CPRM Voted Down

CBNobi writes: "The National Committee on Information Technology Standards (NCITS) has rejected 4C Entity's proposal of the CPRM, a copy-protection that can be placed on future hard drives. While this may be a win for us, many other organizations are attempting the same thing. Full article at ZDNet." This is only a very temporary victory - there is nothing to prevent this addition to the ATA standard from being proposed again, or to prevent Intel, IBM, Toshiba and Matsushita from figuring out another way to implement it. Another submitter notes: "According to The Register, Apple, Adaptec, ST Micro, Western Digital, Maxtor, LSI Logic and Hale Landis voted against "Generic Functionality" in ATA devices for content control. Voting in favor of content control were IBM, Toshiba (4C members), Hitachi, Iomega, Microsoft, Phoenix, Absolute Software, and Circuit Assembly."

Re:Where are IBM's priorities?

I think the problem is that Big Blue's legal department is too disconnected from its technical people.

On the one hand we have cool stuff coming from them such as the Linux watch, and then on the other hand they lobby for lame ducks like European software patents and CPRM.

The legal guys see something like CPRM and start drooling about how many $$$ they can make for the company out of it, whilst at the same time it's obviously going to impact their good standing amongst open source advocates.

IBM needs to decide their overall strategy much better - are they going to be long term supporters of open source, or are they out to make quick bucks from the first company that comes along and says "vote for this !" whilst pissing in the open source well. They can't have it both ways for long.

Really doesn't get it...

So apparently people who buy DVD's and want to play them under Linux are not 'innocent consumers' ?

Very nice...

Re:Optimism

Even if I agree that it is futile to fight, I'd rather put off the inevitable.

To expand on this -- Iomega is in it up to here

Iomega is already pioneering media storage copy protection schemes with its "HipZip Digital Audio Player" ... From the corporate profile [iomega.com]:

"The HipZip player recognizes MP3 format and Microsoft Windows Media(TM) Format (WMA) actively and is upgradeable to additional formats. It supports digital rights management (DRM) technology to secure commercial music content to PocketZip disks, offering artists and publishers protection from the unauthorized distribution of commercial content."

This is "phase one" in a larger project. Take a look at a document from InterTrust [intertrust.com] outlining the plan it is implementing along with Iomega.

(Don't know InterTrust? Read what CEO Victor Shear had to say to the US Senate just yesterday in this pressrelease [intertrust.com].)

While the claim is made in that document that "Iomega and InterTrust are removing the roadblocks for consumers," it's clear that they're really just building their own roadblock around the corner: the consumer will download an mp3 or whatever from an InterTrust-enabled service directly to a Zip disk; the consumer is then free to carry that mp3 around from device to device on that disk; the consumer is NOT free to copy the mp3 to any other storage medium. Once all the "good" music is safely stored away behind InterTrust-enabled walls, an Iomega-branded disk then becomes the carrier-medium of choice (the LP or CD of the future!), and Iomega cleans up on the digital-content revolution. That would seem to be the long-term vision anyway. ;)

So: Iomega benefits from increased sales to end users (Bob needs an Iomega disk to store his download of Britney Spears' latest hit and play it in his ZipWalkman, his ZipCarstereo, etc). Iomega benefits from industry kickbacks which reward this kind of stuff, directly or not. Iomega benefits from sales of "solutions" to other companies. Iomega benefits from CPRM adoption because it makes the whole Iomega/InterTrust scheme that much easier to implement.

In short, Iomega wants to position itself as a "key component" in the "civilizing" of digital distribution networks, and CPRM and similar initiatives would seem to be crucial to achieving that end.

I imagine that many of the others in the yay column have similar vested interests.

It's all about control...

Global Warming - control where/how people live
W.H.O. (World Health Organisation) - cotrol who lives/dies - keep the world population in check
CPRM - control the lesiure activities of the masses

May God have Mercy!

Re:Where are IBM's priorities?

This only marks you as under 40. Older programmers and hackers used to regard IBM the way young kiddies do Microsoft, and with better reason, since their monopoly was more complete and there weren't nice squishy linux sandboxes to play in. Ouch! Did I just bite a troll? Hate when I do that, it's like biting tinfoil.

Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

"Content Control" not "Copy Protection"

It seems like only a minor sematic difference, but the meaning is very significant. I know it is easy to forget the difference, as I have done so in the past myself.

"Content Control" is what Microsoft, IBM, et al are trying to achieve. They want be able to control any and all information on programmable computers.

The term "copy protection" simply reflects a symptom of the control; just like a cough is a symptom of a cold. The fact that they want to be able to "protect" certain articles of intellectual property reflects on the deeper truth that they will be controlling this property.

So let's please call CPRM and son-of-CPRM what it is: Content Control.

Apple against MS

I think this is terrific. Apple is definitely pursuing a good, anti-DMCA/CPRM type strategy from what I can see. Look, Mac users have free access to encoding the licensed Fraunhofer MP3 codec which you usually have to pay for. That's a Good Thing, and surely makes people like these CPRM advocates unhappy. "More MP3s, dammit!" grumbles the RIAA, "And CD-burning built-in to boot!" Was there ever a handier program for (illegally, or fair-usefully) managing and burning Mp3s to CD than iTunes? It's the perfect pilferer's tool. And that means less control from The Man.

Additionally, Apple has that DVD-authoring program, plus of course Final Cut Pro and such. Plus a new OS with an open-source core. That's goood. Apple is rapidly positioning itself as the good guy as much as it can, usually. Although they aren't perfect, suing guys who make Aqua-like skins. And of course they licensed that one click silliness.

My point is: Apple is really forging ahead in a lot of areas, even if it's small, too compromising steps for now. (For example, Mr. Stallman annoyed about the Apple Open Source License: "It's not exactly GPL! AHHHH!")

Microsoft, on the other hand, has sort of locked down pretty strongly. As someone observed, Windows Media Player no longer has a "Capture Stream" function, presumably to put a stop to copyright naughtiness (or fair use). And that new codec which supposedly blows MPEG Audio Layer-3 away has all kinds of copyright protection built in. MS is backsliding, man.

Apple is doing a yummalicious job with this stuff, and going out on a limb by opposing stuff like the CPRM that most people won't even notice. Remember this the next time you're going out to get a computer.

--

Re:Optimism

With supporters like you, who needs detractors? There is no "cannot win" unless you don't fight. Yes, the deck is their favour, but while there's someone willing to fight, there's always a chance, slim though it may be. We have a higher chance of winning than a sperm has of fertilizing an egg, yet it happens all the time.

Bill - aka taniwha
--

Re:Whats in it for them?

Their customers want this.

You are not their customer in the proper sense. Perhaps you buy a few drives. That's nothing. The commodity PC hardware market is not lucrative enough for HDD manufacturers right now. Prices are rock bottom. They want to sell boatloads of drives to appliance makers(*), and they need an edge in the market. The value add is the feature alot of hardware+software companies are asking for: copy-protection. This is why you see alot of OEMs in the against column, and software vendors in the for column. I'm suprised to see maxtor in the against column, as their website along with quantum's website menition being able to provide this in the future. They must be holding out for a more flexable solution.

(*) - I'm not necissarily talking consumer appliances when I say appliances either. Think routers, arcade games, groupware servers, server apliances in general... All these manufacturers have a vested intrest in preventing people/competitors from seeing how their device works. That's hard to do with a device made from general purpose components.

The more mp3s I can distribute fairly or not, the more 250 Meg Zip disks people will be buying, it would seem.

The less secure your media the less software vendors will distribute on it. Even with these features, you'll still be able to use the disk as you please if you have access to the content you want to put on it.

Or do they own sizable software subsidies?
Last I checked IBM had one of the worlds largest...

Jeffrey B. Lotspiech at Stanford Tommorrow!

> Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
> 4:15PM, Wednesday, April 4, 2001
> NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03
>
> Title: Content Protection for Recordable Media
>
> Speaker: Jeffrey B. Lotspiech
> IBM Almaden Research Center
>
> About the talk:
> Content Protection for Recordable Media, or CPRM, is a technology
> developed by IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba to provide copy
> protection on portable media. The technology allows a recorder to
> record encrypted content, and a player to play it back, without
> having any keys in common. The media acts as a passive oracle to
> allow the different boxes to come to the same cryptographic key.
> In contrast, previous copy protection technologies like the one
> used for DVD video, depended on shared keys between the mastering
> studio and the players, with predictable results. As soon as a
> 16-year-old in Norway found one shared key, the system was
> effectively broken: there was no way to exclude the broken key
> from the system without hurting too many innocent consumers. In
> contrast, CPRM can survive thousands of independent attacks, and
> exclude millions of circumvention devices, without any chance of
> innocent consumers being affected.
>
> Recently, articles have appeared in the press that CPRM will be
> standardized on all PC hard drives. This has fueled Orwellian
> mages of a Big Brother chip on your PC that will decide whether
> your files are worthy of being copied. This is complete nonsense.
> CPRM would never be standardized, nor have we ever proposed such
> a thing. CPRM strength is portability and interchangeability and
> it is mismatch for fixed hard drive. It is completely passive,
> requires no hardware, and can only be exploited by newly-designed
> applications. It cannot possibly affect existing files or
> applications. How these myths came about, and persist, was an
> object lesson for a media-naive researcher.
>
> About the speaker:
>
> Jeff Lotspiech is the manager of the Content Protection
> Technology Group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He has a BS
> and MS in Computer Science from MIT, 1972. He has been working on
> content protection technologies, both the Internet and media, for
> the last six years.
>
> Contact information:
>
> Jeffrey B. Lotspiech
> IBM Almaden Research Center DPEM/B3
> 650 Harry Road
> San Jose, CA 95120
> 408-927-1851
> 408-927-3497
> [e-mail]

See you there!

The point is not to win the tech war

You're right that we can't win a technological arms race with big business. CPRM will probably get implemented.

What we can do is win the PR war. It's interesting that you bring up Ralph Nader. He won the PR war against businesses years ago. He turned enough people against companies producing consumer products which play fast-and-loose with people's safety that in the end, the government and business had to stand up and take notice.

That's where we need to concentrate our efforts, IMO. We can't win the technology in the short term, but if we do it right, we can win the hearts and minds.

Buycott!!!

I propose a buycott!
This is where we send letters to targeted companies, stating why we are going to single them out to purchase, not avoid, their products. In this case it is because they voted down CPRM.

DO IT, folks! There is more to be gained from honey and sugar than vim and vigor.

The companies on my Buycott list:
Apple, Adaptec, ST Micro, Western Digital, Maxtor, LSI Logic and Hale Landis (who is this??).
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,