5 ms·

Do publishers just have their head in the sand? DRM is a hassle to real customers and an interesting challenge to pirates. I consider the following talk on DRM

Do publishers just have their head in the sand? DRM is a hassle to real customers and an interesting challenge to pirates. I consider the following talk on DRM by Cory Doctorow at MSR from 2004 to be a must-read, and I do not think that age has affected its accuracy: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

tptacek 18y ago
It hasn't hurt iTunes, which remains (for all intents and purposes) unbroken. It's a tightrope. Requiring reauthorization every 10 days, so that if I forget to play, the game doesn't work on the airplane --- that's a total fuckup. But if 95% of your users aren't even going to notice the DRM, and the DRM is hard enough to provide 1-5 days of lead time for the title (during the most lucrative window for the publisher), it's hard to see why publishers wouldn't do it. Spore's DRM does appear to suck. Windows game titles are notorious for crappy DRM. StarForce, for instance, apparently hooks both INT3 and the kernel idle loop. So, I'm going to concede Spore to the bOING bOING crowd. But there are DRM systems that are working: iTunes, DirecTV, Blu Ray BD+. It's an interesting CS problem and it rankles me when people are dismissive of it. Not that you were.
- jacobscott 18y ago
  If 1-5 days lead time is the problem, why not promise to disable it afterwards? iTunes DRM has been broken and patched multiple times. The vast majority of its content is also available on CD/DVD. I don't keep up with DirecTV, but I know there was at some point an active cracking community; while BD+ is still unbroken, AACS fell. These systems have been almost entirely deployed in embedded systems, which clearly makes them harder to crack. Still, the xbox360 and the wii have been cracked (can be modded). I do not think DRM has a good track record and I think it is fundamentally wrongheaded. I don't find the current solutions to DRM that interesting -- from what I understand they just lock down as much as possible (from TCM to HDCP). However, if/when Sun's DReaM stops being a pipe-DReaM, I'll definitely pay attention.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Disabling DRM after opening week is not at all a bad idea. iTunes DRM has been broken repeatedly. But the latest incarnation has survived multiple years, despite large incentive for a public break. It's been hard enough to break that what has been done has been kept private, for commercial reasons. Like it or not, it's a success story. DirecTV had an active cracking community 7 years ago. Then they contracted a famous cryptography team to develop what appears to be a white-box crypto scheme implemented directly in hardware gates. Nobody has been able to do anything with it since. It's a major success story. What was there in 1999 wasn't so much a "community" as a cottage industry, and now it's dead. BD+ actually has been broken. Title. By. Title. Even if that trend continues for the next several years, it's still a win for Blu-Ray, because SlySoft hasn't gotten a crack out within opening week yet, and they have to dedicate a team to refreshing their product at the whim of the publishers. I don't have a moral concern about DRM. I'd rather use unencumbered CDs. Sure, I'd also rather not pay for satellite TV. But as a CS problem, it's really interesting. The things that people say make it "impossible" actually make it Hard. Hard problems are fun, and we learn from them.
    - jacobscott 18y ago
      Thanks for further fleshing these out; I think you're right that the three are success stories. Just to play devil's advocate, can you think of anything (reasonably popular) for sale on iTunes/Blu-ray or shown on DirecTV that can't be found free (illegally) online? What do you think about the darknet paper? http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc
      - tptacek 18y ago
        I don't like this paper. It makes a facile argument ("DRM systems will leak"), and then supports it with inaccuracies. For instance, the notion that watermarking is unlikely to succeed owing to technical challenges with the "embedding layer" --- huh? This irritates me on general principles! Watermarks are covert channels, something most security disciplines try to eliminate, and generally concede to be unstoppable. What I think really happened here? This paper came out roughly a year after Ed Felten busted the SDMI watermark, and simply took his results and generalized them. Of course, SDMI is a crappy watermark; Ed Felten broke it in a matter of weeks.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  It hasn't hurt iTunes Really? I'm a big online music buyer. I've bought well over 1000 songs online per year for the last several years, and I've never bought a song from iTunes, because I don't buy DRM-encumbered music (for both pragmatic and ideological reasons). I've bought from eMusic, AudioLunchbox, direct from artists like Radiohead and Girl Talk, Amie Street, Amazon Unbox and probably several other places that don't come to mind. Assuming there are at least some number of people like me (and while I like to think I'm a unique flower, I'm pretty sure I'm not entirely alone), iTunes is making zero sales to some of the heaviest music buyers because of DRM. Obviously, it hasn't stopped iTunes from being the biggest online music seller...but we're still early in the online music distribution saga. There's still plenty of time for iTunes to fall out of favor...and the longer people are exposed to the inconveniences of DRM, the more likely they are to come to distrust it and choose other options. iTunes just happens to have done it extremely well and close to transparently, as long as you're doing the things Apple thought about. But, that'll change, as more people want to put songs on their non-iPhone mobile devices, and more people want to use their non-Apple/non-Microsoft OS-based netbooks to play the songs they've "bought" from iTunes. iTunes also had the advantage, at launch, of having as its only high profile competitors companies that were even worse than iTunes. All of the other big mainstream services were "subscription" services, where you basically got a radio station for your computer that allowed you to pick the songs, and if you stopped paying, you lost your songs. Everybody can see the stupidity in that...it takes longer to see why buying from iTunes is stupid. So, I think it's pretty early to say iTunes hasn't been hurt by DRM, even if you assume that I'm far enough of an outlier that people like me not buying from iTunes is an acceptable trade off.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    From a standing start, iTunes became the #1 music retailer in the US in less than 7 years. You don't matter to them.
    - jacobscott 18y ago
      I have an iPhone, and I have multiple Macs. It frustrates me that I cannot seamlessly move media between these machines and my iPhone. Last time I tried, Apple wanted to wipe all music currently on my phone before it would put music on from another computer. I may not matter to Apple, but this is an example of DRM degrading my experience after I paid them lots of money.

tptacek 18y ago

It hasn't hurt iTunes, which remains (for all intents and purposes) unbroken. It's a tightrope. Requiring reauthorization every 10 days, so that if I forget to play, the game doesn't work on the airplane --- that's a total fuckup. But if 95% of your users aren't even going to notice the DRM, and the DRM is hard enough to provide 1-5 days of lead time for the title (during the most lucrative window for the publisher), it's hard to see why publishers wouldn't do it. Spore's DRM does appear to suck. Windows game titles are notorious for crappy DRM. StarForce, for instance, apparently hooks both INT3 and the kernel idle loop. So, I'm going to concede Spore to the bOING bOING crowd. But there are DRM systems that are working: iTunes, DirecTV, Blu Ray BD+. It's an interesting CS problem and it rankles me when people are dismissive of it. Not that you were.

jacobscott 18y ago
If 1-5 days lead time is the problem, why not promise to disable it afterwards? iTunes DRM has been broken and patched multiple times. The vast majority of its content is also available on CD/DVD. I don't keep up with DirecTV, but I know there was at some point an active cracking community; while BD+ is still unbroken, AACS fell. These systems have been almost entirely deployed in embedded systems, which clearly makes them harder to crack. Still, the xbox360 and the wii have been cracked (can be modded). I do not think DRM has a good track record and I think it is fundamentally wrongheaded. I don't find the current solutions to DRM that interesting -- from what I understand they just lock down as much as possible (from TCM to HDCP). However, if/when Sun's DReaM stops being a pipe-DReaM, I'll definitely pay attention.
- tptacek 18y ago
  Disabling DRM after opening week is not at all a bad idea. iTunes DRM has been broken repeatedly. But the latest incarnation has survived multiple years, despite large incentive for a public break. It's been hard enough to break that what has been done has been kept private, for commercial reasons. Like it or not, it's a success story. DirecTV had an active cracking community 7 years ago. Then they contracted a famous cryptography team to develop what appears to be a white-box crypto scheme implemented directly in hardware gates. Nobody has been able to do anything with it since. It's a major success story. What was there in 1999 wasn't so much a "community" as a cottage industry, and now it's dead. BD+ actually has been broken. Title. By. Title. Even if that trend continues for the next several years, it's still a win for Blu-Ray, because SlySoft hasn't gotten a crack out within opening week yet, and they have to dedicate a team to refreshing their product at the whim of the publishers. I don't have a moral concern about DRM. I'd rather use unencumbered CDs. Sure, I'd also rather not pay for satellite TV. But as a CS problem, it's really interesting. The things that people say make it "impossible" actually make it Hard. Hard problems are fun, and we learn from them.
  - jacobscott 18y ago
    Thanks for further fleshing these out; I think you're right that the three are success stories. Just to play devil's advocate, can you think of anything (reasonably popular) for sale on iTunes/Blu-ray or shown on DirecTV that can't be found free (illegally) online? What do you think about the darknet paper? http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc
    - tptacek 18y ago
      I don't like this paper. It makes a facile argument ("DRM systems will leak"), and then supports it with inaccuracies. For instance, the notion that watermarking is unlikely to succeed owing to technical challenges with the "embedding layer" --- huh? This irritates me on general principles! Watermarks are covert channels, something most security disciplines try to eliminate, and generally concede to be unstoppable. What I think really happened here? This paper came out roughly a year after Ed Felten busted the SDMI watermark, and simply took his results and generalized them. Of course, SDMI is a crappy watermark; Ed Felten broke it in a matter of weeks.
SwellJoe 18y ago
It hasn't hurt iTunes Really? I'm a big online music buyer. I've bought well over 1000 songs online per year for the last several years, and I've never bought a song from iTunes, because I don't buy DRM-encumbered music (for both pragmatic and ideological reasons). I've bought from eMusic, AudioLunchbox, direct from artists like Radiohead and Girl Talk, Amie Street, Amazon Unbox and probably several other places that don't come to mind. Assuming there are at least some number of people like me (and while I like to think I'm a unique flower, I'm pretty sure I'm not entirely alone), iTunes is making zero sales to some of the heaviest music buyers because of DRM. Obviously, it hasn't stopped iTunes from being the biggest online music seller...but we're still early in the online music distribution saga. There's still plenty of time for iTunes to fall out of favor...and the longer people are exposed to the inconveniences of DRM, the more likely they are to come to distrust it and choose other options. iTunes just happens to have done it extremely well and close to transparently, as long as you're doing the things Apple thought about. But, that'll change, as more people want to put songs on their non-iPhone mobile devices, and more people want to use their non-Apple/non-Microsoft OS-based netbooks to play the songs they've "bought" from iTunes. iTunes also had the advantage, at launch, of having as its only high profile competitors companies that were even worse than iTunes. All of the other big mainstream services were "subscription" services, where you basically got a radio station for your computer that allowed you to pick the songs, and if you stopped paying, you lost your songs. Everybody can see the stupidity in that...it takes longer to see why buying from iTunes is stupid. So, I think it's pretty early to say iTunes hasn't been hurt by DRM, even if you assume that I'm far enough of an outlier that people like me not buying from iTunes is an acceptable trade off.
- tptacek 18y ago
  From a standing start, iTunes became the #1 music retailer in the US in less than 7 years. You don't matter to them.
  - jacobscott 18y ago
    I have an iPhone, and I have multiple Macs. It frustrates me that I cannot seamlessly move media between these machines and my iPhone. Last time I tried, Apple wanted to wipe all music currently on my phone before it would put music on from another computer. I may not matter to Apple, but this is an example of DRM degrading my experience after I paid them lots of money.