7 ms·

All DRM is a non-solution really. Some are just non-er than others. Its like the first law of "info-dynamics": 'If you can watch it, you can copy it'. Anyone

All DRM is a non-solution really. Some are just non-er than others. Its like the first law of "info-dynamics": 'If you can watch it, you can copy it'. Anyone actually paying for a DRM scheme feels to me to be of the same caliber as someone investing in a perpetual motion machine. They're determined to get ripped off throwing good money after bad. Why try any harder than you have to to accept their money?

beering 14y ago
Do you really think that all DRM users are idiots who believe in perfect DRM security? Gosh, people who buy locks must be stupid, because anybody with a crowbar can simply pry the door out of its frame. DRM deters people from copying content willy-nilly. You might argue about the quantitative results, but it does something, and as long as it has more value than it costs, people will pay for DRM.
- EthanHeilman 14y ago
  But there is a big difference. If someone breaks a lock they get into your house, but if someone breaks DRM, DRM-less copies of that movie will be on the pirate bay within a day. Then users copy the DRM-less copies willy-nilly. Directly controlling the distribution of digital artifacts is nearly impossible.
  - brian_cloutier 14y ago
    What would you say the ratio is, of all the data the NSA has vs. all the data WikiLeaks has published?
    - X-Istence 14y ago
      Do note that he said nearly impossible...
    - MichaelGG 14y ago
      If you want to expand DRM to mean "all information security, anytime, anywhere", then you can coerce truth out of your statement. But such a definition of DRM is pointless and tries to brush over the fact that actual DRM implementations (as in copy-protection schemes used by Amazon, iTunes, Bluray, etc.) are worthless.
- noonespecial 14y ago
  DRM isn't like a lock exactly. Locks keep people out period. DRM tries to keep people from making off with the stuff in the house after you've already let them in through the door. DRM schemes seem mostly to be misunderstandings about how encryption and authentication fit together.
  - RandallBrown 14y ago
    The file is the house. The DRM is the lock. If you have a key to the house, you can see what's inside. Just like if you have a key to the DRM, you can view the contents of the file.
  - pyre 14y ago
    > Locks keep people out period. Unless you have a key, or a lock pick, or a Bic pen[1], etc... [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite_lock#Lock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite_lock#Lock
    - Groxx 14y ago
      The Bic pen trick works wonderfully, and quite a few laptop locks still use the same kind of key. I got lucky with the speed, but my dad lost $20 to me in less than 30 seconds when his $20,000 warrantied lock opened without the key.
- hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
  Your analogy is not right. DRM is more like leaving your file on the desk and putting a lock on the Xerox machine.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Somebody who wants to break into a house with a crowbar is running a few risks. Someone might be inside the house when they break in and that person might be armed. Someone might see them opening the door with a crowbar and either report them or stop them. They may be recorded on CCTV en-route to my house , or stopped the police and have to explain why they were carrying a crowbar late at night. Even if they are not caught in the act, the incident will almost certainly be reported to the police afterwards. None of these risks really exist in terms of breaking DRM. If someone could break your house lock simply by tapping a button on their smartphone then I would suggest that locking your house is pointless.
brian_cloutier 14y ago
> All DRM is a non-solution really. I know that by now it's tradition to say this, but can we please stop? It seems to be that a law of life is 'everything dies'. Is medicine therefore useless? Are all the people who spend money for nothing but delaying the inevitable getting ripped off? We all admit perfect security is impossible. Yes, you're right! Controlling the spread of information is a very hard problem. Yes, you're right! It would be very nice if the things I want to watch and listen to were made freely available by their creators. But no, you're wrong. DRM has a purpose, and it can be successful even without perfectly achieving its goals. People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately. There is no fundamental reason why information deserves to be free, it's just easier to copy than physical things.
- noonespecial 14y ago
  DRM has a purpose, and it can be successful even without perfectly achieving its goals. People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately. I haven't yet met a DRM scheme that doesn't achieve this purpose backwards(1). What it really rests on is that people don't know they could just get it easier on "allmyvideos.net". There is no fundamental reason why information deserves to be free, it's just easier to copy than physical things. Its not just easier. A copy has zero marginal cost. That makes it special and different than anything that came before. DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero. I'm not saying that it deserves to be free. I'm not even saying that I think it should be. I'm saying that it IS free. We don't want it to be, because our economic models don't support it (yet), but that's its natural state. I stand by "DRM is silly". If that money were spent providing a better, easier product, they'd make more than they do now with DRM. It seems like they're perfectly willing to spend $3 to keep from losing $1 to piracy. It feels like a kind of willful ignorance. No data, of course, just a strong opinion, held loosely. (1) It doesn't take long outside the US to find out that there are plenty of things DRM makes impossible to aquire legitimately.
  - brian_cloutier 14y ago
aufreak3 14y ago
You can say the same thing about strong public key cryptography as well - "if you can read it, you can copy it" - but that doesn't say anything about the encryption technology itself. In the case of DRM, we are not in general interested in the received material being secret to us whereas in the use of traditional public key cryptography we are. The incentives are not aligned in the case of DRM, no matter what technology is used.
sigkill 14y ago
I don't know why this is a hard concept for people to understand. DRM is basically the equivalent of Schroedinger's box. You want the content decryptable so that it can be consumed, yet you don't want it to be copied. The problem is, decrypted content does not discriminate use cases. If it's clear-content, it shall do as the handler of the content wishes to do. Possibly the only method I can think of would be PKI enabled hardware. I've not thought completely on it enough to proclaim it practical or otherwise, but I had an idea that the player somehow has onboard memory to store public keys that are required for a disc to play.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I assume you mean the private keys would be on the player? This would work until somebody manages to do a memory dump of one of the players and posts the private key on the internet. Even if you were to re-encrypt the data for each individual player (manufacture each with a different key) you still have the problem that one DRM free copy can multiply quickly via bittorrent etc. The most practical solution would be to have players that will only play DRM protected medium and require hardware circumvention on each individual player to bypass that and hope that this is more effort than it is worth to potential pirates.
xtracto 14y ago
By the same logic, a door with a lock is a non-solution to protect your flat. Nevertheless I do not see people getting angry about other people installing those in their homes.

beering 14y ago

Do you really think that all DRM users are idiots who believe in perfect DRM security? Gosh, people who buy locks must be stupid, because anybody with a crowbar can simply pry the door out of its frame. DRM deters people from copying content willy-nilly. You might argue about the quantitative results, but it does something, and as long as it has more value than it costs, people will pay for DRM.

EthanHeilman 14y ago
But there is a big difference. If someone breaks a lock they get into your house, but if someone breaks DRM, DRM-less copies of that movie will be on the pirate bay within a day. Then users copy the DRM-less copies willy-nilly. Directly controlling the distribution of digital artifacts is nearly impossible.
- brian_cloutier 14y ago
  What would you say the ratio is, of all the data the NSA has vs. all the data WikiLeaks has published?
  - X-Istence 14y ago
    Do note that he said nearly impossible...
  - MichaelGG 14y ago
    If you want to expand DRM to mean "all information security, anytime, anywhere", then you can coerce truth out of your statement. But such a definition of DRM is pointless and tries to brush over the fact that actual DRM implementations (as in copy-protection schemes used by Amazon, iTunes, Bluray, etc.) are worthless.
noonespecial 14y ago
DRM isn't like a lock exactly. Locks keep people out period. DRM tries to keep people from making off with the stuff in the house after you've already let them in through the door. DRM schemes seem mostly to be misunderstandings about how encryption and authentication fit together.
- RandallBrown 14y ago
  The file is the house. The DRM is the lock. If you have a key to the house, you can see what's inside. Just like if you have a key to the DRM, you can view the contents of the file.
- pyre 14y ago
  > Locks keep people out period. Unless you have a key, or a lock pick, or a Bic pen[1], etc... [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite_lock#Lock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite_lock#Lock
  - Groxx 14y ago
    The Bic pen trick works wonderfully, and quite a few laptop locks still use the same kind of key. I got lucky with the speed, but my dad lost $20 to me in less than 30 seconds when his $20,000 warrantied lock opened without the key.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
Your analogy is not right. DRM is more like leaving your file on the desk and putting a lock on the Xerox machine.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Somebody who wants to break into a house with a crowbar is running a few risks. Someone might be inside the house when they break in and that person might be armed. Someone might see them opening the door with a crowbar and either report them or stop them. They may be recorded on CCTV en-route to my house , or stopped the police and have to explain why they were carrying a crowbar late at night. Even if they are not caught in the act, the incident will almost certainly be reported to the police afterwards. None of these risks really exist in terms of breaking DRM. If someone could break your house lock simply by tapping a button on their smartphone then I would suggest that locking your house is pointless.

brian_cloutier 14y ago

> All DRM is a non-solution really. I know that by now it's tradition to say this, but can we please stop? It seems to be that a law of life is 'everything dies'. Is medicine therefore useless? Are all the people who spend money for nothing but delaying the inevitable getting ripped off? We all admit perfect security is impossible. Yes, you're right! Controlling the spread of information is a very hard problem. Yes, you're right! It would be very nice if the things I want to watch and listen to were made freely available by their creators. But no, you're wrong. DRM has a purpose, and it can be successful even without perfectly achieving its goals. People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately. There is no fundamental reason why information deserves to be free, it's just easier to copy than physical things.

noonespecial 14y ago
DRM has a purpose, and it can be successful even without perfectly achieving its goals. People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately. I haven't yet met a DRM scheme that doesn't achieve this purpose backwards(1). What it really rests on is that people don't know they could just get it easier on "allmyvideos.net". There is no fundamental reason why information deserves to be free, it's just easier to copy than physical things. Its not just easier. A copy has zero marginal cost. That makes it special and different than anything that came before. DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero. I'm not saying that it deserves to be free. I'm not even saying that I think it should be. I'm saying that it IS free. We don't want it to be, because our economic models don't support it (yet), but that's its natural state. I stand by "DRM is silly". If that money were spent providing a better, easier product, they'd make more than they do now with DRM. It seems like they're perfectly willing to spend $3 to keep from losing $1 to piracy. It feels like a kind of willful ignorance. No data, of course, just a strong opinion, held loosely. (1) It doesn't take long outside the US to find out that there are plenty of things DRM makes impossible to aquire legitimately.
- brian_cloutier 14y ago

aufreak3 14y ago

You can say the same thing about strong public key cryptography as well - "if you can read it, you can copy it" - but that doesn't say anything about the encryption technology itself. In the case of DRM, we are not in general interested in the received material being secret to us whereas in the use of traditional public key cryptography we are. The incentives are not aligned in the case of DRM, no matter what technology is used.

sigkill 14y ago

I don't know why this is a hard concept for people to understand. DRM is basically the equivalent of Schroedinger's box. You want the content decryptable so that it can be consumed, yet you don't want it to be copied. The problem is, decrypted content does not discriminate use cases. If it's clear-content, it shall do as the handler of the content wishes to do. Possibly the only method I can think of would be PKI enabled hardware. I've not thought completely on it enough to proclaim it practical or otherwise, but I had an idea that the player somehow has onboard memory to store public keys that are required for a disc to play.

jiggy2011 14y ago
I assume you mean the private keys would be on the player? This would work until somebody manages to do a memory dump of one of the players and posts the private key on the internet. Even if you were to re-encrypt the data for each individual player (manufacture each with a different key) you still have the problem that one DRM free copy can multiply quickly via bittorrent etc. The most practical solution would be to have players that will only play DRM protected medium and require hardware circumvention on each individual player to bypass that and hope that this is more effort than it is worth to potential pirates.

xtracto 14y ago

By the same logic, a door with a lock is a non-solution to protect your flat. Nevertheless I do not see people getting angry about other people installing those in their homes.