Tech journalists and technology
p2pnet.net News View:- DRM is Dumb. As has been pointed out over and over, technies and non-techies alike can copy anything that can be seen and/or heard.
And yet there are still DRM (digital rights management) companies which are apparently making a living by selling ‘copy protection’ technologies.
Are DRM firms actually 21st century snake-oil salesmen with the entertainment industry as their gormless marks? Is this another example of the unspeakable in pursuit of the unnattainable, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde?
The latest ‘DRM news’ comes from Macrovision which is using the mainstream media as its sales force. Important news outlets which shoud know better have been churning out endless copy based wholly on Macrovision’s puff pieces.
A p2pnet reader noticed this as well.
Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I was surprised at the number of places that this press release was quoted – but it’s been very obvious for a long time that most “technology journalists” just don’t understand technology.
The first thing to consider is that all DRM systems are at some level bogus – they are forced to rely on obfuscation by the simple fact that every piece of information needed to display the “protected” content must be available to the player. All they can do is make it hard to find – but if someone looks hard enough, they will work it out.
The designers of the original DVD CSS recognised this, which is why they provided a table of different keys for different players – this meant that if one key was compromised, it could be removed from later discs without affecting any other player.
Of course, this didn’t work in the end, since the crypto was weak – as soon as one key was known, it provided enough material (the decrypted title key) for a known plaintext attack on all the other keys, and the entire system was compromised.
So this is just an attempt to add another layer of obfuscation on top of an already cracked framework – but with the additional restriction that it has to be capable of operating with all the players that are currently on the market. In effect, it has to work around holes or grey areas in the spec – and the DVD consortium did a sufficiently good job of writing it that I don’t think there are that many of them.
Of course, the more cynical might suspect that this is just an attempt by MVSN to distract attention from the fact that their biggest single source of income (the copy prevention system that’s built into VCRs by legal mandate in the US) is slowly generating less and less income as the number of VCRs sold decreases. Add to this that SafeDisc is getting less popular with the publishers (mostly because it now has a lot of people trying to crack each new release – some of who are very very good.
Even a well designed system will have problems standing up to that sort of concerted attack…) and you can see why the company wants some good PR.
I personally think that it’s going to end up blowing up in their faces, though – the first release to use this technology will almost certainly end up ripped and posted far quicker than it otherwise would have, just on general principles.
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See:-
‘DRM news’ - RipGuard ‘copy blocker’ reloaded, p2pnet, February 15, 2005
