New Consortium to Push UDI and Include DRM 264
MarsGov writes "Intel, Apple, Samsung, LG, Nat Semi and Silicon Image formed a consortium to promote Unified Display Interface (UDI) as the new standard to connect computers to monitors and TVs. UDI will be HDMI and HDCP "anti-piracy" compatible. "
doesn't appear to be required, though? (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple DRM (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sounds cool (Score:2, Interesting)
There used to be. It was called copyright law. Then large numbers of selfish people decided they were above the law, and it ceased to be as effective at fighting copyright infringement. You can't really blame the media industry for fighting back (though you certainly can challenge their methods and fight to defend your legitimate rights as a user of the content).
DVD Jon will crack it! (Score:3, Interesting)
Good Luck to Them (Score:2, Interesting)
Another thing to challenge and have broken.
Sooner or later somebody is going to wake up, charge a fair price, allow fair use, and make a profit without alienating their customers
On the other hand, how long did Rip Van Winkle sleep?
Defeat THIS piracy technique! (Score:5, Interesting)
From the current flowing in the scan coils, we can determine where the electron beam is on the screen {though to generate a standard timing signal, we really only care about when it jumps to the left hand side or the top}. From the three grid drives, we can get the levels of red, green and blue light emitted by the nearest pixel.
Apply some rudimentary signal conditioning which, if you could get the circuitry to fit on an A6 size piece of breadboard, you really would not be trying at all; and you have a set of signals suitable for feeding into any old-fashioned SCART socket on any old-fashioned TV set or DVD+RW recorder.
There is no way to protect any kind of content against the "dummy CRT" attack -- and once it has been successfully applied, the content is now unprotected for all time
Look to China (Score:5, Interesting)
Follow
Overhauling Intellectual Property Laws --or-- Balancing Capitalism and Communism [slashdot.org]
for my economic opus and ode to media bashing.
Re:DRM versus the freeing of information (Score:4, Interesting)
When Serenity came out in theaters, I liked the plot so much I went 4 times (x2). When the DVD came out yesterday, I bought one copy for myself and 6 for presents. Yet when Serenity was released on ThePirateBay, I downloaded it until I could buy it. Why did I pay Joss Whedon and Universal for their DVD? Because I wanted to support their FUTURE efforts, not their past ones.
Nothing prevents content producers from protecting their creations in a free market. I'd say you have a good argument up to 1995 or so, but with the Internet, content producers can completely control their own content with zero laws. All they have to do is create stronger encryption standards, get together and make hardware that follows it, and they're there. That's what they're doing here. I am completely fine with content creators doing this -- I don't believe in copyright so I don't believe in fair use.
The consumers will also be fine with DRM. It will only succeed if it meets the needs of all parties. If it doesn't, another format will succeed. You can't stop entertainment, but you can stop those who don't allow every party to profit from the transaction.
So What Does this Mean for "old monitors"... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Defeat THIS piracy technique! (Score:4, Interesting)
This past week I was able to play with a Canon XL1HD camera. and with a small amount of setup I recorded a "protected" Live PPV content off our Calbe system digital box with a Hd projector this camera and a $9.95 35MM slide to Video converter box I had laying around at home.
The resulting copy looked only slightly worse than the origional signal on the Cable TV. if viewed on a PC or a sane sized HD television it was highly acceptable. It only looked muddy whe shown on the projector at it's normal 10' size.
So it's already broken. I can take what was recorded and compress lightly and have something that is better than most illegal copies of shows or movies on the net.
it was mostly done as a proof example to the Exec's here that were touting how secure the content is.
Doesn't matter (Score:3, Interesting)
It can be legislated to hell and back and it still won't make a bit of difference. I guarantee you a lot of countries have bigger problems than enforcing American patents/copyrights and have no interest in complying with any anti-circumvention laws either. Someone will crack it, the crack will get out into the wild, and it'll be like the DRM never existed.
Let them waste their money developing expensive DRM schemes that a 17 year old in Romania will break 6 months after it's released. The laws don't exist to prosecute this kind of thing in many countries, nor should they. MPAA/RIAA tired of losing money? Stop producing crap and people will buy it. But look at their members' profit/loss sheets recently, what they say in public is in polar opposite to what they tell their shareholders...
Re:Defeat THIS piracy technique! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hardware DRM Serves One Purpose (Score:5, Interesting)
1) You have to buy hardware with DRM built into it -- otherwise you can't communicate with anyone else who's in the DRM chain.
Usually this DRM is protected by patents and/or trade-secrets, so every individual piece of hardware needs a license from the IP holder. At the very least, it requires knowledge of private encryption keys and/or registration of public encryption keys with a central authority. This probably won't be a free service, and by definition can't be a public service, otherwise the private keys will be exposed to the public and the system does nothing.
2) Despite what they tell us, a working DRM system cannot freely permit unscreened content from third-party, independent producers.
Here's why: if the system allows unflagged media to enter and be displayed normally, it allows an independent content creator to release non-DRM-encumbered content. It also allows anyone with the know-how to bypass the DRM on a single piece of licensed content and re-release it without the DRM. Thereafter, anyone using p2p sharing will just download the re-released, non-DRM version, and it will be appropriately non-flagged as if it were a piece of independent content. Voila, the DRM chain is broken.
Therefore, the only DRM system that has a chance of working is one that requires all content to be registered in some manner, even if the registration is provided without charge (at a loss) to independent creators. This means you can't distribute your newest novel without going through a corporate/government approval body.
It's certainly possible no functional DRM system will ever enter widespread use, and I hope this is the case. However, the only functional DRM systems will meet both of the above criteria. In my limited foresight, that is what the DRM supporters are actually attempting, only in small steps at first.
(I wrote this reply soon after you posted, but Slashdot's excessive anti-anonymity measures have delayed its posting for over 58 minutes. For this reason, I'll be unable to reply again even should your life depend upon a response.)
Re:DRM versus the freeing of information (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now, they rely on the DMCA and other stupid laws to protect their BADLY WRITTEN DRM. If they want stronger DRM, they have to realize they can't rely on laws to protect bad programming.
I personally wouldn't buy a proprietary media format, but if consumers do, then producers should be free to make whatever they want. I believe that competition will let the cream rise to the top.
I don't believe in copyright either, but, due to its legal side, DRM is like copyright only worse. You may not believe in fair use, but copyright with fair use is less repugnant than copyright without it.
Let's ignore copyright for a moment and look at the most restrictive protections on content not using the law: subscriptions. Many writers (including myself) have private subscription newsletters that people pay to receive. They could copy these newsletters (and some do) the majority don't -- they want the information and they don't want many others knowing about it. I look at some of the US$1000 per year newsletters I used to subscribe to and I never saw them hitting the public eye.
The same is true with any information. You can sell information that is valuable, and you can sell information that isn't. If it doesn't have much value, you have to make your money by offering it to the widest audience at the lowest price. $2 for a TV show per person (x10,000) versus $1000 for an investment newsletter (x20) is the same money. Which has a bigger market, and which is more valuable?
Copyright can't change simple economics. If you make a product that is good quality and people want to see more, they'll pay for it. If they don't care about it, they won't.
Hardware DRM Serves One Purpose-Free ride over. (Score:1, Interesting)
Warmcat already made a good point. Now here's one for you. Please backup your claim that a content producer will HAVE to license their content else it will break laws.* I can only assume in the absense of proof that your engaging in FUD, and Lord knows that ONLY big corporations engage in that.
*For those paying attention. The content producer may have to agree to certain terms UNDER CONTRACT LAW to get their content onto a certain platform. e.g. consoles. But it's NOT illegal for them to withhold it from that platform. The OP wants us to believe (FUD) that somehow free choice will disappear because of DRM. NO, what will at worst disappear is content produced AND under DRM. Good if you believe all the slashdot talk about content quality (I'll refrain from pointing out the conflicted message illegal P2P sends). Bad if you want that content without honoring the reciprocal agreements (you know? Give me GPL code, I obey the terms)
Re:DRM versus the freeing of information (Score:3, Interesting)
Hence, people see NOTHING wrong with recording and copying TV. People have taped shows and loaned them to friends since beginning of time, and such tapings are considered to be mostly worthless. Yes, most people understand that making a business out of recording TV broadcasts is illegal and not ethical. And, lookie, its' illegal by even the oldest copyright laws I've seen...
Yet the DRM overlords want, in the name of 'protecting their content', to limit everything to the point where TV becomes utterly useless. Watching, in essence, is 'copying the content to your brain'. Trying to make something uncopyable, yet readable/watchable, is like trying to make water not wet.
I'm pleased... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/236 [securityfocus.com]
Its going to be really interesting to see how successful the new consortium is in forcing US copyright legislation on the rest of the world.
Or, perhaps, hardware not made in the US, or for US export only, will have versions of the interface that don't include DHCP. Gee. I wonder how long it will take for US consumers to buy their hardware from outside the US instead.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I have karma to burn
Why is SCO so heavily involved in this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also worth noting: there's nobody from Microsoft, and nobody from Red Hat. IBM has some people, but IBM is so big they send a few people to any standards effort.
My take on copyright - to stop the assumptions (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, let me be clear, because I'm getting tired of people (not just you) reading things into my posts that aren't there.
I am no apologist for the big media industries. I think their lobbying to get copyright terms extended to almost geological timescales is both morally wrong and probably bad for business in the long run too. I think fair use provisions should be rights, and should explicitly include common things like making back-ups, format-shifting and making compilations, and moreover I think any attempt by a copyright holder to actively restrict the enjoyment of those rights by a legitimate holder of a copy of the material should be subject to legal blocks. As far as I'm concerned, they can take their ineffective-against-real-lawbreakers but annoying-to-genuine-customers DRM and shove it if that happens to conflict with the above (as it almost inevitably will). Finally, it's about time the whole industry was dealt with over its transparent price-fixing and other anti-competitive behaviour, as provided for in law.
There, now I've got that off my chest, I will also say that I belive the underlying principle of copyright is sound. Our economies work, and pretty well in comparison to many others, based on some basic capitalist principles. People who rip off copyright material are upsetting the economics at best, and screwing a genuinely needy content creator out of fair compensation for their work at worst. I have no sympathy for people who do this, get caught, and get punished in a proportionate manner. If you rip an album, put it on P2P, let thousands of people copy it illegally, and get caught, then I have no problem whatsoever with your being fined a few thousand times the current selling price of the album, and I don't for an instant buy the usual weasel words about people not necessarily buying the album otherwise, or about the guy who buys more music as a result of the illegal copying (whom I strangely have never met).
Now, to address the specific point you mentioned, sure, let's view copyright infringement as it applies today, and that DRM is designed to combat, in light of the extended copyright duration we agree is too long. How many of the works covered by DRM today would have been out of copyright under a more reasonable timespan of, say, 10 years? What proportion of material traded on obviously mostly illegal P2P nets is less than 5 years old, and still easily available at stores? What proportion is less than three months old, and probably still recovering genuine expenses that those responsible for creating the work incurred, never mind making a profit or covering the media groups' other expenses on acts that didn't work out? (Yes, I know the big media players are very good at passing this on -- which just means you're slamming the good guys who actually make new content if you dodge paying early on.)
If you can show a serious level of correlation between the content widely swapped and increasingly distributed with some form of DRM attached, and the content that is now covered by extended copyright periods but wouldn't have been under the original duration, I'll read your comments with an open mind. Maybe you'll even convince me that my current position on this issue is wrong. However, right now I suspect that the vast, vast majority of illegal copying that DRM is aiming for would be well within even the original copyright durations, and the whole extended duration thing, while a valid concern in its own right, is nothing but more smoke and mirrors to try and justify an ethically dubious position to most illegal swappers.
Re:Hardware DRM Serves One Purpose (Score:4, Interesting)
In other words, any DRM system that would actually prevent copyright infringment would necessarily disallow un-"protected" content, because any method of allowing non-DRM content (including all Free content) would allow cracked (i.e. de-DRM'd) content as well.No, this isn't FUD. In fact, we're only one step away from it now. For example, SSL certificates aren't free, unless they're self-signed. And because of the point made above, the equivalent of self-signed (or unsigned) certificates could not be allowed at all in the DRM system, or it stops working. Therefore, there would necessarily be a central licensing [gnu.org] authority to which all content must be submitted. Moreover, there's no reason to belive licensing would be free, because Verisign isn't free.
Make no mistake, any DRM system that worked as I describe would be very, very bad. Not just because it would create a "DRM tax," but because it would also make censorship trivial merely by witholding licenses from anyone that Central Licensing doesn't like. In effect, we would all become digital serfs, with Microsoft and the RIAA (or this consortium -- whoever wins the battle) as our Lord and Master.