Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

DRM and the Myth of the Analog Hole 314

Art Grimm writes "Movie studios want to punish legitimate customers for legally purchasing content, while the real pirates go right on stealing. ZDNet's George Ou writes: "There seems to be a persistent myth floating around the board rooms of the movie companies and Congress that analog content is the boogie man of music and video piracy. In fact, they're so paranoid about it that they're considering a mechanism called ICT (Image Constraint Token) that punishes law-abiding customers for content that they legally purchased. But ironically, the real content pirates who make millions of bootleg movies have no intention of ever taking advantage of the so called "analog hole" because that is the slowest and lowest quality method of stealing content.""
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

DRM and the Myth of the Analog Hole

Comments Filter:
  • Repeat after me: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TrumpetPower! ( 190615 ) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @09:17PM (#15022607) Homepage
    It ain't about stopping ``piracy.'' Not even in the slightest.

    It's all about control, and the power that goes with it.

    Cheers,

    b&
  • by jimmyhat3939 ( 931746 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @09:20PM (#15022630) Homepage
    The reality is you don't have to use the analog hole. Any encryption scheme is going to have a set of keys that will be, at a minimum, susceptible to some sort of clever replay attack. Even a DVD player hooked to the internet and sharing keys with a movie studio would ultimately fall victim to this.

    The whole thing is stupid. The studios will never win.

  • by SoCalDissident ( 953017 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @09:27PM (#15022661)
    Their real fear is that it is becoming easier and easier for people to make THEIR OWN CONTENT and distribute it for free, aka youtube.com. Some of the best movies have been low budget movies produced by a few people with vision.
  • by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @09:28PM (#15022665) Homepage
    The whole analog hole (and DRM in general) really isn't about piracy. The studios and labels know they won't be stopping anyone who wants to rip the off on a larger scale.

    Instead, it's about us not format shifting, basically. The idea that you can take music or movies you bought and play wherever you are, at full quality, is anathema to them. They want us to pay for the CD. Then pay for the mobile phone version. And the portable player. And the car. And ...

    A lot of the movie and music sales - and an even larger part of the profits - the past fifteen years have been people rebuying stuff they own in a new format. Beloved LP recordings and worn out VHS tapes were bought again as CD:s and DVD:s. But now, with fully digitalized content, there is little reason to ever do that again. Copies don't degrade, and the quality is already high enough (especially for music) that a new format just isn't very tempting.

    But if you stop people from moving their data from evice to device, people will have to re-buy their content whenever they get a new device. It's an eternal upgrade revenue stream, like the shift from recordings to CD, but without any improvement in the viewer experience;without even having to pay for remastering or repackaging, in fact. And the more fine-grained you make the mesh of walls, the more often we have to pay again. Studios probably love that online services aren't standardized or compatible with each other; it means another resale every time someone switches from one service to another.

    In fact, if I were a studio executive, and of a manipulative frame of mind, I'd back one service to the hilt - for, say, three or four years. Then I'd switch allegiance to a new (but incompatible) service, nudging everybody to switch, and pay again. If I'd be _really_ manipulative, I'd look at what my fellow executives in other studios are doing and try to coordinate the shift with them (no need to actually make a shady deal; just follow the group). I wonder a little, in fact, just how much time iTunes has left as the current king of the hill.

    A steady stream of income without ever even having to produce any content. Who would not love that business model?
  • by Lord Ender ( 156273 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @09:30PM (#15022677) Homepage
    I've seen few summaries so bad. First of all, it's so dripping with bias that it's hard to understand what is even being said. The write-up should include details, not opinion! Also, it fails to make the basic distinction between copyright infringement and theft.
  • by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @09:31PM (#15022683) Homepage
    ...and what's more, it IMNSHO can never be entirely plugged.

    So long as content has to be displayed, it has to be converted to analog signals in the process. And while it may take a large amount of effort to "uncover" the hole - such as, disassembling an LCD panel and tapping into the driver circuitry - it only takes one person to redigitize the open content and distribute it, and all of a sudden it's everywhere again.

    There *IS* one strategy that might work; it involves adding a system for embedding a digital watermark to the decryption mechanism, which could help content owners track stolen content back to the one who did the stealing (assuming that person or group had no way to cover their tracks). But if the content owners implemented such a strategy, there'd no longer be a reason to cover the hole!

    All I can say is, if I do purchase a HD-disc and then discover it won't play at full resolution on my hardware, I'll simply download a free-market copy. I'm sure they'll still be available.
  • the free will hole (Score:4, Insightful)

    by circletimessquare ( 444983 ) <(circletimessquare) (at) (gmail.com)> on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @09:39PM (#15022717) Homepage Journal
    it is impossible to empower a customer to consume your content while at the same time restrict their ability to copy it, by any means, with any technology, with any scheme you can devise

    it's simply a matter that providing them the tools to consume your media also provides them the tools to copy it, and it is simply not possible to do one without also enabling the other

    it's philosophically impossible, no analog hole need apply

    the philosophical impossibility is supplied by the concept called "free will"

    no company, no matter how much time, technological innovation, or money it has, can defeat a group of poor technologically astute teenagers with time and motivation on their hands to consume your media without your restrictions. no human-devised security sytem cannot also be defeated by human beings. there is no such thing as a technological fix to human ingenuity

    the poorest of your customers, who are therefore the most motivated to steal your content, just happen to also be your prime target demographic audience as well

    in other words, the current ip system is simply doomed

    checkmate
  • by BlueStrat ( 756137 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @09:50PM (#15022787)
    Right on, it's all about pay-per-view.

    That's part of it, but not even close to all of it, or even the main goal, IMHO.

    Even more important to the big media interests is keeping individuals and independent groups from being able to distribute content freely.

    This is their biggest threat: the ability of anyone to create content and distribute it over the internet to anyone interested for free or whatever the individual or group feels is fair.

    Without exclusive control over distribution and promotion, the whole media cartel collapses. Making proprietary DRM mandatory keeps the media cartel in control by locking out those without the ability to pay licensing costs, and/or making the terms of any such licensing such that it is useless for distributing independently created content.

    Strat
  • by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @09:59PM (#15022821) Homepage
    We're talking about a whole different sort of watermark.
  • Solution... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by all204 ( 898409 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @09:59PM (#15022824)
    I have a solution to all this DRM nonsense... Make and play your own music (I play guitar), they can't DRM or control that in any way. Besides it is a very satisfying and rewording hobby.

    ~Allen
  • I don't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by prisoner-of-enigma ( 535770 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @10:11PM (#15022878) Homepage
    It ain't about stopping ``piracy.'' Not even in the slightest. It's all about control, and the power that goes with it.

    I cannot believe that. Power for power's sake? Why? You seem to think these guys are a kind of evil overlord trying to keep the peons in their place. That's about the silliest possible motivation there could be because it flies in the face of reality.

    NO, what motivates these guys is money, pure and simple (not that there's anything wrong with that since I'm an ardent capitalist). They want to do whatever they can to make as much money as the can for as little cost as they can. Following that logic, we find that if something costs them money or reduces the amount of money they can make, they'll be against it. But here's what you fail to realize: the customer is in the driver's seat here, not the media moguls.

    If DRM is too intrusive or obnoxious, consumers won't buy into it, especially since DVD's are already here and "good enough" for most folks. If the industry starts getting heavy handed with ICT, consumers can and quite likely will revolt. Then, faced with the prospect of losing money, the industry will capitulate. They need our dollars (or pounds, or Euros, or whatever) far more than we need them. Deep down, they know that. The problem is that most consumers don't know it yet. But if pushed, they will discover it quite fast.

    It's not about power, it's about money. No matter what the media moguls do, the one thing they cannot do is force us to buy their products. We have the power of choice, they do not.
  • by David Gould ( 4938 ) <david@dgould.org> on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @10:22PM (#15022930) Homepage

    Yes, the "analog hole" is real, in the sense that it prevents any DRM scheme from ever being able to completely eliminate any possibility of copying, but it's very deceptive, for all the reasons mentioned already (real pirates don't use it anyway, it's all about control, etc.) Another reason, which I haven't seen mentioned yet on this thread, is more subtle: it's psychological manipulation, hiding the fact that they're asking for new rights.

    By referring to the possibility of analog copying as a "loophole", they create the impression that it's something new, and that it's not a situation that has previously been considered acceptable. But of course, before we had digital content [*1], all copying, legal and illegal, was analog. Their whole argument for justifying laws like the DMCA was that with digital content came the possibility of digital copying, and that, since this removed the generational-loss problem, copying became more practical (shifting the balance against them), making such laws necessary just to restore the previous balance. But since analog copying was already part of the previous balance, adding laws to block it would be shifting the balance toward them, more than it ever was in the pre-digital days.

    In short, they're rewriting history: reinforcing the false impression that the rules established in the DMCA have always been part of traditional copyright law, and that to leave the "analog hole" open would be to take away something that they've always had, when in fact, closing it would be to give them something that they've never had.

    --
    [1] if anyone can remember a time sooo far back as the early nineties -- Gods, I'm old (29).
  • by linuxtelephony ( 141049 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @10:26PM (#15022950) Homepage
    I doubt it's a myth. I bet they know exactly what they are doing. It's just all a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

    They know they are fighting a losing battle with the "digital copies" that won't be affected by closing the analog hole. However, they also know that they have a captive audience of people that have already purchased their product. These people, at some point, WANT the purchased product.

    Media shifting has (or at least was, don't know if recent case law has overruled or changed it) been legal as fair use. That means it is (or was) legal to copy a CD to casette if you legally purchased the CD and wanted to listen to it in your car cassette deck.

    The media companies don't like this. They want you to have to pay them a second time for the different media. They could not (or at least I don't think they have) stop the fair-use media shifting directly. Now, however, using the guise of piracy, they are taking steps to stop people from being able to do their own media shifting. The end result will be, at least what the media industry hopes will be, a large customer base of people that they know will spend money, since they have once already, on their product that will be more inclined to spend money again for different media.

    Think about it like this. If an older album sold 10,000,000 copies on cassette, and the same album then sold 1,000,000 copies on CD, the media industry will look at trends like that and see an automatic 10% revenue source for minimal work. Now, suppose a CD sells 10,000,000 copies, and the next audio format comes out. If they can make it imposible to copy that CD to the new media format, then it is likely that they'll be able to capture another 10%. 10% doesn't sound like much, but if they sell 1,000,000 copies of a song, and they are pocketing 1 or 2 dollars, that's 1 to 2 million dollars extra, times the number of titles they can repeat this process with.

    In the end, I think they know exactly what they are doing.
  • My 2 cents (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Temujin_12 ( 832986 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @10:56PM (#15023128)
    When someone listens to a song the emotional attachment is made with the artist of the song, NOT the company that produced it. I personally feel the whole DRM situation would taper off if this emotional attachment was reflected economically when a consumer purchases a CD. That way the consumer has an emotional incentive to obtain the song legally since their purchase goes directly to the artist and enforces this emotional attachment. The same is true for movies, books etc. The problem is that in order for this to happen, the large producing/publishing companies will have to go away (or at least fall backstage). These companies know this, and what we are seeing is their attempts to stop natural economic and technological trends. Once it becomes economically feasible for an artist/author to produce/publish their work somewhere else, either by themselves or via companies that don't demand ownership of their work, they will do it, and DRM, as well as large producing/publishing companies won't be needed as much.
  • Re:Solution... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Petrushka ( 815171 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @10:59PM (#15023144)

    Make and play your own music (I play guitar), they can't DRM or control that in any way.

    Yet.

    No, I'm serious. I too am a musician (piano, mostly). Consider: it's not out of the question that some software company might decide one day that they want to control what you do with your own data that you have created using their software. After that, there's not a big conceptual leap between controlling what you do with your data and controlling all private artistic output; the only thing missing is the technology.

    OK, OK, my tinfoil hat is on really tight today, but I'm thinking say a few decades into the future, when everything might potentially be "tagged" in one way or another, -- including acoustic musical instruments. And that bit, I fear, is not at all a paranoid fantasy; I think it's very likely.

  • Re:I don't buy it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by marcosdumay ( 620877 ) <marcosdumay&gmail,com> on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @11:12PM (#15023200) Homepage Journal

    They do force people to buy their products. They simply make sure that the competition doesn't exist. And that is the why they need power.

    So, even if they lose some money on the short term, the *AA will try to get power, because if they don't, the money will go to the competition on the future (and they'll need to adjust their prices). Although money is the final obective, you'd better think about power to understand them, not money.

  • Re:I don't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Draknor ( 745036 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @11:26PM (#15023287) Homepage
    But here's what you fail to realize: the customer is in the driver's seat here, not the media moguls

    Except, we're not. Or at least, not actively driving. Sure, consumers *could* stop buying DRM, but we won't. The media industry will continue to slow turn up the heat, until we're long past boiling and we don't even realize it. Look at it the history of it --

    1. We started with Macrovision, so you couldn't connect two VCRs & copy commercial tapes.
    2. Laserdiscs - no consumer-level recorders, so no problem there
    3. DVDs - region control & CSS, not supposed to be able to rip & copy
    4. HD/Bluray - DRMs starting to get a little more intrusive

    It's not going to happen over night, but once the HD/Bluray standards finally settle and people start buying & upgrading equipment over the next decade, HD & Bluray's DRM will seem like CSS does now - annoying, but not without its workarounds. And then they'll come up with the next big DRM control, and technical people will gripe about it and Average Joe will remain about as clueless.

    The only way consumers will "revolt" is if they crank up the heat too fast. This industry doesn't move *that* fast, and they're smart enough to not alienate their entire customer base all at once.

    In fact, the industry's biggest danger is consumers moving to other forms of media & content before the industry can react -- stuff like iTunes, podcasts, videoblogs, whatever's next. I definitely agree with previous posts in this thread that media moguls are in the DRM movement for control; if they can control the content & the distribution, they get to control where the profits go.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @11:54PM (#15023443)
    Your post is so much bullshit that I had to break out my hip boots.

    Here's what the "big media interests" are really worried about: They worry about people taking their copyrighted material and distributing it illegally, thereby depriving them of the money that they are entitled to by virtue of owning those copyrights. Ignore for a moment whether or not they pay the artists sufficiently in your view, ignore whether or not you think that it is worth what they charge, ignore whether or not you'd have bought it in the first place, ignore whether or not they are making sound business decisions with regards to their approach to the Internet as a distribution method in your estimation - ignore all the rationalizations that so many post here.

    They want to be paid, on their terms, for their copyrighted material, because the terms are theirs to dictate for such, in EXACTLY the same way that you have the right to dictate the terms for anything that you copyright. Want to release your songs, movies, posts for free? GOOD for you! Doesn't entitle you to someone else's for free, unless they CHOOSE to offer them as such.

    They know that just because anyone can "create content" and distribute it easily doesn't mean that it's worth anything, even if it is given away. Sturgeon's Law, right?

    And the sad truth is: Even as the Internet has created a new distribution medium that is increasingly accessible, much of what is distributed through it *is* crap. Look at all the blogs, discussion sites and so forth, and tell me I'm wrong.

    And that is the real challenge, to all of you that want to "stick it to The Man": Create things of value, yourselves, and release them for free with the same conviction that you feel as you infringe on the others' copyrights.

    It isn't likely that most of you will, or can. The truth is, many of you just want to be entertained for free by that which others create, regardless of the terms under which they choose to release it.

    But, I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

    I almost posted this non-AC... but, I'm afraid that I simply don't have the courage to withstand the downmodding of the pro-copyright infringement faction here.
  • by curtvdh ( 738461 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @12:21AM (#15023590)

    ...because it requires the co-operation of hardware manufacturers. Sure, your Big Names are going to fall in line - Sony, Philips, Pansonic etc. But there will still be a host of Chinese/Korean/Singaporean manufacturers who will simply disregard the DRM restrictions. I have a DVD player imported from Korea - plays MPEG-2/MPEG-4, PAL/NSTC, completely disregards region encoding and Macrovision 'quality control', and lets me skip any part of the disc that I want (none of this 'cant use the remote on this piece of video' crap). Plus, is has Component Video Out, DVI/HDMI OUT, VGA Out - pretty much any connector you can think of, it has it. Cost less than $150 (minus shipping).

    The studios are fooling themselves if they think all hardware shops are going to fall in line. Right now, less than 5% of containers arriving at our ports are screened for radioactive materials - do you really think that some know-nothing Customs Agent is going to care about a harmless DVD player?

  • Fill that hole! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Hao Wu ( 652581 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @12:45AM (#15023740) Homepage
    "the so called "analog hole" ... is the slowest and lowest quality method of stealing content."

    They are already willing to degrade quality in order to prevent fair use. What's a little more then?

  • by TimothyJones ( 954047 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @12:47AM (#15023749)
    I am so fed up with entertainment business. I don't mind spending my money on things I like and someone can provide but the whole thing is retarded, and getting more retarded still. I don't believe MPAA, RIAA, studios, labels and the bunch are morons and thinnk that somehow, by introducing all the restrictions they'll eradicate piracy and stand to make significant profit, if bigger profit at all due to that fact. It is all about control and someone going "Because I said so and you little shitheads bow down to me!" Recently there was this thing with French having a problem with iTunes and locking into iPod, and I don't particualrly care for the French but you know what? They're right. Wanna provide content and sell songs? Fine, but don't limit people to some specific equipment. Otherwise, kindly fuck off! Chevys are not required to fill up at a special GM gas station, how are songs or movies any different? They're not.

    I can't have simply a satellite receiver, oh no, I need to have a CrapTV receiver and if for some reason I'd like to switch or buy some "other" programming, well receiver goes to the trash. What is the goddamned deal here? Same with the cell phones, cable tv, sat radio and few other things. I really cannot fathom how can equipment manufacturers even go for this crap? It is almost unimaginable that we have somehow managed to build a universally accessible Internet. Someone must have had a brain fart and forgot to grease our public servants.

    Back in the day I truly enjoyed my first TiVo. Awesome product and what a concept. Add a dash of DirecTV and one ends up with TiShit. The thing changes channels on its own to record infomercials, convininently and regularly reorganinzes my channel list to include removed by me shopping channels, bitches constantly about not being able to call home and a host of other annoying things. AND to top it all off we're being charged $5 or so a month for a DVR SERVICE. What fucking service!? I bought the damn thing for top dollars, it's a computer with a hard drive and all it does is record what I tell it to. What service!? That whole DRM shit is really no surprise and will likely go the same way. We enjoyed having pricey but no less standardized CD's and DVD's for a long while but the end is near. We'll end up with yet another "service". Wanna listen at home? Here you go. Wanna listen in your car? Sure, you'll need to pay more for this additional, exciting "service". Wanna listen to some other record label? Well you'll need a whole new equipment for that. Actually it's already here in the form of sat radio. It's not about piracy at all. Frankly those who'd even consider watching a video-recorded movie are pathetic losers who have no appreciacion for film, any film and will not spend real money on it anyway. Pirates will do whatever they do and no crappy DRM will stop them just like all the software activations and cable/sat scrambling haven't done a thing but to annoy and limit an already and duly paying customer. Actually it may as well increase the demand for pirated media not because it's cheaper or free, but because you'll be actually able to listen to it, watch it or use it. It is not about providing customers with content, it's about controlling what you do and selling sub-content. Commercials on TV don't work cause everyone hates them so they need to sell shit some other way. They'd be glad to precede every song on a CD with an "information from our sponsor" and to ensure sponsor's happy, it'd be neat if they could guarrantee that the customer will definitely listen to the promo - cause he's got no say in the matter. Yea, he paid for the CD, who gives a shit, we can make more money this way. It also be cool if we somehow made it a law prohibiting turning down the volume for the promo's duration. Many DVD's already have that great feature and one must sit thru several minutes of stupid - ehem pardon me, "exciting" previews before they get to watch a movie that they paid for. They're so exciting they have to make us watch it, to watch it. Some media

  • offshore jobs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @01:54AM (#15024068) Homepage Journal
    The funny thing is that the studios would almost certainly see a lot less actual piracy if they would stop having their DVD presses run cheaply in China and other places where it's sometimes difficult to find a legit DVD.

    I guess they added up the figures and came to the conclusion it's still cheaper doing it that way. They only fake the losses when they need to force through some new law.
  • by Phroggy ( 441 ) * <slashdot3@ p h roggy.com> on Thursday March 30, 2006 @03:54AM (#15024508) Homepage
    Long and short, DRM and copy protection stops casual copiers. But dedicated copiers, if left with no other alternative, still have the analog hole as a last resort. And once one dedicated copier puts something on the file sharing nets... ...it will be more convenient to download the pirated version of the film than to buy it in a store and jump through whatever hoops they want you to jump through in order to get it to play. Video games reached this point a few years ago - there are lots of people who go out and buy a game, then download a pirated version (or just a crack) so they can play it without all the anti-piracy crap.

    Steve Jobs touched on this issue when he introduced the iTunes Music Store. Apple understands that in order to make money selling music, they have to make it significantly less hassle to buy it legally than to pirate it. The MPAA hasn't figured this out yet.

    I don't watch very much TV, so I have no interest in paying for cable or satelite TV. However, I really like The Daily Show. I used to pirate it via BitTorrent, but then SuprNova got shut down, then another torrent site got shut down, TVTorrents doesn't seem to have new episodes posted on a regular basis, the P2P networks I've looked at are unreliable and slow and don't usually have new episodes... there are probably other places I could look, but it's just a pain in the ass. So when Apple announced they would be selling a monthly subscription, I jumped at the chance to throw money at them. Why? Because it's significantly easier than pirating. It's not perfect yet (iTMS MultiPass isn't as smooth and seamless as Podcasts are), but it's not a pain in the ass.

    I don't have much money to spend on entertainment right now. If you want any of it, you have to give me something I want for a price I think is reasonable without being obnoxious about it. Period.
  • by 16K Ram Pack ( 690082 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (dnomla.mit)> on Thursday March 30, 2006 @03:57AM (#15024521) Homepage
    The other thing is that people shifting their media means their CDs and DVDs remain intact. If you rip your CD to your PC and then to your iPod, you can put your CD on a shelf, and probably never need to touch it again.

    That means no losing it, no scratching it or anything else that could generate a repeat sale.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30, 2006 @04:01AM (#15024537)
    Bruteforce won't be necessary. Encryption only works when the people wanting to control the information are the only ones to have the keys.

    Give the keys to the consumer, and someone will crack them.

    Don't give the keys to the consumer, and his HD-player won't be able to play any movies, and thus no sales.

    The only thing they can do is try to hide the keys so that the consumer can't find them, but not so good that the player can't find them. It's not going to work.

    Microsofts Trusted Computing has a much better chance of working, because the only thing they need to hide is the public key for validating the signature, not a decryption key. And public keys don't need to be secret in the first place. The private key for signing the software is never going to leave the Microsoft vault.
  • by shutdown -p now ( 807394 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @05:25AM (#15024809) Journal
    it's a balance. the content creators DO have a right to limit your access to content they create. this provides them with an incentive to create content.
    One important thing you forgot to mention is that those rights they have are not inherent. We, the society, grant them those rights for our benefit. If those rights do not serve towards their intended purpose, they can just as well be revoked.
  • by -brazil- ( 111867 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @05:25AM (#15024810) Homepage
    The biggest problem facing independent distribution is NOT global corporations; they have little to fear from independent developers. The biggest problem facing independent media is not the difficulty of production/distribution; the biggest problem is that THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE WILLING TO CREATE MEDIA!!

    No. Lots of people are creating media. The biggest problem is that people are not willing to find and support stuff that's not shoved down their throats with millions of marketing dollars.

    The herd mentality of the consumers is what keeps the media cartels in business, because only they have the promotion infrastructure to create the big hits that make big money.
  • Re:I don't buy it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Aceticon ( 140883 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @05:27AM (#15024821)
    The day when downloading a movie from the Net is easier and gives you a beter quality product than buying it from the content producer is the day consumers will start jumping ship in droves.

    Look at "protected" music CDs (hi Sony!) vs mp3s downloads from the latest and greatest P2P network.

    If you have any kind of portable MP3 player, pirating the music IS the best option. (sad really)

    (This is not completely so, thanks to Apple an iTunes)

    Thus for movies, the scenario of turning the heat on too fast is still viable even when studios are slowly heating up the DRM fire. This is because consumers don't feel the heat in a linear way (the absolute number of hurdles do i have to jump over to seem the movie), but instead in a non-linear one (how many hurdles do i have to jump over by comparisson with the other ways of getting the same content)

    DRM will not protected against pirating of the movies simply because for each movie DRM only has to be broken or bypassed once for the movie to become available in the Net.

  • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @05:47AM (#15024875) Homepage
    With all due respect, D/A/D conversion means that the "analog hole" is now always a first generation analog copy. While they've never put DRM on analog copying, you can't claim that a redigitization is anything like the tenth generation VHS tapes that were floating around.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30, 2006 @07:13AM (#15025071)
    That way you will have a viewable movie 50 years from now

    That must be why movie studios spend millions of dollars restoring master copies of old films (gone with the wind etc.) then... or are you just talking rubbish? The best way to preserve something long-term is to keep copying it (like medieval monks with manuscripts), and that works better with digital methods (and extensive error correction codes) than with analog.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30, 2006 @07:31AM (#15025120)
    I don't watch TV, I don't watch movies, and I only buy used cd's. I can do it -- can you?
  • by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @07:35AM (#15025139) Homepage Journal
    Its about control of the consumer/citizen.
  • by Britz ( 170620 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @08:25AM (#15025266)
    I am a big libertarian over here in Europe (which would translate to democrat in the US, yes, we are so far apart!), but there might be times when markets do seem to fail. The DVD was a large success. But the next generation? DRM is just one of the areas where the entertainment industry seems hopelss. Will the consumer "wait and see" for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray? I guess they will. Will they wait for DRM to actually work? Most likely! Will that translate into much sales? Hardly!

    Same happened to the music industry and online distribution. They slept through it. They didn't even combat online piracy very good. They still don't. Maybe in part because Kazaa promotes the most popular and therefore acutally serves them. But iTunes came along pretty late in the game and still much earlier than the labels themselves.

    Many people now have some sort of 5.1 or 6.1 Dolby Digital system at home. The music industry could sell all their stuff in sourround and reap similar profits to the movie industry with their old stuff on DVD selling like mad. Competing formats, no marketing, complete failure!!!

    I still don't think the government should get involved in many of those cases, simply because markets sort it out eventually (see iTunes). But they would serve the industry much better if they would take lead in some sort of standard body. It might take longer with the government involved, but shorter and cheaper than the upcoming standards war.
  • by steevc ( 54110 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @09:11AM (#15025404) Homepage Journal
    Years ago I heard a reference to 'format fatigue', i.e. we got bought CDs because we were bored with vinyl. B*ll*cks I say. New formats are introduced to get us to buy again. It worked with vinyl->CD and VHS->DVD because everyone could see the advantage. It didn't work with CD->DVDA or SACD.

    I don't anticipate buying movies again on the new DVD formats. My DVDs sound and look good enough with my 28" CRT and basic surround system and I don't re-watch them much anyway. Audio-/videophiles may think differently, but they are a small minority. I'll consider a new player when they get affordable.
  • Re:I don't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by albanac ( 214852 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @09:23AM (#15025449) Homepage Journal

    It's not about power, it's about money. No matter what the media moguls do, the one thing they cannot do is force us to buy their products. We have the power of choice, they do not.

    There's something of a series of responses I'd like to make here.

    Firstly, there's no question that you're right that this is about money. You seem to have missed the basic reality that in the West, and indeed most places, money == power, up to the point of full-scale nuclear military engagement. Without money, you can't run a war: why do you think the US national debt is so much higher now than it was in 2000? You can work from there right down the scale to the two guys on the street who see a hot dog stand and are both hungry. The one who has $5 has the power to become fed, the one who does not lacks this power. But you're right: it's about the money.

    Your comment about the power of choice, unfortunately, is theoretically fine but practically irrelevant. The US consumer really doesn't have the power of choice, and most consumers in the Western world lack it as well; those in some corners of Europe like Scandanavia and the Czech Republic have more than most. This is because any given consumer has the power of choice, but consumers en masse do exactly what they're told. Marketing works. Targetted and co-ordinated marketing works (take a look at how we got into Operation Cobra II in the first place). The only arenas in which Western consumers have actual choice are those in which there are competing products made by companies who have to compete on quality and price: arenas like, for example, high grade sports equipment or food. Lots of choices there. The current area of discussion, however, is a cartel-based industry. There is no competition on price (prices are standard). There is no competition based on quality, because while the cartel may display the occasional interneicine rivalry, everyone in the club knows that they aren't competing against each other: all they have to do is keep making less movies at more money per movie every year, and because they are the only game in town, the general public will keep watching their movies. In case you doubt that comment, apply google to the problem and take a look at the number of movies made per year and how that indicates a trend over the time period from 1920 to the present day. Cross-reference with average price per movie.

    Now we get to the meat of the issue. Just as with the produced-band, hip-hop canned pap industry (otherwise known as the Recording Industry of America Association) the cartel which rules movies has seen a very worrying trend. People aren't spending as much money on movies as they used to. They're still buying the merchandise, which helps: they're still buying movies and going to see them in the cinema, but they're doing so less often. The obvious conclusion from this is they don't like the movies, or consider them (or their media) to be overpriced for the quality. This, however, is not something a cartel can admit. The cartel in question are looking for any way to maintain their profit margins: that's their job. Their profit margins are not based on quality or competition: they are the only game in town. What are their profit margins traditionally based on?

    Leverage of a monopoly status. The term 'gatekeepers' is a useful one: see Jim Baen for a more developed version of this argument from the point of view of a print literature publisher. Publication of entertainment, be it books, films or music, was once an industry with a staggeringly high cost of entry. You had to be One of Us (tm) already to be able to afford to enter the industry, and if you got into it and weren't already one of us, you'd soon have enough cash that you were acceptable to the club. This high cost of entry meant that a cartel-based industry could develop without problems. Back in the day, the cartels *did* compete, but the losers got bought by the winners until pretty much all movies distributed by Hollywood today are owned

  • by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @10:06AM (#15025668) Journal
    I'll up the ante and say that my DVDs (the well produced ones) look excellent on a 51" high quality RPTV. The best produced DVDs are between good and very good, even on a 119" screen (my previous setup) through a HD FP.

    IMHO, there are relatively few things which look significantly better at high definition, and most of those would benefit from full 1080p, and a system which can provide that resolution. Team sports played on large fields is one of them (like football - both types).

    I own about 250 movies on DVD, and I really don't plan on re-buying 95% of them. There are a few lousy transfers I'll probably get, though I'd be happy with a better produced DVD (Thomas Crown Affair, Titanic come to mind). Most of my discs are about the story, not fantastic resolution. Will Animal House get better in HD? Waking Ned Devine? Of course not.

    Sadly, the new formats are aimed at better picture and sound, but are limited largely by the environment, in addition to the cost of the setup. Heck, I'm picky about my audio, but I still rip to 128kb for the MP3 discs I put in my car because - lets face it - you can't tell the difference with wind noise at 70MPH.
  • by BVis ( 267028 ) on Thursday March 30, 2006 @11:04AM (#15026004)
    Analog audio is good quality, let's not forget we live in an analog world..our eyes and ears process analog. The main problem in the piracy world is taking advantage of this hole properly, which many won't do because of the time and expense involved. I'm an audio engineer, I quite honestly find audio Cd's quite lacking in the sound game.
    Now that I've listened to DVD-Audio and SACD, I agree that CDs are lacking. But you're an audio engineer and I'm an uptight elitist asshole, and we represent a very very very small percentage of the market. Most of the great unwashed couldn't give two shits about the quality of the experience they're having; they care that it's cheap and loud. When consumers begin to adopt HD-DVD and/or Blu-Ray, most of them will buy the inevitable converters to plug them into their older HDTVs (because they're used to having to buy extra stuff, since they don't understand or don't care about how to do things the way they're engineered), thus incurring the "analog hole" penalty, and either won't notice the difference or won't care. Thus the DRM doesn't have a negative effect on sales, even though the consumer is getting a quarter of the quality they're paying for.
    It was even brought up a few times that record companies go back to distributing on vinyl to prevent piracy, it MIGHT work comsidering few people have the capability to properly record vinyl.
    The key word there is "properly". People will go back to using their old-fashioned cassette decks, or capture the output in some other way that's been around since the 70's. There's a marked loss of sound quality, but again, people either don't notice or don't care.
     
    IMHO this is the most important factor in trying to fight onerous DRM: The average consumer's complete apathy towards and/or ignorance of the drawbacks of the technology.
    As far as movie theaters..that's a losing game.
    And now we've hit on the REAL cause of theater revenues dropping in recent years. People used to like going to the movies. They paid a few bucks, got a decent seat, some popcorn, STFU'd, and watched the movie on a big screen. Now, you pay an arm and a leg, get a plastic seat, pay the other arm and leg for popcorn (or risked ejection by bringing your own snacks), yack yack yack incessantly throughout the movie (either to their companions or their cell phones), and watch the movie on some screen that probably has been completely poorly maintained, if at all, and listen to sound on blown out K-Mart quality speakers. Even the bigwigs at the MPAA have admitted that the poor theater experience contributes to the loss of revenues they're seeing. (There are exceptions to this experience; I saw V for Vendetta on opening weekend in a "premium cinema" near where I live. It's expensive, sure, but not all that much more than a regular theater, and when you factor in that the popcorn is free, the seats are leather, you have 2 of your own armrests, a pull-out tray table, and a full bar in the lobby that allows you to bring drinks into the theater, not to mention the THX spec sound an video, it's a fucking bargain.
  • by crashdot ( 749909 ) <swysong@pacbell.net> on Thursday March 30, 2006 @03:14PM (#15028490)
    A digital SPDIF out is built into 99% of DVD players, most of which play regular ol' audio CD's. Since a PC has been determined by the courts to NOT be a recording device (the RIAA vs. lost the MP3 Players case), so SCMS is not an issue, the SPDIF out looks to be a yawning Digital Hole, although digital capture would be limited to a 1X speed. SPDIF to USB anyone? I'm sure there are some cheap (under $70) USB Audio Adapters that will enable SPDIF CD ripping from a DVD player ... in fact, a cheap cable that's just SPDIF-to-USB has been a dream of mine --- truly a RipCord (TM, I hope soon). I'm a software guy - otherwise I'd create this thing ... any volunteers in the hardware world? We will all be grateful to you for the death of ALL audio CD copy protection.

UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker

Working...