Media/content/whatever-business types don’t see the big picture, the slippery slope, the implications of DRM.

I do believe that DRM as a technology is devoid of morals, and can be used for evil (“how many times do you want to read that book before paying yet again”) as good (signed binaries to avoid running malware, etc). There might even be good uses for DRM-protected media files (proof of authenticity of news reports or something, I don’t know). I’m just worried that having the infrastructure will make a whole bunch of less-scrupulous guys go “great, now let’s see how we can abuse this…”.

I guess it’s like every technology – you can never turn back the clock. So I guess we’ll just have to bite the bullet and use it to our advantage too. It would be nice to have some safeguards to protect the owner of the machine – running an unverified binary black box doesn’t inspire me with confidence – even (and especially!) if it comes from a “big company”.

]]> http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2005/12/03/drm-and-gstreamer/comment-page-1/#comment-110 Anonymous Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2005/12/03/drm-and-gstreamer/#comment-110 A clarification: are you working on support for adding DRM to files to be streamed, or support for playing DRM-crippled files?<p/>If the former, which clients would support this DRM? It would be strange to be using GStreamer to stream out a format that it can't play.<p/>If the latter, perhaps you could clarify something: exactly how do you plan to enforce DRM against users who have all the source code and can trivially change an "if(permitted)" to an "if(1)"? (Or is this just a 90% solution hoping to get the people who don't know how or won't bother?) "Open DRM" is an oxymoron. Fundamentally, DRM itself is giving a user a lock and a key and then trying to enforce rules on opening the lock; short of hardware-based non-extractable keys (which the %!@#!@# hardware vendors are adding to new hardware), this is completely unworkable even in proprietary systems.<br/> A clarification: are you working on support for adding DRM to files to be streamed, or support for playing DRM-crippled files?

If the former, which clients would support this DRM? It would be strange to be using GStreamer to stream out a format that it can’t play.

If the latter, perhaps you could clarify something: exactly how do you plan to enforce DRM against users who have all the source code and can trivially change an “if(permitted)” to an “if(1)”? (Or is this just a 90% solution hoping to get the people who don’t know how or won’t bother?) “Open DRM” is an oxymoron. Fundamentally, DRM itself is giving a user a lock and a key and then trying to enforce rules on opening the lock; short of hardware-based non-extractable keys (which the %!@#!@# hardware vendors are adding to new hardware), this is completely unworkable even in proprietary systems.

You give them far too much credit; they see exactly where DRM leads, and they want to get there as soon as they can.

> I guess it’s like every technology – you can never turn back the clock. So I guess we’ll just have to bite the bullet and use it to our advantage too.

Why? Proprietary software was a new creation at one point, but our response to that was to shun it and attempt to destroy it, not embrace it. The same reaction is needed for DRM, even more strongly.

To the extent that DRM-like technologies are useful, they aren’t DRM; DRM by definition is attempting to “manage” your rights to your own data. We’ve been using signing and encryption for beneficial purposes for many years, and that isn’t DRM.

Music you buy in shop is not your data. It is truely copy of copyrighted work. Owner of this work can do whatever it wants within its rights. So actually morally and legally record companies are right. However, ethically and in attitude to customers they are deadly wrong, and therefore they should be punished such way – by free market.

But there is no free market, right?

For DRM, solution is one – don’t buy such DRM-enabled art works and don’t support such way of doing business from companies, if you don’t like such attitude, period.

Problem is here that most people _don’t_ care. Ohh, there was Sony, ohh disc don’t play on your Mac?

Who GIVES a !!$#%?

Most of their market is ignorant, grey mass.

In the end – on topic – if the harsh reality asks for DRM infrastructure in Gstreamer, there should be one. I’m all about power of copyright. Hovewer, I’m against seeing customers as thiefs.

Ignoring the semantic quibble over the term “ownership” (I own the bits, as they are on my computer; they just hold a copyright which applies to those bits), the point is that their “rights” extend only as far as not permitting copies.

> So actually morally and legally record companies are right.

Please don’t conflate “morally” and “legally”. Legally the record companies are (unfortunately) usually right. Morally they are not, at least to me.

> and therefore they should be punished such way – by free market.

Oh, there I agree with you entirely; I’m not suggesting any other approach to the problem. I do, however, believe that we won’t have a real free market situation until we eliminate the various protectionism laws for industries built upon the artificial scarcity of data.

On topic again: I do agree that providing infrastructure supporting DRM-style plugins in GStreamer is a good idea, in order to get people onto a Free platform. The idea seems similar to Wine: better to get someone running an entirely Free GNU/Linux system with the sole exception of a particular Windows application run via emulation, than for them to continue running all of Windows just because of that one application.

It seems like DRM support is not all that complicated, as it is just another container format. Is there something in particular about DRM containers that makes them different from another muxer?

So in response to the claim that the owner of a set of bits can do whatever they want within its rights, I would suggest that people would have far less problems with said owners if all they tried to control was what was within their rights.

Let me state upfront that I currently purchase all my software and music legally. Like most people, I just want to playback my music (and video) how I want – in my car CD player, on my computer (Totem), or on my portable iRiver. I want control over my long term ability to move my purchase across evolving physical or virtual mediums in order to maintain it’s long term value to me. This ability has held up in the past – I was able rip my purchased CD’s to FLAC/OGG, play them on my Windows or Linux box and my iRiver today, and I can be fairly confident that the CD music I have purchased, and made FLAC files from, will be available through whatever platforms and formats we are using 20 years from now. My worry is for these DRM formats of the future – if I buy a Blu-Ray DVD, do I have such an assurance? I use Linux, GStreamer, and OGG to protect me from this – and just need reasurrances that will continue.

My big problem with some DRM is that it often won’t even allow people to do things that the laws of their country state *should* be legal for them to do. (ie, countries with laws ensuring Fair Use, like in the USA before DMCA).

** GStreamer shouldn’t preclude people in some country from writing plugins/elements so they can *legally* save/transcode their purchased media, even if it is against the DRM policy guidelines.

GStreamer should provide a framework for ripping a Blu-Ray DVD (example) to Theora, or a “Save the decrypted version of this encrypted stream to a Theora file” pipeline – even if those are against the DRM policy. I don’t think it should actually do it out of the box… but in places where it is legal, it’s API should enable someone to write some DeCSS type plugin/element code to do so, and for some user to download those plugins from some yum repo, and then it should work.

Of course, I also have no problem with GStreamer supporting playback of DRM restricted formats – but those formats have thus far been of little concern to me personally, except as a last resort. The first thing I do when I get my purchased CD or DVD home is rip it to an open format – and I won’t purchase media in formats I can’t at least easily make a high quality analog copy of for my own personal use. I will use a DRM restricted service to locate music I want to purchase and rip though.