Invisible wrote:
> On 21/01/2011 06:16 PM, Darren New wrote:
> 
>> Basically, the music and film industry depends on it being possible to
>> make copies but not cheap to make copies.
> 
> And now those assumptions have been brutally violated. 

Well, yes. That was my point.

> You say the 
> industry needs to "deal with that", but I'm really not sure where that 
> leaves us. The only obvious solution is to just not sell content for 
> money any more, since the model isn't workable. 

Well, you might show movies only in the movie theater, or at least count as 
gravy anything you sell outside the theater. You might make draconian DRM, 
or DRM so transparent that most people don't mind it (like with video game 
consoles or Steam). You might institute DRM that provides for fair use, like 
the ability for libraries to loan out Kindle documents or something but only 
to one person at a time.

> (This of course leads 
> directly to high quality content no longer being made, which would be 
> very sad.)

But that's my point. High quality content used to be made before it was easy 
to make copies at all. You can still go to plays that involve dozens of 
people working for you as you sit there watching. You can still go to live 
concerts with pyrotechnics. These things haven't died out.

>> Even if he is, the shareholders aren't. It's like the TSA - security
>> theater.
> 
> What's TSA?

The "security" at US airports that pretends to be catching terrorists.

>>> I have no problem with content creators expecting a return on their
>>> investment. But I object to DRM, on a number of grounds. (Point #1
>>> being "it doesn't work".)
>>
>> The real reason it doesn't work is that you only have to break it once.
>> Once someone takes the copy protection off, they can distribute the
>> broken version. So the DRM has to keep out the *smartest* attackers, not
>> just the average attackers.
> 
> The other reason is that you *must* take the DRM off to use the thing. 
> No matter which way the image data is encrypted, you /must/ decrypt it 
> in order to see it. If you can see it, you can copy it.

Well, that's what makes it possible to break in the first place. But the 
average joe wouldn't know how to rip a blu-ray disk. The problem is that if 
it costs more time and effort to break the DRM than the protected thing is 
worth, it's not worth doing. Nobody is going to spend two days ripping a 
blu-ray disk when you can buy it for $15.  The problem is that someone 
*will* spend two days ripping it (a) just to prove they can and (b) in order 
to give it to thousands of other people.

Nowadays, the video is (in theory) decrypted only inside your monitor, so 
the idea that you have to decrypt it to see it is not as much of a stumbling 
block. People are figuring out ways around that problem, and the battle 
continues.

> About the only thing this potentially doesn't apply to is computer 
> software. (Or anything similarly interactive, I guess.) Even then, if 
> you can somehow pluck the decrypted data out of the computer's memory...

Computer software isn't a whole lot easier to break. Of course, stuff like 
game consoles encrypt the data on disk, but I don't think it's encrypted in 
memory.  (There used to be copy-breaker cards for Apple ][ computers, where 
you'd plug it in, run your game or whatever, and then push the attached 
pushbutton and it would stop the CPU and copy all of RAM into its own RAM, 
so you could then quit the game and write it out to disk, so sure.)

Of course, DRM is only as good as the hardware it's stored in.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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