light weight drm - welcome blockwart mentality

[thoralf]

Hi -

just read about the new drm scheme the general german public will enjoy in the future according to their tax collecting body (see www.doom9.org). They call it light weight drm and claim it to be perfectly comaptible with today's listener needs.
Developed mainly at universites (i'm not paying taxes yet, but reading this stuff doesn't make me appreciate the prospect of doing so), the light weight basically stands for permitting private copies while preventing the misuse of these via file sharing. Files are initially tied to one's computer, and can only be unlocked by using a unique, traceable signature. The bottom line is that private sharing is fine but public sharing is evil and can well be prosecuted.
Seems to be not much of a concern for today's media, but i wonder if anyone would lend cds to, say, his twin brother once this stuff gets introduced. He might burn another copy for the sister who doesn't like the other brother and puts the stuff on whatever p2p there will be ... Those guys at the IT faculty don't seem to get that "sharing" means something completely different today than it did 10 years ago - hence the listener needs. This must probably be dealt with, but an approach that comes down as trust (as in "interhuman relationships") vs. really big brother is certainly not an acceptable way of doing so.

[Doom9]

Seems to be not much of a concern for today's media, but i wonder if anyone would lend cds to, say, his twin brother once this stuff gets introduced. He might burn another copy for the sister who doesn't like the other brother and puts the stuff on whatever p2p there will be ..Well. what your twin brother does is illegal under current copyright law even without any DRM and DMCA legislations. Traceability might get people to realize that fair use doesn't mean multiple generation of copies. With respect to that I like the SCMS approach.. you can create as many copies of the original as you want, but you cannot make a copy of a copy. However, SCMS won't work on computers as it would require mandatory software and hardware support.

And to get back to traceability: As far as I know.. if you share something you're not supposed to (say a piece of software) and the guy whom you give it to spreads it further.. you are also accountable for the further spreading. So obviously if you do something illegal, you have an interest to know the people you're dealing with. It's like with the big warez busts a while back.. those rings work as long as everybody sticks together.. when people turn careless you're going to get into serious trouble.

We have to realize that we won't get away forever with what's going on right now (and btw note that I haven't used P2P since Napster so it isn't really me I'm talking about here). We cannot hope to always get better quality, smaller filesizes and get everything for free. In order to be still able to make private copies in the future we'll have to accept certain changes as well.. if we're not willing to agree to any compromise it will be the industry imposing their terms and we know they want full control and no copies whatsoever. LWDRM to me would be at least an acceptable compromise. Another one would be access fees to P2P networks, which are distributed to artists in function of the number of downloads. Either way.. something is going to change in the future. The days you can install a P2P software and henceforth get everything for free will be limited.

[Doobie]

LWDRM won't work. Someone will always have access to someone else's stuff without that other person knowing. If people are prosecuted after having material traced back to them under LWDRM, it will be mostly innocent people who had no idea that someone copied their new disk. Many copies will be released by insiders without LWDRM. Hackers will figure out ways to bypass LWDRM. It only takes one release to fill the P2P networks.

I think we will get away with what's going on "forever." Although, we will have DRM and strong protections in the future. Lawsuits may force P2P uses to move to anonymous networks, an increasingly viable option as internet speeds increase.

The movie indistry is going to have to secure their own distribution methods to prevent movies from reaching the public before DVD releases (cam screeners are no threat). They can still thrive on movie ticket sales.

The music industry is going to have to lower prices so that customers are paying little more than it would cost them to burn the CD themselves. Their main source of income should be concerts and commercial use of their music.

The software industry will allow piracy to continue because any success in ending piracy will just move the market to free software.

[thoralf]

sure, we can't get anything for free - otherwise we would live in some sort of a perfect (and probably rather autoritarian) brave new world. I'm really a great fan of left-wing utopias, but none of them has proved to work so far ... On another level, the nice musician living around the corner deserves a living, too, and certainly the music industry will not grant him a decent one unless he transform himself into the new britney spears. Musicians do need to get their money.
i just have the feeling that the guys who developed the lwdrm scheme are adhering to a definition of sharing that can only be called historical. What used to be "sharing" became basically "copying" with the advent of napster & co. - a good digital copy is as good as the original, and it can be distributed to a wide audience via p2p. These features did not apply to a record dubbed onto a tape - it was not a public copy, and there was a considerable loss of quality involved.
with regard to the lwdrm guys this evolution of copying will be stopped by introducing a "no copies because noone can be trusted"-scheme. this strikes me as completely insane: it just does not fit in our times, nor does is justice to the needs of customers who admit that leeching won't do any good to noone. hacking this kind of drm becomes some sort of civil disobedience ...