Google’s very own DRM
p2p news / p2pnet: With all the vested interest PR-babble spouted at the Consumer Electronics Show, the real news is: Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) has become The Corporate Way, and what better to exemplify the message than the fact Google is doing its own DRM dance?
The company wants video content owners to set their own prices to create, “a more flexible alternative to Apple Computer Inc.’s pioneering iTunes store,” says the Associated Press, quoting Google co-founder Larry Page at the Consumer Electronics Show.
And the anti includes home-made Google DRM.
The company has, “already has lined up commitments to sell thousands of downloads, including recent television broadcasts of popular CBS shows and professional basketball games, as well as vintage episodes from series that went off the air decades ago,” says AP. “A launch date for the expansion has not been released.”
Now, “relying on its own proprietary copy-protection technology, Google threatens to compound the frustration that some consumers feel when they buy songs from one online source like the iTunes store, only to discover the music can’t be played on an incompatible gadget such as Creative Technologies’ Zen player.”
AP has Page saying Google feels other copy protection schemes wouldn’t have worked as well as one made in-house. But Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff has another theory:
“It’s arrogance.”
A majority of new media players and media centers, “other than Apple’s and Sony’s devices,” use Microsoft DRM, “a setup that most entertainment companies have embraced”. Now, says Bernoff, Google is telling Toshiba, et al, “No, you have to implement ours.” It’s, “just crazy,” he said.
Meanwhile, Yahoo is is also “widely expected to extend the range of its video offerings, although chief executive Terry Semel didn’t announce any new initiative on that front during a Friday speech at CES,” says AP, adding:
” ‘Yahoo and Google will both offer video, and I think at the end of the day, video is what the Web wants,’ Semel said in an interview afterward. ‘The opportunities are quite large for all the Internet players’.”
The interesting thing about the discussion is: the giant money corporations all talk about DRM as though it’s real and as though you, the customer, don’t exist.
Also See:
Associated Press – Google Plans to Expand Video Offerings, January 7, 2006
January 7th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
“The interesting thing about the discussion is: the giant money corporations all talk about DRM as though it’s real and as though you, the customer, don’t exist.”
I’ve said this before on p2pnet, that all this talk of DRM is really only for the corporations’ benefit, in order to secure content, to give good corporate face.
Nowhere is there mention of the benefits DRM has for the people who will ultimately have to learn to love it – the consumer.
I for one will not touch DRM-infected content with a bargepole. Google et al are going to have to get wise sooner rather than later if they really wants us, the paying consumer, onboard.
January 7th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
Why was VHS successful? Why was the cassette tape successful? Why are CDs and DVDs so successful?
Answer: There’s a standard. With all the different companies coming up with their own DRM schemes, the ones left out in the cold are the objects of the DRM: consumers. Overall, consumers are dumb. All we want is our stuff to work. We don’t want to worry about whether or not the crappy DRM laiden MP3 will work on our chosen player, nor do we want to worry about whether our desire to watch tv on a 1.5″ lcd screen will be shot down because nothing works together.
Message to companies: If you want us to buy your product, make it transparent, convenient, cheap, and most importantly, universal.
January 8th, 2006 at 12:31 am
Damn right! DRM will only be accetable if it’s so easy any thicko can use it. It’s no good pitching store against store, it’s like saying one store’s CDs don’t work in the same player another store’s CDs do. Nonsense. So come on, you corporate types, crack those heads together. The only way we, the paying public, will be loyal to you is if we know that wherewever we buy our content it’ll work in our player – pure and simple.
Of course we’d prefer it if you trusted us enough not to have to do all this nonsense. But I guess the paranoid content providers won’t have it. Oh well, it’s their loss (of revenue).
January 8th, 2006 at 3:58 am
Good. Keep it up. Make some more drm “solutions”! Everyone needs their own drm “solution”!! Don’t be the only one without one!!!
What am i babbling about? Well, the more stupid, ridiculous, complicated and most importantly incompatible drm “solutions” there are out there, the better off we are. If one “solution” takes over we’re all gonna get stuck with it someway somehow.
But lots of different “solutions” will frustrate average joe consumer, and with any luck make him finally wake up and realise that’s not roses he’s smelling, it’s bullshit.
January 8th, 2006 at 11:19 am
Tony and RW have highlighted some of the major issues of DRM – compatibility, ease of use, freedom, trust – all of which I have tried to address with the Intellectual Contributions Model [1]. For a short time I have been trying to make Google aware of these points and the opportunity they have to do something innovative. My latest attempt is here:-
http://groups.google.com/group/DRM-Copyright-and-Google
Anyone like to join the campaign? My proposal might not be the best but I would like to see something other that DRM considered.
[1] http://p2pnet.net/story/6358
January 8th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Why? Why? The brightest minds on the computing planet and they can’t understand cryptography 101.
DRM is impossible. You can’t give the encrypted text and the keys to the customer and then control what they do with the plain text.
What I really don’t get is why all these Tech Titans want to become content intermediaries when the existing content intermediaries are dinosaurs that are falling apart with broken business models threatened by disruptive technologies on all sides.
Make no mistake about it. Microsoft, Intel, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, Real and now Google are part of the problem not part of the solution and they’re all trying to perpetuate the same old media cartel cr*p.
Why?
January 8th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
excellent comment
January 9th, 2006 at 4:15 am
All the content companies have the same problem. Their old models are almost dead. It is showing up in the bottom line as such and I am sure all their crystal balls are showing the same thing. That the present model is broken and the trend of less money being spent will continue to hold sway.
Therefor the only solution is to change the model to on-line with the internet being the vehicle. The place where virtual shelves go on forever without need of a physical store to house them in and without need of seeing that very store owner in the distribution chain recieves his cut in the process. If a model is made to work that store cut is now the owners cut or at the worse is less of a cost, pocketing the difference is the same as a price increase for the owner.
What they haven’t grasped yet is how to make it pay off. What they are attempting to do is stop a copy machine system dead in its tracks and change the culture aspect that has already estabished itself within the users of the internet, as a Johnny-Come-To-Late.
Successful take over and turning the internet into an international mall of sorts means that first the copy side of what the user has come to expect as a given must be terminated in order for the old pay for each copy to work. In this, they haven’t a clue on how to make work. They can’t watch every customer at every point in the store and after the customer has taken home the goods. Making it an on-line watch dog isn’t going to work because the customer can at any point terminate the on-line watchdog and do as he pleases simply by turning off the internet to the computer. Their idea is to put the watch dog with the product. The customer for the most part doesn’t see any value in this sort of behavior as it is contrary to the laws of ownership and what one expects when one purchases a product. As a result, the on-line music and the on-line movies won’t be the international store these corporations expect. No one wants this sort of merchandise under these conditions as the limits on what one can do to change that purchase into something that fits into one’s lifestyle is so limited as to be all but useless.
Till the corporations figure out the customer isn’t going to accept this sort of product, configured as it is with the internal watchdog, we will see ever more cries about how pirates are stealing stuff and about how more laws are needed to protect the established and entrenched businesses. What they also haven’t figured out yet is that no amount of lawmaking is going to guarentee sales where the customer doesn’t see value in the product or sees it as over priced for the inherent restrictions that come with the product. Making a customer regret his purchase is not a sure way to business success.
January 9th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
FYI, there are hundreds of DRM-free video files available to download from http://www.4Flix.Net They are video iPod compatible to boot!
January 9th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
4Flix is selling Public Domain material they you can get from the internet archive ……So much for being trying to be Not Evil .
Google on the other hand houses the Internet Archives servers in its parking Garage in a Huge Container .
http://www.archive.org/details/movies