harsh usage restrictions in the form of digital rights management.

The student is only able to download the text to one computer. Moreover, the access to the electronic book is hugely temporary. After five months (150 days) the file will no longer be accessible. Other limitations may exist including the inability to print the entirety of the book all at once (like that's going to prevent someone from actually printing the whole thing piece meal and reaching the same result).

And, here's the kicker, the price is only discounted 33% from retail value of the book. I'd consider it, only briefly, if the price was lower, perhaps 75-90% off the retail, printed textbook price. There is practically no overhead to producing these ebooks. They can sell and resell and three-sell to infinity the same product without actually tapping a single resource except bandwidth. These publishers have taken what could be a very lucrative business launch and mucked it up with DRM, and not just one-user-one-computer DRM, but the expiring license and EULA kind, which to me is of the particularly nasty, virulent sort.

By introducing these new DRM'd ebooks, publishers are attempting to trump one very large competitor to their university textbook sales: widespread reselling of physical textbooks for which they receive no windfall. Why do you think they so frequently release updated editions of their textbooks? Many times it is because the world or our worldview has changed and thus parts of the textbook must be rewritten, but often it's just a correction or two and a worthless extra chapter so that the publisher can sell new books all over again by making the older editions seem outdated.

And who would be a better sucker to sell an expiring ebook to than a customer looking for the cheapest option and forced by circumstances to read the book, i.e. a broke college student with a hefty booklist?

The truly criminal part of this whole pile of publishing hoohah is that I am certain that a portion of these books are classics that have no copyright and thus can be legally printed and sold by anyone who has a mind to do so. To have made it onto the publisher's test list, the titles had to be popular enough to be widely used across many classes and curriculums. Re: English lit titles, Greek classics, or less precisely, one third of the books I have on my personal bookshelf from an agonizing period of major-switching. Such titles would likely be free to own, read, and print via Project Gutenberg. I'm sure many of the trial e-textbooks are exceptions to my previous statement, such as core textbooks written by academics and copyrighted by these participating publishers or classics that have prefaces and translators notes that are protected under copyright. But included among the bunch are certain to be ones that have no copyright limitation on them to begin with.

I've spent the morning emailing many of the publishers and distributors involved to get a list of the titles currently being offered in the trial program. I'll post here when/if I hear back from any of the people Ive contacted. If anyone else has additional information (students, write in, too, and let me know what ebooks are available on your bookstores shelves!), please email me. Here's a list of participating schools and publishers from the article:

The trial project starting this semester is the first to include multiple publishers and one of the largest textbook wholesalers in the country, MBS Textbook Exchange. The publishers include McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Houghton Mifflin, John Wiley & Sons, Thomson Learning and Sage Publications.

MBS Textbook Exchange, which provides inventory and accounting services as well as wholesale book distribution, developed the card system with input from the publishers and a handful of bookstores, hoping that it and its customers could avoid being cut out of the sales process as digital sales grew.

The digital books will be initially available at the University of Oregon, the University of Utah, Portland Community College, Bowling Green State University, Princeton University, Georgetown College, California State University-Fullerton, Morehead State University, and at privately owned stores serving West Virginia University and Louisiana State University.

Author: Ginger Cox

DRM and Tech Mortality Rate

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Fri, 5 Aug 2005 07:45:19 -0500

Most consumer complaints about digital rights management revolve around the limited interoperability of proprietary systems. Those concerns are still legitimate and remain unanswered by current DRM technology. But there exists another concern beyond the simple lateral limitations of trying to move a file from one DRM-supported system to another. Those concerns also apply to the longevity of your media. The introduction of digital rights management can greatly decrease the lifespan of your files, whether they be music, video, text, or any combination thereof.

In my very short lifetime (I'm 26), I've watched the evolution of ownable, compact media unfold before my very eyes. I danced to "Disco Duck" turning on a Fisher Price record player, sneered at my mother's Neil Diamond 8-tracks, played "Thriller" on cassette in my boom box, bought "Queen's Greatest Hits" twice on CD, and swapped Tori Amos mp3's via my dorm's T3 before Napster was even a glimmer in Shawn Fanning's eye.

Bad taste quips aside, the format and delivery of music is going to keep changing. In eras past, new branches in music evolution meant that you couldn't play your old files in your new players. But now that the files as well as the devices are digital, the physical limitation is no longer present and the next step in media evolution shouldn't render your old files useless. Rather than having to build a special machine that accepts multiple forms of physical media, you just have digital versions of your old files. After that, it's just a matter of the vendors writing software on the new devices that is backwards compatible with your old files regardless of how those files are delivered to the device.

This is all true until you encounter digital rights management on the files. Sure enough, the inclusion of DRM significantly hinders the designer's ability to make the new devices and software backwards compatible. The problem becomes even more complicated when you're dealing with multiple proprietary DRM's each with their own platforms, encryptions, keys, watermarking, and usage restrictions. Now the lifespan of your files is tied directly to the lifespan of that DRM. And you can forget about taking those files with you to the next generation of media.

Content owners want us to buy DRM'ed music not just because they think that the DRM protects their assets. They want DRM on their content because it forces consumers into a Walmart-style brand of consumerism in which we truly consume the product; we use it a few times and we throw it away, because it's cheaper just to buy a new one than to actually buy the higher quality, longer lasting item. Some music lends itself to this play-play-over-play-and-die model. Some pop music fits that one-time-use mold with its cultured-from-a-test-tube, rhinestone divas and their fifteen minutes of fame. But there's some music that we want to listen to over our lifetime, and no matter what genres you listen to, anyone with a spare dime has their own trove of beloved music.

When I do buy music, I buy so that I can listen to it for my whole life. It's not some casual fling with BMI's flavor-of-the-month. I suppose that's the difference between liking music and being a music lover. I want that music to be with me for the rest of my life. The same goes for a book or a movie or even the files I create myself. As a writer, my world is tied to the words I inject with meaning and string together in a document. Some of my writing I post; some I want my children (should I ever have them) to read in all their embarrassing glory.

Many misguided writers have argued that such fears could be allayed if an interoperable DRM were created. Oh? I'm assuming by this they mean one based on open standards formed by an alliance of industry leaders that would set basic standards for all players in the industry to adopt. Hrm, like the OMA, perhaps? We see how effective that has been. Or perhaps we should look to an even older market: browsers. We've seen how well-behaved Microsoft has been when deciding whether or not to comply with open and established standards. Read their latest decision to ignore CSS compliance once again with IE7.

Wilson's post is disappointing because Microsoft doesn't plan to fully support the latest CSS standard in IE 7.0. Instead of using well-established Web standards, IE 7.0 will continue to foist proprietary technologies on Web developers, forcing them to choose between two competing ways of creating Web sites.

Wishing for one platform to rule them all isn't an acceptable solution either. Every DRM vendor is lusting after the idea that their platform might one day gain enough market share to become the standard. Interoperability would increase, but so would prices for everything from the media to the devices to everything in between. Don't take my word for it; ask The Register when they interviewed Ed Gracyzk about MS's IPTV DRM.

But even if DRM licensing from Microsoft is low priced now, we could point out that it used to charge very little for its operating system, but thats managed to inflate over the years, so why not DRM license fees?

Hello, barriers to entry; goodbye, competition. And don't think that other proprietary DRM vendors will play nicely if their platform becomes the market winning standard. Apple's practices are just as proprietary as Microsoft's, perhaps even more so because they want to sell the hardware as well as the software.

Even if the industry somehow manages to stumble upon the perfect solution for interoperability among DRM platform(s), it still slows down the growth of the industry as a whole. The presence of digital rights management hinders the adoption of new technology. Let's use the most recent buzz about the Trusted Computing Alliance and Vista to illustrate. Other than the people who buy their computers off the shelf and don't know the difference between an operating system and their keyboard, how many people do you think are going to buy and install Vista knowing that they'll have to buy a new monitor to watch their normal media? Other than those who don't know any better, who would actually choose to spend money on a device or software that gave them less capability and lower quality than they already have? Now imagine if Vista included many new tools that were useful and attractive to consumers and businesses instead of catering to content owners' paranoia. Many many more people would make the switch to Vista. Thus DRM slows the adoption of new technology by users who no longer see the upgrade as attractive when its paired with its DRM limitations and increased hardware expenditures.

I think I may have made the DRM vendors' and some content owners' agenda clear. The only way that they can make DRM standard and indispensable is if they sell it unknowingly to the average user who doesn't know any better. As long as that enormous knowledge gap exists between the common end user and the platform designers, DRM vendors will pray upon this lack of awareness and slip into the lap of the silent majority. I don't expect consumers to learn every detail on how their computer works, but I do know that awareness can be fostered without the need for technical knowledge. We have the most influence on people who are in our immediate circle of family, friends, and colleagues. You don't have to preach. You just have to talk, listen, and teach.

Author: Ginger Cox

Discuss Amongst Yourselves; Let Me Give You a Topic...

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Mon, 1 Aug 2005 14:23:26 -0500

enGadget has launched a contest to "build your own DRM scheme". They're giving away an iZon Bluetooth MP3 player to the person with the most interesting comment. It'll be judged by the enGadget editors. We wrote our own comment, but moreso to share criticism of DRM rather than to compete. Regardless of the bribe, we enjoy the discussion. Read and leave a comment of your own.

Here's our response. Although I personally am in favor of watermarking, Jimmy focused this particular argument on the effectiveness of charging for distribution methods rather than using a system of key revocation (which enGadget proposes). The idea of key revocation is dangerous to legal consumers, as we've discussed in our breakdown of AACS in the new realm of HD-DVD. We've been meaning to write a post about digitally watermarking compressed files, but that'll have to wait til later this week.
— ginger

There is no form of DRM that will ever work. DRM will prevent the average Joe from swapping content with his friends but true pirates will still make that content available, for free or for pay, and perhaps even with malware. Your scheme has not solved this problem; it is just another DRM scheme.

Your scheme actually makes the problem worse for consumers. If a pirate does get his hands on my files then he can publish all of his pirated materials with my name on them. It would be easy enough for my files to make it into the public; consider how many iPods have been stolen in the last year.

Several comments have suggested a system where a device would have to be in constant contact with a server. This is also a horrible idea. Where am I going to be able to take my MP3 player to a beach and still be able to get a decent wireless connection? It is difficult enough to get a cell phone signal that I cannot imagine how hard it would be to get a signal with enough bandwidth to support data transmission.

For any scheme to work, the content files need to be as easy to use as a CD or DVD. If I take a DVD to my friends house, I do not have to worry if his machine will work. Sharing my content with my friends is fair use and should be protected not restricted. I believe that the files themselves should be left alone. Let people do what they want with the files.

I think that users should be held responsible for their own actions. This includes actions on P2P networks. So, as a software maker I would encourage other software makers to shift responsibility to the users. This is easily accomplished through making P2P swaps directly traceable to the source. If a user swaps a file that is copyright protected and the RIAA/MPAA/Other finds that file, then the software maker should turn that user over to the powers that be without question. Software makers need to make it perfectly clear to their users that this is going to happen and that every swap is going to be logged and that the days of annonymous swapping are over.

However, there must be mechanisms in place for the content owners to collect moneys. For this, the content owners should change their licensing terms to say "...we authorize the trading of this content on licensed trading software...". This change allows the average Joe to trade all the music he wants by simply paying a service fee to his P2P company. These fees would have to go to some sort of industry collecting agency and divided among content owners. The fees paid by the P2P company would need to be negotiated with the content owners based on the files being traded.

This scheme provides incentives to consumers to go legit and it provides P2P software makers a way to make real money. It also provides a way for content owners to make more money than otherwise they would make. Finally, it gives the content owners a real legal recourse against any P2P company that allows trading of copyright material without paying the fees.

I suggest also that there should be fees on all downloading services such as iTMS, Napster, Yahoo Music, etc. This provides a way for people to buy higher quality music and not have to deal with P2P headaches. Perhaps my music is $1.19 instead of $0.99 but if I can get it at a higher quality and without DRM then I as a consumer am much more likely to purchase it legally. If I do not want to buy individual tracks then I can still purchase CDs.

This scheme does not prevent piracy, no scheme will. However, this scheme provides the consumer with more choices for content and less incentives to try to download illegally. Also, this scheme should reduce the price of electronics. The electronics makers will not need to license DRM schemes from many different companies just to make their devices compatible. As the price of the electronics fall, more content will be purchased or traded which will increase profits for the content owners even more.

DRM in Hi-Def

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 12:35:55 -0500

If you own a high definition (HD) television, you might sometimes wonder why you spent so much money on it since almost no content is available that can showcase the televisions capabilities. You might also wonder when you are going to be able to buy or rent high definition movies on DVD. I cant answer your doubts about spending money on the new technology, but I can tell you when and how you will get your high definition content.

Almost all new television series are being recorded in high definition, and in most US markets the major networks are broadcasting in high definition. So at present you can watch some television series and most sporting events in hi-def. The real availability for hi-def content will not be for at least another five months, until fourth quarter 2005 or first quarter 2006. These are the launch dates for both of the new high definition disc formats, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.

This site is not a forum to discuss which technology is better, so we are going to focus on the software behind the hardware. However, I will give a quick take on the technologies for background. On paper Blu-Ray appears to me to be a more advanced standard with higher storage capacity and more software options, but it also appears to be more expensive to build. The first of the two formats to hit the market appears to be HD-DVD. These players should be on the market sometime this year with less than one hundred movies available at launch. Firm prices have not yet been set for the players or the movies, but expect player prices to be over $500US and movies to be in the $30US price range. The Blu-Ray players will be out sometime in early 2006 with about equal movie support. It is possible that the first Blu-Ray player to reach the mass market will be the Sony Playstation 3 gaming console. Most computer makers are very happy to see higher capacity discs appearing, so expect to see computer drives for both formats start showing up soon after the stand-alone players show up.

With the hardware talk out of the way, lets compare the software and digital rights management that will be included in these HD players. The video encoding software that has been adopted by both standards is known as VC-1 which was developed by Microsoft. Microsoft has now turned over licensing of this standard to MPEG LA which is the same licensing board that handles all licensing for MPEG video systems. This means that even though Microsoft will get paid for every new hi-def player, they will not have the ability to charge more to some clients than others as they do with their personal computer software.

Both systems use new sophisticated DRM schemes. In the case of HD-DVD, the DRM scheme is known as Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Blu-Ray has not officially announced which DRM scheme it will use, but recent reports indicate that they too may use AACS. The exact internals between the two systems will vary some but I will try to explain the basics of how the system works. Keep in mind that this explanation is very simplified.

The first thing to understand is that AACS will use a system of encryptions and keys. Content can be encrypted so that it will work with one or more keys. This approach is already used to encrypt email, so it makes an easy example. Imagine that you want to encrypt an email and send it to me. I would provide you with my public key. You would give this public key to your email client and associate it with my email address. Now anytime you send me an email it will be encrypted in such a way that only my private key can decrypt it. If you wanted to send the same email to two people, your email client would encrypt the message in such a way that both peoples private keys could decrypt it.

In the same way, the new HD discs can be encrypted using one or more keys. Every device will have a unique private key similar to the email clients described previously. Or in some cases, the manufacturers may choose to assign one key to multiple devices. In order to get the content off of the disk, a person would have to have one of these keys. If a person is able to extract this key from the devices firmware, then they would be able to copy the new disc to a computer, make backups, pirate it, etc.

The next thing to understand is the concept of a binary tree. A binary tree is a type of data structure used in computer science where there is a base node that expands by two branches at each level. Each branch is referred to as either left or right and each branch has at its end either a node or a leaf. A node will have branches extending out of it to the next level while a leaf does not have any branches extending from it. Leaves are the last level of the tree.

I explain the tree structure because it will be the data structure used to store all of these device keys. While this may not seem logical, consider how many keys can be stored in a relatively small tree. There is one key in the first level, two keys in the second level, four keys in the third level and so forth. The number of nodes (keys) at a particular level is equal to 2(n-1) where n is the level number in the tree. So a tree with only 17 levels would have 216 or 65,536 keys on the bottom most level. The number can grow quickly with 2,147,483,648 at level 32 of the tree.

What does storing all of these keys in a tree have to do with DRM? Well, this is where the really insidious part of this scheme begins to show. The AACS specification calls for every device to have network connectivity. Thats right, your hi-def DVD player is going to be connected to the network and will have the ability to call home and receive updates. What kind of updates? Key revocation notices, of course. If a device key gets cracked and posted to the internet, then the DVD makers can encrypt all new discs so that they cannot work with that key. Now is where the tree comes into play. Since every key is a sub-key of the node to which it is attached, entire groups of keys can be disabled by disabling a key higher in the tree than where your key is located.

Lets say that your device has a key that is in level 30 of the tree. Now lets say that I have a key at level 32 and I publish my key to the internet so that people can decode DVDs on player without a key, such as a Linux computer. The DVD makers will go to some level above me, say level 20, and disable that key. Any node (key) that is a child of the disabled key will no longer work. The device will have to call home to get new keys to continue to work. In this example with thirty two levels, if the cutoff is done at level 20 then 8191 devices (keys) would stop working until they phoned home.

At this point you must have realized that this revocation process only works if the DVD makers can identify the key that is cracked. If a hacker cracks his device but does not publish his key then the DVD makers will never know it was cracked. This hacker can then begin putting unencrypted movies on P2P networks then the DVD makers are powerless to stop this. In this regard, this DRM scheme fails to stop piracy just like every other DRM scheme on the market. Pirates that operate for profit will not be affected by this new DRM because they will either publish nonencrypted DVDs or will make a bit-by-bit copy of the original disc. Casual pirates will simply circulate stripped copies without the DRM.

So why put this much work into something that does not prevent piracy? Money and power. With current DVDs, if I want to go into business building DVD players, all I have to do is pay my yearly encryption license fee and start building the DVD players. The movie industry has no control over how I build my devices. I can let my devices ignore region encoding, not use MacroVision, and generally allow the user to do whatever he wants. Even if I stop paying my yearly license fee, the movie industry has little recourse against me. However, this is not so with the new generation of devices.

If a device maker does not build their devices to suit the movie industry or if the device maker stops paying their licensing fee, then all the movie industry has to do is revoke their key. The problem is that if you happen to be one of the poor people that bought a hi-def DVD player from one of these disreputable companies then your player will most likely never work again.

It seems to me that this particular DRM scheme can only serve to punish innocent consumers. The exact companies that the movie industry is worried about are the ones that generally make the lower-end, lower-priced players. An example is Apex DVD players which have a flashable ROM so that a person could turn off any of the protection schemes that were built into the player. Instead of stopping piracy and file sharing, this new scheme only serves to boost profits for the movie industry and the electronics industry by keeping prices artificially high and reducing competition. It is reprehensible when companies wave the anti-piracy banner and use DRM to merely veil engorged profits and artificial price inflation. As a side note, such tactics are perfectly legal because the DMCA prevents any circumvention of DRM schemes.

Expect next generation high definition players to cost $500US or more. Also expect the prices to stay at this lofty price for a long time. It is up to you and me as consumers to send a message to the movie industry that we are not willing to accept this sort of lunacy. With all of this said, it is my fear that like many other things in todays society, this will become commonplace because people do not understand the technology or because people are too apathetic to do anything about it.

Author: Jimmy Palmer

Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act of 2005

jimmypalmer@gmail.com (DRM) — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 07:52:00 -0500

A couple months ago I wrote a piece called, "Consumer DRM-Awareness Through Labeling", in which I argue that software and various forms of media should be outwardly and properly labeled if they contain any form of digital rights management. Such labeling should also explicitly state whether the media (movies, music, ebooks) will only play on certain proprietary devices. Although the second form of labeling (proprietary devices) often already exists as a carryover from an older habit of printing system requirements on the sides of software boxes, DRM labeling is virtually non-existant.

Physical media and software always have sinister, brightly-hued copyright warnings, but I've yet to see even one CD or DVD that warns me that it also has built-in copy protection. Nor are there labels that explain how my rightfully purchased media or new software CD can't be accessed on my computer because the DRM detects that CD burning software is also installed. Sometimes it's not even burning software (which is built into the newest operating systems and used for innocuous, legal purposes every day) that sets off the DRM alarm but another non-related program altogether. Every day I hear new horror stories about people learning too late that their new purchase had digital rights management built-in, such as one commenter's need to format his hard drive to remove the DRM software with the latest Foo Fighter's CD installed on his computer.

The reason why this information isn't advertised as much as the threats of prosecution is because some people would refuse to buy the product if they knew it contained DRM. Those who have no idea what the term DRM means should at least know that the item they're about to buy won't work in their computer, can't be transferred to their iPod, and can only be copied thrice for the lifetime of the disc, including back-ups.

Luckily I heard of some news a week ago that addresses the same concerns I'd already expressed. In early March, Rep. Rick Boucher of Virginia authored a bill called the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act of 2005. Along with fellow authors Reps. Doolittle and Barton of Texas, Boucher hopes to protect consumers by requiring all CD's to have easily-visible labels that inform the potential buyers of any limitation in playability. Specifically, the bill says that it is unlawful to sell mislabeled CD's, but mislabeling is defined in a way that is greatly benficial to the consumer:

Mislabeled Discs- For purposes of this section, a prerecorded digital music disc product shall be considered to be mislabeled if it--
(1) bears any logo or marking which, in accordance with common practice, identifies it as an audio compact disc;
(2) fails to bear a label on the packaging in which it is sold at retail in words that are prominent and plainly legible on the front of the packaging that--

(A) it is not an audio compact disc;
(B) it might not play properly in all devices capable of playing an audio compact disc; and
(C) it might not be recordable on a personal computer or other device capable of recording content from an audio compact disc; or

(3) fails to provide the following information on the packaging in which it is sold at retail in words that are prominent and plainly legible--

(A) any minimum recommended software requirements for playback or recordability on a personal computer;
(B) any restrictions on the number of times song files may be downloaded to the hard drive of a personal computer; and
(C) the applicable return policy for consumers who find that the prerecorded digital music disc product does not play properly in a device capable of playing an audio compact disc.

House Resolution 1201, as it is called, has been introduced on the House floor, sent to the Committee on Energy and Commerce and further sent to the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection. As I've stated before, other than the wheeling and dealing that goes on behind closed doors, most of all the decision-making and action-taking about bills occurs in the Committees, so there is no better time than now to make sure something actually comes of this one. Contact any of the members of the relavent subcommittee and count yourself ahead of the game in terms of digital liberty kharma.

Many people argue that the government shouldn't be involved in making decisions about digital rights management at all. One such person is Declan McCullagh, political correspondent for News.com, who recently wrote an article called "Leave DRM Alone" for the Michigan State Law Review. He argues that the government shouldn't involve itself in the burgeoning industry of digital rights management. McCullagh is an opponent of HR 1201 because he believes it "would create a complex web of regulations overseen by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that would
govern DRM-enabled compact discs."

I am inclined to agree that the government shouldn't make laws that might favor or promote a certain industry winner. I generally prefer to let innovation and the market decide its fate, particularly in technology. However, the government has already involved itself by creating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) through which it made criminal acts of circumventing DRM and reverse engineering, giving companies a stranglehold on consumers' rights, effectively eliminating fair use, and forcing consumers to accept monopolistic business practices that give us less and less for our hard-earned dollar.

The Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA) is an absolute necessity at this point to restore not just the tiniest fraction of consumer's rights but also to increase consumer awareness. If I wanted to get all-Homeland-Security about it, I'd argue that the record labels wouldn't have anything to fear from a little consumer awareness if they weren't afraid we'd excerise our right not to buy if we knew about the DRM ahead of time. The only thing the DMCRA is missing is a sister-bill that applies the same criteria to software and smaller devices with embedded DRM.

Author: Ginger Cox