>> 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.

Unfortunately, some content distributors seem to be labouring under the 
delusion that DRM = "we can invent arbitrary prising structures and 
people will actually pay what we demand". Hopefully that will wear off soon.

> You might make draconian
> DRM, or DRM so transparent that most people don't mind it (like with
> video game consoles or Steam).

I love the way that Steam won't let you log in twice, so you can install 
the same game on two PCs, but you can only play it on one at once...

...unless you put Steam into offline mode. *facepalm*

Still, I guess it means you can't play *multiplayer* games from two PCs 
at once...

>> (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.

Given that copying becoming easy is the problem... what's your point here?

>> What's TSA?
>
> The "security" at US airports that pretends to be catching terrorists.

Oh, that.

>> 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.

Yeah, pretty much. I gather zero-day cracks are a relished challenge for 
some people. (Then again, most of the DRM I've seen surely can't be 
*that* hard to crack in the first place...)

> 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.

I don't think that's how it works. I thought the idea is that the 
encrypted content is decrypted inside your graphics card, processed as 
necessary (e.g., colour balance, or compositing it with the rest of your 
Windows display), and re-encrypted before leaving the pins of the chip 
in the circuit board. So the encrypted link from the graphics card to 
the monitor is a completely seperate cryptosystem from the encryption on 
the disk (or whatever).

Ultimately, what it all boils down to is that the piece of electronics 
in front of you knows how to decrypt the video data. Which means that, 
in theory, you can do this too. The keys must be stored somewhere. It's 
merely a question of how awkward it is to do, as a practical matter. As 
you say, you've only got to pull it off once.

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

That's basically what it comes down to, yeah. Software running on a 
general computer system that you have full control over? It's toast. 
People paying money for computer systems that purposely prevent them 
doing stuff? Not gonna be popular. :-P

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message