p2pnet - rss feed: Does Hollywood control Vista?
p2pnet.net News View:- In a Freedom to Tinker post, Princeton computer science and cryptography professor Edward W. Felten wrote he believes Hollywood is controlling features in the new Microsoft Vista operating system. A Microsoft white paper speaks of “robustness” which Ed believes the legacy content industries are imposing on Microsoft.
What “robustness” requires is that the technology and software be under the control of the manufacturer, and not the owner of a communications tool. Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is obviously excluded as not being “robust,” given that FLOSS is accountable and transparent to the user.
Microsoft admits in many of its recent SEC filings that FLOSS is the largest competitive threat to its market and business model, so it’s no wonder Microsoft sees FLOSS such as Linux and OpenOffice.org as its primary enemy.
The comments to professor Felten’s article ask why Microsoft is doing this, given that they command an existing monopoly on the desktop, and could easily purchase many of the major labels/studios and control them that way. The assumption is that Hollywood is in control. But I believe the opposite is true.
Microsoft is trying to leverage the (smaller) recording and motion picture monopolies to strengthen its own. It can’t do this directly as it’s under anti-trust (competition) scrutiny, so must dupe the content industry into lobbying for changes to the law. Not understanding the issues themselves, policy makers are not only granting a level of control to the content industry that’s technically impossible to offer, but are also indirectly offering benefits to specific technology companies that they wouldn’t offer directly.
If a majority of high profile content is only available to Microsoft customers, it will deter a large portion of the marketplace from using competing software. When this tie between access controlled content and Microsoft access technology is strong, the content industry will find out that it’s Microsoft that effectively owns/controls the distribution channels for content. The content industries will only have access to the audiences Microsoft wishes them to have, with Microsoft able to entirely replace the current major label/studio control.
Microsoft learned from the experience with the broadcast flag. In this case, the studios announced they wouldn’t purchase the services of many of the DRM companies there, only considering three options. This meant the competing companies who had thus far been supportive of the broadcast flag then turned against it, leading to the death of this bad policy proposal.
If Microsoft plays the studies/labels right, they’ll be lead like lambs to the slaughter, with the studios/labels only realizing the damage they’ve done to themselves when it’s far too late.
Those of us frustrated by the legacy recording and motion picture monopolies mustn’t fall prey to the idea that “an enemy of an enemy is our friend”. Replacing the existing content monopolies with an IT monopoly will be far worse than the situation we have today, and we must not be distracted by our dislike of the antiquated thinking from the labels and studios.
Have you spoken to your elected representatives about this issue yet? Have you spoken to your favorite musicians or other artists?
A lack of public education is what these DRM manufacturers are relying on. But that’s something we can fix.
Russell McOrmond - p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons).]
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August 11th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
I would not put it past Micro$hit to try to do something like this.
August 12th, 2005 at 6:12 am
Very interesting theory, but there are a couple holes in it.
I think the fruition of such a plan would undoubtedly trigger reform. At such a point even hollywood would lobby for DMCA reform, and with their obscene lobbying power they would be granted it immediately. This means it’s actually HOLLYWOOD which holds the trump card here.
In addition, microsoft would be exposing itself to very significant antitrust litigation risks if their goal is as your theory states.
As much as i’d LOVE to see this happen, as it would make even the idiotic mr. hatch wake up, i believe felton has it right. Hollywood is the one in control here.
August 12th, 2005 at 12:09 pm
Nicely put. I agree 100%. You have to look at a situation like this critically/sceptically, given the past behaviour of Microsoft. And Linux *is* its main competitor.
One slight problem, though: as I understand it (which I admit isn’t fully) the DRM is mainly done in hardware. Unless hardware manufacturers explicitly disallow the OS community to write drivers for their hardware (including Palladium chips) won’t the DRM be cracked or bypassed almost immediately? If not, why not?
Chris
August 14th, 2005 at 5:11 pm
DRM is a set of rules, and those rules are encoded in software. What the Trusted Platform Module (TPM — not “Technological Protection Measure”) that TCPA is pushing http://www.againsttcpa.com/ is a small computer that is included on your motherboard. Your software as the owner/operator of the computer runs on the main processor, but the DRM software runs on this separate less powerful TPM computer.
The idea is that each stage of the process on the main computer “measures” the next stage, and stores this encrypted information in the TPM in a way that unauthorized software that runs later can’t modify. The BIOS is measured, and then the BIOS measures the boot loader (GRUB, LILO, etc), and then so-on down to each application that you run. When asked by a remote site the TPM will give these encrypted measurements which can then be verified against known/trusted software. Obviously user-modifiable software, such as Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), will not be known/trusted.
Can this be “cracked or bypassed almost immediately”? Of course it can, but this only matters to those very few people who have both the technical capabilities to do so and are not law abiding. While DRM can never be effective in its stated goal (of stopping lawbreakers from infringing copyright), it can have a huge anti-competitive effect on the marketplace. The vast majority are law abiding citizens, and having a technology that keeps these law-abiding citizens from using competing software will work quite well.
It is important to always remember that DRM only affects the activities of law-abiding citizens. It only takes one law breaking technical person to decode the DRM and re-release the content in an unencumbered form. Then any number of law breaking non-technical persons can access that content with the technology of their choice.
August 14th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
You are correct that the 1996 WIPO treaties, the USA’s DMCA, and Bill C-60 if it passes in Canada will eventually need to be abrogated. The important question is: What state will the relevant markets be in by the time policy makers wake up and realize the problem they created?
a) Will any of the motion picture, recording industry, and other content sector intermediaries of today exist? Their current value-add in the marketplace is control over the distribution and funding of content. DRM companies can entirely replace that part of the market, and thus this theoretical lobby-group won’t be there to fight against bad policy.
b) Will the alternatives to “software manufacturing” such as FLOSS still exist? There will always be a fringe human rights activists who refuse to give up control over their own computers, but will there be a growing marketplace of commercial competitors as is the case today?
Legal protection for DRM only needs to exist long enough to get rid of competitors on both of these fronts. Then they only need to fight off much smaller new-market competitors, something that the contenders for the DRM monopoly (Microsoft, Sony, IBM, etc) have a fairly long history of doing already.