Managing Rights Management

CES 2010: DRM Is Alive And Well - Part 1

The 2010 Consumer Electronics Show was very upbeat, perhaps more so than two years ago (last year doesn't count given the economic implosion resulting in widespread malaise and depression). Of course the purpose of the these shows is to drum up excitement. 3D TV (not quite ready for prime time in my view, but I did not spend much time looking), Mobile, and Auto seemed to be the principal sectors leading the charge.

Having seen a lot of the show (at the expense of my feet), one conclusion is that rights management, broadly construed, is everywhere. In saying this, I'm taking a very expansive view of rights management to include both technical and non-technical--largely business model factors--means of protecting digital content. I'm excluding from consideration music CDs and related issues since there does not seem to be a good solution specific to the CD problem that is acceptable to privacy and consumer advocates.

In giving a few selected examples of how rights management is being further insinuated into services and business models, I'm leaving out many vendors (apologies to those not mentioned). I'm sure that critics will be able to find counter examples  My goal here is simply to identify trends.

Various parties with DRM and related solutions were at the show, including Irdeto and Digital Containers. HDMI Licensing had a booth as well. Metadata company Gracenote had a  booth that also highlighted customer applications. Executives from Widevine were in town but did not have a booth.

Media futurist Gerd Leonhard (among others) have long argued that the future of media is and should be streaming rather than downloading files. The 2010 CES makes it perfectly clear that the world is moving substantially toward media streaming. More in the next installment. 

RIAA Stops Suing Consumers - Not!

The NYTimes and other outlets reported that the RIAA is ending its lawsuits individual music downloaders. Not so, says Slashdot:

According to a report on Wired.com, the RIAA spokesman claims that the RIAA has not filed any new lawsuits "for months"; according to the Wall Street Journal report the RIAA stopped filing mass lawsuits "early this fall"; and the Associated Press was apparently told that the RIAA had stopped bringing new lawsuits in August.

Being very familiar with the RIAA's penchant for "misspeaking", even when under oath, I investigated the matter a bit, and learned that a large number of suits have been brought by the RIAA quite recently, one as recently as this Monday.

Turning ISPs into the content police won't work either. To repeat: the business model is broken. Unless and until the music industry figures out other ways to monetize, all of these efforts must fail.

To borrow from Pete Seeger, when will they ever learn.

CNET: The RIAA's Letter to ISPs

cnet.com has obtained a copy of letters sent by the RIAA to ISPs regarding P2P downloading of music files.

Please bear in mind that this letter serves as an official notice to you that this network user may be liable for the illegal activity occurring on your network. This letter does not constitute a waiver of our members' rights to recover or claim relief for damages incurred by this illegal activity, nor does it waive the right to bring legal action against the user at issue for engaging in music theft. We assert that the information in this notice is accurate, based upon the data available to us. Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies in matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.

It's unfortunate that the major labels do not recognize that their fundamental business model is substantially broken and that these rear guard actions will not put humpty dumpty back together again. The money spent would be far better used to work toward thinking through the challenging problems that come with business model change and then implementing a new course.

Backdooring Skype

[tip o' the hat to Dave Farber's IP list] Speculation abounds that Skype has incorporated backdoors so that national security agencies can listen in on Skype calls. So much for privacy.

An article posted by Daniel AJ Sokolov on the heise security site says in part:

At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.

ISP Targeted Advertising

One example of the current discussion regarding ISP efforts to participate in revenue streams based on advertising is this overview article that appeared in MediaPost. Charter and others are looking into ad insertion based on capturing information about the web browsing behavior of their customers.

In the U.S., ad company Charter Communications has said it intends to share information about its broadband subscribers' Web surfing with ad company NebuAd. Bob Dykes, CEO of NebuAd, has said that the platform is anonymous, and that users will be able to opt-out.

Warner Music Hires Jim Griffin To Herd Music Industry "Cats"

Sam Gustin reports on Conde Naste's Portfolio.com site that Warner Music's head honcho Edgar Bronfman, Jr. has hired noted music industry exec Jim Griffin, formerly Geffen Music's digital chief, to lead Warner's drive to fix the music industry's business model. Griffin will reportedly focus on getting the ISPs to add an amount to their subscriber fees that would underwrite access to all music tracks. An organization would be created to return fees to labels and artists. Gustin says that Griffin has a three year contract.

Maybe.

It will be interesting to see whether all the interested parties are willing to participate and on what terms. The major and lessor known artists, major and independent labels, royalty collecting societies (such as ASCAP, BMI, and CISAC), concert promoters, venue operators, fan zines and web sites, etc. may  have divergent economic interests. Griffin has a major cat herding effort in front of him.

Comcast Capitulates On Net Neutrality

According to this NYTimes article and other sources, Comcast has said that it will move to application neutral network management and disclose publicly its bandwidth management techniques. Tests by the Associated Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (among others) showed that Comcast was disrupting P2P traffic with forged packets.

The company initially veiled its traffic-management system in secrecy, saying openness would allow users to circumvent it. But on Thursday, Werner said the company would ''publish'' the new technique and take into account feedback from the Internet community.

Comcast has been hampering the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, which together with the eDonkey protocol, accounts for about a third of all Internet traffic, according to figures from Arbor Networks. The vast majority of that is illegal sharing of copyright-protected files, but file-sharing is also emerging as a low-cost way of distributing legal content -- in particular, video.

Verizon Set To Improve Legal P2P File-sharing

According to the AP and NYtimes, Verizon is set to announce later today support for legal P2P filesharing companies and applications. Working with companies that use P2P and researchers at Yale University, Verizon will reportedly help P2P applications make more efficient use of the Net.

Verizon shared details about the structure of its network with the researchers and Pando in the ''P4P Working Group,'' created last summer, and they together created a system that connected users not randomly, but to other users close by.

In a traditional P2P network, if a Verizon customer downloads a file, only 6.3 percent of the data will come from another Verizon customer in the same city, said Doug Pasko, senior technologist at the company. In the ''P4P'' trial, 58 percent of the data came from nearby Verizon users, vastly reducing the company's cost of carrying the traffic.

Surprise! MPAA Against Net Neutrality

Ya just have to love Variety-speak: "MPAA topper blasts Net neutrality."

"This effort is being called by its proponents 'Net neutrality,'" Glickman [MPAA's 'topper"] continued. "It's a clever name. But at the end of the day, there's nothing neutral about this for our customers or for our ability to make great movies in the future. Government regulation of the Internet would impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways, and it would impair the ability of broadband providers to address the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks today ... Government regulation of the Internet would be a terrible reversal of American innovation policy."

Unnecessary alarmist misdirection aimed mainly at P2P file sharing, in my view.

Delaying the Canibalization of The Cable TV Business

One of the high level themes underlying today's FCC hearing on net neutrality is what's motivating Comcast to interfere with P2P traffic? Their answer is that they manage the use of a small number of users whose traffic my otherwise degrade the experience of the many more users who are not doing P2P.

Increasingly, P2P is being used to share or deliver video via the Internet. These video providers are increasingly competing with the Cable TV operators for audience, or in the vernacular, for eyeballs. This morning saw a demo and heard a presentation by Gilles BianRosa, CEO of  Vuze which uses P2P to distribute video programming across the net.

Factoid mentioned this morning: more content is downloaded from YouTube than was distributed across the Internet in 2000.

Verizon offers, for example, 20 megabits per second in each direction on its FiOS network and doesn't discriminate against P2P applications largely because of important architectual differences between FiOS and cable-based broadband networks.

So, why does Comcast interfere with P2P traffic? One possible answer is that they are trying to delay competition with its base Cable TV business.

Morning Session Main Points

This morning's session boiled down to whether Comcast and cable operators can manage their network by discriminating against specific applications such as Bit Torrent. Some argued that such discrimination is OK as long as the application discrimination is disclosed to consumers. Others argued that in a duopoly, disclosure isn't sufficient.  Therefore, Comcast and other, mostly cable ISPs, should be prevented from discrimination against specific apps.

It was also noted that the deep packet inspection technologies apparently being used to interfer with P2P traffic can also be used for content filtering and abridgment of speech not that anyone is doing that in the US.

We're off to the engineering session.

Markey's Comments

Congressman Ed Markey's comments include an emphasis on free markets as the foundation for solving bandwidth and pricing issues. This should be No Country For Old Broadband. And Bit Torrent should not be Bit Trickle.

Also, check out the SaveTheInternet.com site and their FAQ on Net Neutrality.

Blogging From The FCC Hearing on Net Neutrality

I'm at the Havard Law School today. Thanks to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the FCC is conducting a public en banc hearing at the Harvard Law School on Net Neutrality (NN) and broadband management. There will be a live audo feed for those interested. I'll be blogging comments from time to time.

UK: ISPs To Be Held Responsible For Piracy - Maybe

The Beeb reports that the government has indicated that ISPs must take steps to curb piracy or face legal sanctions.

The culture secretary said consultation would begin in spring and legislation could be implemented "by April 2009".

Representatives of the recording industry, who blame piracy for a slump in sales, welcomed the proposals.

"ISPs are in a unique position to make a difference and in doing so to reverse a culture of creation-without-reward that has proved so damaging to the whole music community over the last few years," said John Kennedy, head of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

I used to think the Brits were a bit smarter. Since the record business is global, the business model is just as broken abroad as it is here in the US.

Snooping on Skype

[tip o' the hat to Digital Freedom Campaign] Jeremy Reimer writes on ArsTechnica that the Bavarian government sought assistance from software vendor Digitask in snooping on Skype conversations. So much for privacy.

The method outlined involved the installation of malware referred to as the "Skype Capture Unit" that would be delivered in an executable file that "can for instance be attached to an e-mail or directly be installed on the target machine." This software would then transfer unencrypted conversations to a remote Skype Recording Server that can record and replay 10 Skype interceptions in parallel. The Recording Server then sends the conversations through to Skype and their intended destination, a classic "man in the middle" attack that is difficult for the compromised user to detect.

What's Going On In The Living Room? DRM.

Investor's Business Daily has an overview article on the digital living room. The article rightly views the Macrovision / Gemstar TV deal as a natural outcome of convergence between copy protection technologies and Internet on-demand TV distribution. It concludes with a discussion of Marlin-based DRM interoperability and quotes Scott Smyers, who is president of the Digital Living Network Alliance and is a senior Sony technical guy.

MPAA, ISPs, and Content Filtering

[tip o' the hat to Lauren Weinstein's post on the Net Neutrality Squad list]. Nate Anderson writes in Ars Technica that the MPAA expects ISPs to reduce piracy by implementing content filtering technologies (e.g., deep packet inspection and/or fingerprinting-based filtering).

Case in point: AT&T and its publicly-stated plan to implement some sort of filtering system on its network. No technical details of such a system have yet been revealed, but the announcement has warmed the cold cockles of the MPAA's heart and has garnered support from companies like NBC Universal.

Glickman also held out the hope that filtering technology would quickly be adopted by many more ISPs. "The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected," he said, "and I think that's a great opportunity." It's not the first time he's asked ISPs to do more.

So much for net neutrality and privacy.

 

China jails man for ad stripping software

As noted earlier, ad stripping is practiced in the US through browser plugins. At least until recently, Norton Internet Security provided a robust ad stripping capability.

[Tip o' the hat to Dave] Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Chen Shoufu, a 28 year old computer science instructor, has been arrested for distributing a program (Coral QQ) that strips ads from QQ, China's dominant instant messaging network.

Tencent [the operator of QQ] first complained to Mr. Chen in late 2002, saying Coral QQ violated its copyright and warning him to stop distributing it. He did. Mr. Chen then devised a noninvasive "patch" on the program -- a separate piece of software -- that would run concurrently with QQ on a user's computer and modify it as the two went humming along. In 2003, he resumed offering Coral QQ.

In 2006, as it became increasingly apparent that Coral QQ was only growing in popularity, Tencent filed a 500,000 yuan ($68,000) lawsuit alleging copyright infringement against Mr. Chen and won a judgment for 100,000 yuan, which Mr. Chen paid. In early August, Tencent complained to the police in Shenzhen, where it has its headquarters, and on Aug. 16 Mr. Chen was detained. Tencent said Mr. Chen was "making illegal profits and infringing on Tencent's copyright."

The NetNeutrality Squad

I'm a big fan of Pixar's The Incredibles, which is about the exploits of the Parrs, a family of superheros.

Apparently in response to revelations that Comcast was disrupting BitTorrent traffic, several Internet and technology luminaries, including Dave Farber, Paul Saffo, Bruce Schneier, Peter Neumann, and Lauren Weinstein have created The NetNeutrality Squad. Their very worthwhile goals include:

The project's focus includes detection, analysis, and incident reporting of any anticompetitive, discriminatory, or other restrictive actions on the part of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or affiliated entities, such as the blocking or disruptive manipulation of applications, protocols, transmissions, or bandwidth; or other similar behaviors not specifically requested by their customers. 

Other key aspects of the project are discussions, technology development and deployment, and associated activities -- fostering cooperation and mutually agreeable methodologies whenever possible -- aimed at keeping the Internet a maximally unhindered, useful, competitive, fair, and open environment for the broadest possible range of applications and services.

Having saved the day in great superhero fashion, the Incredibles ends with a machine rising from underground and a character emerging who says the following:

Behold, the Underminer! I'm always beneath you, but nothing is beneath me! I hereby declare war on peace and happiness! Soon, all will tremble before me!

Can't help but wondering if this was Comcast in a subtle cameo appearance.

FCC Urged to Stop Comcast Internet Blocking

CNet reports that a coalition of Internet scholars and interest groups has petitioned the FCC to stop Comcast from continuing to disrupt P2P traffic on their network. Sadly,

But the truth is there isn't much that the FCC can do at this point. Under the current regulations and laws, the FCC has little to no power to do anything, even if it becomes blatantly obvious that Comcast is intentionally blocking traffic. The reason is simple. The FCC Internet policy is simply that. It's a policy. And there is no real enforcement muscle behind it that would require Comcast to do anything. So until a Net neutrality law is passed or the FCC imposes some kind of regulation or rule, which Chairman Kevin Martin has been adamantly opposed to doing, not much is likely to come of this complaint.

It would be outstanding if someone could find a rationale for seeking an injunction against Comcast to prevent this kind of disruption.

I'm not sure that they interfere only with BitTorrent traffic. My file transfers with another Comcast subscriber using AOL's AIM slow down to a crawl most of the time.

Comcast Admits Delaying Some Traffic While Confessing to Some Blocking

In response to accusations by the Associated Press and EFF that it interrupts certain P2P traffic on its network, Comcast denied blocking BitTorrent traffic. Instead, the nations largest ISP said that it employs traffic shaping technologies to manage bandwidth during peak traffic times.

According to the Associated Press, however, a Comcast spokesperson acknowledged that it does exactly what the AP and EFF accused it of doing:

On Tuesday, Mitch Bowling, senior vice president of Comcast Online Services, added a nuance to that statement, saying that while Comcast may block initial connection attempts between two computers, it eventually lets the traffic through if the computers keep trying.

"During periods of heavy peer-to-peer congestion, which can degrade the experience for all customers, we use several network management technologies that, when necessary, enable us to delay — not block — some peer-to-peer traffic. However, the peer-to-peer transaction will eventually be completed as requested," Bowling said.

The explanation is not inconsistent with the AP's tests. In one case, a BitTorrent file transfer was squelched, apparently by messages generated by Comcast, only to start 10 minutes later. Other tests were called off after around 5 minutes, while the transfers were still stifled.

Frequently my file transfers using AIM to other Comcast customers are slowed to a crawl, apparently by Comcast's traffic shaping.  Too bad there is no Verizon FIOS or RCN in my building.

Comcast Blocking Or Delaying P2P Traffic

The Associated Press reports that Comcast blocks and/or delays P2P traffic when its subscribers try to upload an entire file to another Comcast subscriber.

Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer -- it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: "Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye."

So much for net neutrality. 

Let's see if litigation follows.

How To Unlock An iPhone

Several outlets including the AP/Boston Globe and the New York Times are reporting that 17 year old "hacker" George Hotz has figured out how to unlock an iPhone. His now runs on T-mobile rather than on ATT. The steps for unlocking can be found here.

Skype Deconstructed / Hacked

[tip o' the hat to Dave Farber's IP list].

Phillipe Biondi and Fabrice Desclaux have reversed engineed Skype. The details are in a highly technical presentation online here. Skype apparently makes use of several software obsfucation techniques and defensive security mechanisms. For those interesting in details, worth the read.

How IPTV May Change The Role Of Telecom Infrastructure

This longish article in Billing World addresses how telecom (broadly construed) back office infrastructures are evolving to address the delivery of video programming over the Internet (IPTV) and over cellular networks. There are lots of 3- and 4-letter acronyms and vendor names, but  the main points include that back office functions are evolving to meet the demands of new content delivery technologies. Snippets:

Oracle Implementing DRM

This article in The Inquirer says in passing that Oracle is implementing DRM, in part to address the telecom market. Snippet:

Entitlement Management For Next Gen Broadband Systems

Telephony Online says in a worthwhile article that entitlement management systems are the next important evolution in back office systems for broadband services. Snippets:

IDC Says Mobile DRM Complexity A Factor In US

According to this PCWorld article. Snippets:

Motorola's iradio

What's Motorola planning? According to this Gizmodo blogicle, a music downloading (not streaming) service that is subscription-based and "heavily drm'd."

Cingular Rumored To Be Eyeing iTunes

So says this Newsfactor article. Snippets:

Motorola iTunes phone faces uphill battle against MS media juggernaut

David Berlind offers insightful comments on Motorola's music-related efforts. Snippets:

Carriers Buy Into SDPs

Telecom related site lightreading.com has an article on a recently published Light Reading report on Service Defined Platforms, a next frontier for Carriers and integrators. Rights management is among the services mentioned. Snippets: