Managing Rights Management

FTC on DRM-Disclose, Label It, OR Else

Ars Technica reports on a recent Federal Trade Commission report issued nearly 18 months after the conference that spawned it. Regarding DRM, the report says in part:

As new, proprietary technologies are introduced, consumers will be faced with noninteroperable products. Despite consumers’ general preference for interoperability, which provides the greatest flexibility and range of use for products they buy, such a goal may be elusive in a competitive marketplace where businesses seek to provide unique and innovative products. The challenge for the FTC, then, is not to ensure that products are interoperable, but rather to ensure that consumers are provided sufficient information prior to purchase so that they understand any inherent limitations on the use of the products they buy.

DirectTV Clamps Down

[I've been off doing a crash project for a client. Catching up today.]

Several sources including this Ars Technica article by Eric Bangeman report that Direct TV has changed the rights management rules regarding the time to view recorded TV shows.

DirecTV DVR owners got some bad news from the satellite TV provider recently when the company announced that it will break some of the existing functionality of the DVRs. Effective April 15, subscribers will only have 24 hours to watch pay-per-view movies recorded to their DVRs. Once the movies are purchased, the clock starts ticking, and after 24 hours, the PPV movie saved to your DVR will become nothing more than an unreadable collection of zeros and ones.

Why the studios should care is beyond me. Another capricious act by content owners and distributors.

DRM In Movie and TV Downloads? Wired Says No Way!

Is the movie download business like the record  business and should the lessons learned there be applied to movie and TV program downloads? Yes, says Frank Rose in Wired in an argument that seems a bit illogical:

The lessons from the music fiasco are clear: Trying to limit the inherent advantages of digital files is a losing strategy. The way to stop piracy is to make everything available — easily, legally, and at a fair price. But it's a lot of work to secure Internet rights to old films and TV series from writers, directors, composers, and the like, and the studios show little inclination to monkey around with their lucrative sales to premium channels like HBO — deals that don't affect DVD sales but are written in a way that can keep electronic distribution rights locked up for years. "There would be a lot fewer Mercedes pulling up to the Palm every day without those pay-TV deals," one exec quips. Right — but how many music moguls have you seen pulling up to the Palm lately?

If the music industry failed to monetize because of rampant piracy of a product that was provided on CDs without protection, and if the movie industry more successfully monetized by locking up content for a period of time on many channels, what's wrong with copy protection and DRM?

Apple Shuts Down DRM Stripping Site

The Standard (and other sources) reports that Apple has been able to shut down a site that strips FairPlay DRM from iTunes files. The open source Hymm project received a "cease and desist" order from Apple attorney's.

iTunes customers can legitimately lose FairPlay DRM in order to play their music on other devices by burning a CD of their songs, and ripping that CD into a different format.

Hymn has complied with Apple's legal letter, removing download links to its software from its website and warning forum users not to post links to alternate download sources within its forums, or risk a ban.

Why is Adobe Adding DRM to Flash?

EFF staff technologist Seth Schoen writes that Adobe is adding DRM to the latest version of Flash. Why they are doing this is, of course, an interesting question. Schoen suggests that the major motivation seems to be Adobe's business model:

Users may also have to upgrade their Flash Player software (and open source alternatives like Gnash, which has been making rapid progress, may be unable to play the encrypted streams at all). Third-party software that can download Flash Video, like the most recent RealPlayer, will also break. But Adobe now has an incentive to push the use of DRM: it's only available to sites that use Flash Media Server 3 software, which starts at over $4,000 (with extra fees depending on the number of simultaneous streams).

Canadian Privacy Minister Cautions Against DRM

Privacy is a touchy subject. For nearly 20 years, I have advocated that consumers be informed in advance and "opt in" to any collection of usage information by DRM technologies. The reason is that this information has value. In some business models, it's perfectly reasonable to provide compensation to consumers for access to their usage information. Compensation might be in the form of discounts or free digital goods.

These and related issues are now being discussed in Canada. Jennifer Stoddart, Privacy Commissioner of Canada, has sent a letter to Jim Prentice, Minister of Industry, and Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage, regarding the privacy implications of proposed changes to Canadian copyright law. Ms. Stoddart is most concerned about the use of DRM implementations that collect user related information without their consent:

If DRM technologies only controlled copying and use of content, our Office would have few concerns. However, DRM technologies can also collect detailed personal information from users, who often do no more than access the content on a computer. This information is transmitted back to the copyright owner or content provider, without the consent or knowledge of the user. Although the means exist to circumvent these technologies and thus prevent the collection of this information, previous proposals to amend the Copyright Act contained anti-circumvention provisions.

David Pogue: The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality

NYTimes columnist David Pogue asked his college audience about various use scenarios for music and video. Few found any moral or ethical problem with violating copyright. Pogue concluded this piece with:

I don't pretend to know what the solution to the file-sharing issue is. (Although I'm increasingly convinced that copy protection isn't it.)

I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies' problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can't even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?

Defective by Design Targets eBooks

The Defective by Design anti-DRM campaign has targeted eBook readers and books from Amazon and Sony:

• When you purchase a DRM ebook, it is locked to a single device. When the device breaks or becomes outdated, you can no longer read your ebook. You buy a lock, but you don't own the key! If you try to pick the DRM-lock on an ebook so you can read your book on another device, you break US Federal Law (The Digital Millenium Copyright Act).

• DRM ebooks are bad for authors and publishers. The owners of DRM technology get to decide which books, newspapers, and magazines can be put into their DRM formats. The DRM technology owners can deny whomever and whatever they wish from using their format. DRM allows for digital censorship.

So their answer seems to be enable piracy and reduce the revenue of publishers. It's a point of view, to be sure, but not one with which I agree.

 

Geist On Canada's DMCA Debate

Although I don't always agree with his positions, Canadian Prof. Michael Geist's blog is often a good source of information regarding copyright, DRM, and other issues up North. Apparently in response to consumer and interest group pressure, the government did not introduce a copyright bill this week as had been expected.

Regarding the evolution of the copyright debate in Canada, Geist had this to say:

...the debate around Canadian copyright has been altered from one focused exclusively on creator rights and "piracy", to one that includes (and this week focused on) user rights and consumer property.  That change is at the heart of the thousands of letters and phone calls from Canadians who come from across the country and across the political spectrum.  It is also evident in the media coverage of this issue.  There was a time - not that long ago - that a group like CRIA [Canadian Recording Industry Association] could put out a press release criticizing the government's decision to delay copyright legislation and could expect the media to cover the release as if it were the last word on the subject.  No longer.

Western Digital's Crippleware

Writing in the ChannelRegister (UK), Andrew Orlowski has written a couple of useful articles on the Western Digital's 1 terabyte network drive targeted to the consumer market. The first article describes how WD has crippled the filesharing software it provides so that one cannot share media files across the net. Orlowsk's second article describes earlier attempts to accomplish similar anti-piracy goals

But there may be less here than initially thought, according to Orlowski:

What's "crippled" is Western Digital's optional extra, a virtual file system for Windows users called Mionet. But then it always has been....

Mionet is marketed as a virtual filesystem, and permits you to access your home Windows PC across the internet. It actually does quite a bit more: a shared workspace, and remote device access, for example viewing your webcam remotely. It's a "placeshifting" service, of a kind.

Many of these services are intentionally limited, and this one is no different: Mio blocked shared media over an internet connection long before Western Digital acquired the startup earlier this year.

All these attempts at blanket restrictions--however circumventable--give DRM a bad name. It's one thing to protect movies, television, and music. It's quite another to prevent consumers from sharing their own media files with others and in doing so, add more ammunition to the rising tide of anti-DRM sentiment.

Wired Shut: copyright and the shape of digital culture by Tarleton Gillespie

Tarleton Gillespie is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University and a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. His recent book, Wired Shut: copyright and the shape of digital culture (MIT Press, 2007) may appeal more to students of media and communications, historians, legal scholars, and to sociologists of culture and technology than to technologists and entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, those with an interest in copyright, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and related topics should welcome Gillespie’s book as a timely and useful contribution to the field.

Although Wired Shut is an important analysis of copyright and DRM, I find two problems with Gillespie's arguments: one involving copyright and contract law, Fair Use, and business models; the other involving the role of encryption in DRM.

First, what is Digital Rights Management? I define DRM as “the association of rules governing use and use consequences (e.g., payment, audit information, etc.) with digital information of all kinds and the enforcement of these rules at a distance in time and space.” I’ll return to this definition.

Gillespie's basic argument is that attempts to impose controls on the use and/or distribution of copyrighted works through technical means are contrary to the societal goals of protecting creators and their works while at the same time fostering innovation and creativity.

There Is A Fix For Buyers of MLB Programs

The New York Times reports that MLB has a fix for those who were unable to play video after MLB changed its DRM system.

But it turns out that MLBAM can something after all. I just got off the phone with MLBAM spokesman Matthew Gould, who said fans who purchased games with the now-broken licenses will be able to get every game replaced free of charge by versions with the right license. (That doesn’t make up for the cost in time, and in some cases, materials like CDs. MLBAM might want to consider a credit towards one or more new downloads, too.)

How NOT To Do DRM

I seldom agree with anti-DRM activist Cory Doctorow. Nonetheless, he's exactly correct that MLB should not disenfranchise customers who bought videos of baseball games by unsupporting the underlying DRM system.

MLB shut down the DRM server because they've changed suppliers, and now they expect suckers to buy downloads of games in the new DRM format. Anyone who does this needs their head examined -- using DRM itself is contemptible enough, but using DRM this way is just plain criminal.

Ripoff City.

The DRM Cat and Mouse Game-The BBC Gets It Right

Jonathan Fildes, Science and technology reporter for BBC News has written a good article on the arms wars between security and DRM technology providers and hackers.

The Microsoft DRM system used by the BBC's iPlayer has already been cracked and people using the trial version of the player have already been able to strip programmes of their DRM.

At its launch, Ashley Highfield, director of future media and technology at the BBC admitted: "Piracy is always going to happen."

It is a view shared by Mr Mulligan [Mark Mulligan of JupiterResearch] 

"The bottom line is there will never be a watertight digital rights management solution" he said.

The view is disputed by people within the movie and music industry.

"DRM is not going away," said Mr Gooch [director of technology at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries  (IFPI)]. 

And so until one side wins out, the game of cat and mouse will continue.

Exactly so.

In addition, many DRM and copy control systems were designed in anticipation of their being compromised. Thus AACS was designed as a renewable system. Even more sophisticated is Blu-ray's BD+ programmable security.

SoundExchange Drops DRM Requirement

Ars Technica writer Jacqui Cheng reports that SoundExchange has backed off from its position that Web broadcasters must implement DRM.

On the bright side, it doesn't appear as if DRM is part of the terms this time around. Previously, SoundExchange stated that webcasters who agree to the deal must actively "work to stop users from engaging in 'streamripping'." This began a war of words between the Digital Media Association (DiMA) and SoundExchange, with DiMA accusing SoundExchange of using rate negotiations to push mandatory DRM. SoundExchange fired back, saying that DiMA only continues to spread misinformation about its requests. Earlier this month, however, two senators warned SoundExchange not to push DRM in its negotiations.

Vista DRM Claims Debunked?

Earlier I noted New Zealand computer scientist Peter Guttman's so-called cost analysis of Vista DRM. Now ZDNet's George Ou has written a blogicle critical of Guttman's analysis. Ou boils the controversy down to this:

Basically the whole controversy is about the fact that Windows Vista includes HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) DRM capability and the fact that HDCP includes an ICT (Image Constraint Token) flag that has the potential to slash the resolution of HD DVD or Blu-ray in half if your device isn’t HDCP compliant.  The reason I emphasize the word “potential” is because all of the movie studios have put a moratorium on turning on the ICT flag because HDCP market penetration is still low and there’s no way they can implement ICT without generating a massive user backlash and killing any chance of HD DVD or Blu-ray adoption.  I heavily criticized the ICT flag back in March of 2006 and I am on record as saying that DRM for popular music and video will die from lack of ROI, but this fear mongering on Windows Vista’s inclusion of HDCP DRM is much ado about nothing.  Much of it is based on hatred for Microsoft and Peter Gutmann theories are being cited as the “proof” they need.

The Need for DRM Circumvention?

Google recently announced the demise of its paid video download service. Ken Fisher argues on Ars Technica that Google's pulling the plug on it's DRM-protected paid video download service is reason enough for the Library of Congress to grant exceptions to the DMCA where purchased content is no longer accessible.

Since the death of the commercial part of Google Video will render thousands and thousands of purchases useless, the Library of Congress will have no choice but to consider the matter when they return to their triennial review of the DMCA. To date, the Library of Congress has granted exceptions to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA in instances where DRM has rendered something completely unusable, such as eBook DRM which can render eBooks useless for handicapped people. Recent exceptions from the last review are detailed here. Of note: the right to bypass DRM on products that no longer work properly was considered but rejected last time around.

Disingenuous DRM Scorecard

Alexander Wolfe writing on InformationWeek's blogs has published a scorecard of DRM vs. Hackers which he characterizes as Hackers 1000, Industry Zero.

All DRM systems will be eventually broken. No big. When resilience is a design criteria, as in AACS and Blu-ray's BD+, I believe it is borderline disingenuous to say that industry should give up because DRM technologies have been compromised. This just seems like another song for the Anti-DRM chorus.

The DRM Arms Race - FairUse4M Breaks Microsoft DRM

As most know by now, Microsoft and hackers continue to play the security game. According to any number articles and news postings, the third and latest version of FairUse4M has broken Microsoft DRM.

This arms race is business as usual. Perfect security does not exist. DRM purveyors and hacker tool providers will be engaged in this dance for a long time to come.

Cory Doctorow's Long Piece Is Worth Reading

My own views are, of course, very far away from those of Cory Doctorow, who has written a long and generally informative piece for Information Week entitled "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law. Despite it's anti-DRM mutterings, it's worth a read.

Among other things, he describes the meetings of CPTWG, the Content Protection Working Group. In the late '90s I attended CPTWG meetings and Doctorow's account seems largely accurate.

IS "DRM-Free" the Next Big Branding Idea?

Blogger Benjamin Mako Hill has an interesting blogicle on the use of "DRM Free" as branding feature. Hill's posting shows a flyer for a music store featuring "DRM Free" as a prominent element of the images.

DRM-FREE, it turns out, is a good way to sell music. Not just to geeks but to any consumer who has been stymied unfairly by DRM or knows someone who has. That, it turns out, is a whole lot people. Consumers know what DRM is and they know don't like it.

Is DRM for Music a Lost Cause?

That's the main thrust of  Tekla S. Perry's article in the IEEE Spectrum.

Anti-DRM: DRM Drags Down Economic Growth

Give the current hyperbole,  DRM will next be blamed for threatening the traditional family, global climate change, terrorism, war, and the rest of the horsemen of the Apocalypse. The latest is an assertion by Linden Research CTO Cory Ondrejka that DRM drags down economic growth.

DRM makes education and learning more expensive, which results in less innovation and a lower gross domestic product, said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden, the company behind the Second Life virtual world.

“DRM makes you less competitive,” Ondrejka told attendees at the iX Conference alongside the CommunicAsia show in Singapore.

Countries that want to close the gap with more advanced nations should avoid DRM or they will continue to lag behind, he said.

The Rising Anti-DRM Tide: Free The BBC

More mis- and dis-information, this time from the Free the BBC campaign and a letter to the BBC apparently instigated by Binary Freedom Boston.

The letter make three arguments:
1. DRM doesn't work. Like many others, they conclude that because if it's not perfect, it doesn't work. If it didn't work, who would care?

2. DRM is a poor business decision. Ain't necessarily so. It might be an excellent business decision for content other than music, and even in some cases, for music (although I think that ship is mostly sunk).

3. The industry has ditched it. Well, only in music, and mainly, in my view, to get Apple out-from-under potential anti-trust issues, especially in Europe. Apple sold a lot of music with FairPlay DRM, which did what it was supposed to do.

Much of the anti-DRM sentiment comes from those who believe that "information wants to be free" (often wrongly attributed to Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, but actually from Stuart Brand). To state the obvious, information doesn't want anything. Ever. People don't want to pay. Period.

The economic model of Free doesn't provide incentives to produce digital goods in the first place. There is one well-known exception. And that's where the business model is experienced based. The Grateful Dead made its money from concerts and merchandise. Recordings were a giveaway to build and maintain their fan base. Anyone could patch into the sound board and record the concert. Good model, but not one generalizable to music generally or to video, movies, TV, and games.

Ask a musician who is not at the top of the charts but who has a couple of CDs out, gets some airplay, got someone to distribute their tunes on the Web, and sells merchandise from website, whether they'd like to get paid every time a track is sold AND passed along to the buyer's 10 best friends. Yes they are doing music for art's sake, but like all of us, they have to keep a roof over their heads, eat, and have a life.

Is the division of revenue between artists and labels fair? Debatable. Complex industry. Maybe not. But just because media giants are playing by the rules of capitalism doesn't mean that those who don't want to pay should get a free pass by repeatedly insisting that Free is the only way to go. Repeating a statement endlessly doesn't make it true or right.

The Rising Anti-DRM Tide: Why DRM won't ever work

In the past few weeks it seems that there are more anti-DRM articles being published. For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not suggesting a conspiracy. These sentiments tend to go in cycles and right now the anti-DRM cycle is increasing. One example is is an article by Google's Jeremy Allison (writing as an individual, not as a representative of Google). Allison's article is polite and (wrongly) reasoned. (Other contributions are much less so on both scores, about which I'll have something to say shortly.)

Allison is right to point out that encryption is not DRM. Thereafter our views diverge. Allison says that DRM can't work and is a lot like magic or the Star Trek physics of dilithium crystals. On what evidence are these assertions based? A key case in point is the breaking of the AACS encryption system used in both HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

DRM in my view is the association of use rules and use consequences (payment and audit data) with digital information and the assertion of those rules at a distance in time and space.

Allison is right to point out that the secrets that enable consumer use of content have to be shared with the consumer and are thus vulnerable to attack. However, the purpose of DRM is NOT to prevent professional pirates from obtaining protected content. With enough funding, tools, and sophistication, any security system can be compromised.

Rather, the goals of most DRM implementations include "keeping honest people honest," raising the bar on causal piracy, and making it difficult for professionals to transfer their knowledge to ordinary consumers via software.

DRM has also been used to enforce business models, for example, Apple's FairPlay DRM. The European Union apparently believes that Apple's DRM has served to exclude devices from other vendors using protected content from iTunes. Steve Jobs' recent anti-DRM comments seem intended more to shift the blame for Apple's alleged monopolistic behavior to the record labels rather than some anti-DRM religious conversion.

Nevertheless, a close reading of the AACS standards indicates that they were created knowing in advance that various devices, content, and keys would be eventually compromised. Rather, AACS provides the means for revoking compromised devices and/or content should the movie studios and their distributors desire to do that.

Conditional access systems used by Satellite TV vendors are compromised. They make a business decision regarding when to update cryptographic information. That decision is, I believe, based on estimated losses.

Thus content protection schemes do not have to be perfect to be useful. To the contrary. They do have to have the ability to modify / upgrade / enhance software and cryptographic information.