p2pnet.net News:- A number of high-powered tech companies have banded together to create a “common antipiracy language“.

Ignoring the reality that, bottom line, if you can hear it, you can copy it, members of the Coral Consortium want to come up with a set of technology specifications, “that will let different kinds of copy protection be translated into other varieties,” says CNET News.

With HP, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sony and Twentieth Century Fox and DRM firm InterTrust Technologies behind it, the consortium will try to do what no one has even come close to doing before.

And it all boils down to control.

‘Consumers’ who have shelled out for corporate ‘product’ want to be able to play it anywhere, on anything, without hinderance or problems. But the various heavies want punters to buy their stuff over everyone else’s.

“Content owners, including record labels and movie studios, have been pushing hard behind the scenes for interoperability,” says CNET. “They like the idea of industry-wide standards such as the DVD or CD, which allow one product to be played on hardware produced by any manufacturer.”

That might be better phrased as, “hardware produced by any ‘approved’ manufacturer.

As the Net gains users, the world shrinks and so does the ability of the international corporate community to maintain control over markets and product.

A common DRM standard should fix that, they hope and pray.

It might do it for the majority (for the moment) who’ve never heard of the Net and who still go to stores for their music and movies. But the balance is changing as more and more people get ISP accounts – and discover the online world is a very different place from the offline one.

A few years back, p2p wasn’t the problem. Hackers were. They were into everything, changing index pages on government web sites, doing wierd stuff with telephone systems. And they still are, although no one talks much about it any more.

Were these people a bunch of evil-minded fiends bent on wreaking havoc and sowing destruction?

Nope. They were youngsters, for the most part, consumed with curiosity. Hacking was/is largely about peering into the abyss – and hoping it won’t peer back at you.

DRM, too, represents a kind of challenge, albeit nowhere near as interesting or complex or exciting as phreaking, say.

“The point … is to spread the word of their exploits and earn praise from the rest of the groups, which is the main reward for 99% of the people involved,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Jon Healey in Secret Movie Moguls in which he discusses a 17-year-old high-school student who’s “trying to make a name for himself as a film distributor”.

The student and his colleagues were members of MysticVCD – “one of dozens of ‘ripping’ or ‘release’ groups that obtain, prepare, package and feed movies, songs and games into a secretive and complex distribution scheme that functions a bit like the illegal drug trade – minus the bloodletting.”

And, “Instead of cash, the online underground is powered by bartering – admission to these elite circles is granted only to those with something valuable to offer, such as computer parts or a pre-release copy of a DVD,” said Healey.

Their discoveries don’t stay secret for very long.

Then you have a coterie of individuals – many of them extremely clever and very technically minded – who believe they’ve been ripped off by the labels and studios and aren’t going to put up with it any more.

While all this goes on, the multinationals are floundering, trying to use technologies such as DRM to regain control and dominance.

Enter Coral, but while it gets ready to do its thing, the Moving Pictures Experts Group has been working since last summer to find an interoperability standard, and, “neither group includes Apple or Microsoft, the two most prominent makers of copy-protection technology for consumers,” CNET points out.

None of this bodes well for ‘ interoperability’.

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See:-

antipiracy language – Tech powers seek antipiracy accord, CNET News, October 3, 2004

elite circles – The myth of online piracy, p2pnet, January 9, 2004

This entry was posted on Monday, October 4th, 2004 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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