IETF on DRM, Internet Faxing

Rich Salz writes: "The Internet Research Task Force, a sister of the IETF, has a research group on Internet digital rights management. Ebooks, secure content, no-fair-use (sic), etc. According to a presentation at the last IETF, one of the group's work items is to influence other IETF activities to support/architect DRM. IDRM membership is open to anyone, presumably including nay-sayers." Meanwhile, the IETF has put on hold its work toward an internet fax standard, as Adobe and Xerox squabble over a file format.

Waiting for Adobe and Xerox?

What the hey... maybe I'm ignernt or something, but what's the deal with waiting for two companies to quit squabbling? Why not define the standard and let _them_ conform to the standards, instead of conforming the standards to _them_??

Their charter contains the problem

From their charter: 'IDRM is concerned with legal and social issues only to the extent that they affect or constrain DRM technology.'

I think thats more than half the problem. They arent asking IF something should be done, only how to do it. If someone comes up with a way to track every word I read in an ebook and then delete it so I cant re-read it what are the bets these guys would support it rather than 'constrain' the technology?

Maybe we should form the Internet Social Issues Team (IS IT) to address the things the corporations dont want to be bothered with.

File format? PNG of course. Duh.

PNG includes some compression techniques a lot like that used in fax transmission, so it's an easy conversion, I think. Some fax-to-email software already converts faxes to PNG format. And PNG includes some metadata capabilities (comment fields) which could be used for the phone numbers ("station ID's" in fax terminology) etc.

You wonder where the money goes

I suppose it goes to lawers who publish dribble like THIS [ietf.org]. What an incredible, stupid, greedy list. Picture databases, email faxes? If I get an email fax spam do I get to sue the sender or the liscencer? I wish they had bought dumb chairs instead.

What a depressing organization.

TIFF is already standard, who needs color?

I have been using internet faxing for years. I setup a TPC [tpc.int] node, and also used the Panasonic UF770i fax and both worked together.

TIFF works.

Why bother with Color? Only graphic artists and print shops use color faxing. And then, the documents are usually printed on a Postscript printer, then faxed. In that case, if you have a PostScript printer and internet, why not send the plain PS file?

DON'T STARTLE ME LIKE THAT!!

That title is dangerous. It looks like the IETF is addressing the question of putting DRM in internet faxing.

Upon reading the article it is clear that the post is about the two seperate issues of [the IETF and DRM] and [the IETF and faxing], but the four seconds of shocked, frozen horror upon reading that headline were still pretty bad.

Gods.. DRM built into your fax/print standard. that would be terrifying, a fax/print system with an inherent bias against flexibility at the standard level. What an ugly, ugly thought. Be more careful next time.. you might give some old, feeble-hearted UNIX/COBOL engineer a heart attack before they get a chance to read the article blurb and realise they misinterpreted the headline.

Jeez.. you might as well accidentally post a link on a for-children-only website to whitehouse.com, or something.

here goes

<rant>
ok I'm not an "information wants to be free" monkey, neither do I oppose the idea. But to what extent do we need (I)DRM? Understandably, commercial software vendors want to profit from their creations, and artists want to be paid for their art, but I think that this is going to reach much farther than that. I have seen how the 'net has changed in the last 8-10 years and I remember when it was the BBS ops protecting their own 'wares (which had an entirely different meaning back then) and through it all, not a lot has really changed except the technology behind it all. Big brother (whoever it may be in each particular case) wants to be assured that you only get your slice of the pie and not a part of his. It's only a matter of time before image recognition filters are in place and can monitor who is on your desktop background. It's always us [trying to keep them out of our business] against them [making us their business] and guess what! We always lose! How long until pirated software, mp3s pr0n etc just searches your drive for a liscense, and self destructs when it doesn't find it? Anyway, I suppose I'm just ranting.
</rant>

Fax Format

I wonder which format (Xerox or Adobe) is going to have the first fax virus embedded... oops.. sorry, Adobe.Alex

sad, really

...to see that this "new" innovation is going to use a propietary format. Think of the bickering it will cause.... oh, right. You know why they're fighting over this, right? Same kind of problem with MP3. Royalties, it is all about the royalties. Shame on the IETF.

Spam faxes considered harmful

Of course, you might want to look at Ed Foster's discussion [infoworld.com] of blast spam-faxing and ask yourself if we want better ways of automatically producing more junk mail?

sPh

The IETF needs a Patent IP policy for standards

Squabling over Intellectual Property in standard protocols is short sighted. It reduces the possibility the company holding the IP will be able to have the market advantage that comes with inclusion of their technology in a atandard (because no one will bother to include their technology) and potentially harms the quality and viability of the proposed standard There are plenty of residual revenue streams that come out of such inclusion of IP in a standard, that do not have the potential of harming the diability and rate-of-adoption of a standard (like treditional IP licensing would). The article about the internat fax standard says:

Adobe refuses to support TIFF-FX unless Xerox releases rights for its MRC technology to Adobe.

Xerox, meanwhile, won't back TIFF-FX unless Adobe promises to support the standard in its next version of TIFF.

This shouldn't ever be an issue. There should be a standard mechanism implemented for management and status handling of Intelectual property which becomes part of IETS standards (protocols, file formats, etc) such that there is never a question as to the availability for use of a standard. This is the same sort of issue that came up in an earlier discussion of Dolby Digital AC-3 decoding [slashdot.org] where the standards body, the Advanced Television Systems Committee [atsc.org] has a patent policy [atsc.org] which states in part that:

A license will be made available without compensation to applicants desiring to utilize the license for the purpose of implementing the standard.

Unfortunately, even with this policy, Dolby Labs is making claims against the NetBSD project for inclusing an unlicensed decoder in an Open Source product. The IETS needs to learn from this situation and develop an iron clad patent and IP policy such that these issues never arise when people attempt to implement IETF standards.

--CTH

Internet Fax Standards

Meanwhile, the IETF has put on hold its work toward an internet fax standard, as Adobe and Xerox squabble over a file format.

Internet Fax standards have already existed for years : Check out www.tpc.int [tpc.int] for more info. You'll note that the entire TPC.INT system is based on several RFCs that were released years ago: see RFCs 1528, 1529, and 1530. (And 1703, which extended tpc.int to radio paging....)

digital rights management and tech arms race

Rights management? that's an oxymoron.

IDRM will not pursue research into the legal and social issues of DRM. IDRM is concerned with legal and social issues only to the extent that they affect or constrain DRM technology. As the IDRM RG intends to focus on technical issues, it will address technologies that promote both copy-protection and fair-use copying of digital objects. IDRM will pursue research into DRM technology with a focus on the end-to-end and IP network infrastructure issues of DRM.

What the heck? I don't think that someone who views legal and social issues as a constraint on technology should be developing the technology.

The people who develop technologies deeply rooted in the social context have truly achieved their dreams; as these technologies gain widespread use, they transform society and enrich their creators.

In the case of copy protections and other forms of rights management, these technologists are inventing far away from the wishes of society.

If the mainstream press has understood antyhing, it is that people want to widely share and download music, to create their own unique musical soundtracks and archives, and to share music for free.

If digital rights management becomes widespread, it will only be because the influence of money, and not that of a vast social trend, caused it to happen.

The technologists who make it won't ever be able to rest, they will be in a permanent arms race with those who try to crack the technology. They'll be foot soldiers in a war between money and a social trend.

I doubt that rights management, an algorithmic, bureaucratic process, can win against fair use, a social and organic process. I think the people who live and love the science of copy protection should look in the long term, and use their talents in the interests of people, rather than money.

Internet Faxing? Okay, if you say so.

The standard seems to be: "Who the hell cares?"

- A.P.

Rights and Wrongs

If "digital rights management" is "bad", why does Slashdot put an OSDN copyright statement on its web pages?

I'm far more concerned about plugging up the Internet with more crap, i.e. faxes. Why do we need fax over IP anyway? Is it just so Adobe and Xerox can introduce a new uselss must-have product to business, or because there's any crying need for fax-over-IP?

Internet faxing is available

Typically, you use the SMTP protocol and the "PNG" "GIF" or "JPG" file formats. Our office uses "DOC" "HTML" and "PDF" internally. Do any of these sound familiar to anyone else?

Seriously, what advantage does internet faxing have over email? Email is fast and open-ended. It can handle any type of file format. It can be secured, tracked, provides return reciept.

If you read the article, it talks about two companies using proprietary extensions for color faxes, and they are talking IP rights before the working group has even made a draft! I'm not interested in protocols being manhandled by corporations. Standards are standards. (Remember USRobotics and modem standards years back?)

Standardize DRM is impossible

Is it even possible to have standardized DRM? I thought that every single attempt at DRM, has absolutely and solely relied on security through obscurity. If you publish a standard, don't you lose obscurity?

I advoid TIFF's

I don't know about you but I advoid TIFFs. This sould be solved quickly with a simple agreement on png or jpeg.

When will the world learn:

There are two kinds of organizations:

A) Hardware/Infrastructure
B) Software/Content

Type A has no business getting involved with type B goals and priorities. Type A's job is to make things work. Type B goals like DRM make things NOT work.

Stop it stop it stop it, stop it right now.

No-fair-use ?

" Ebooks, secure content, no-fair-use (sic), etc."

The charter for this RG says explicitly that "it will address technologies that promote both copy-protection and fair-use copying of digital objects" which hardly sounds like no fair use to me. People on Slashdot all too often seem to think that all digital rights management is inherently evil when this is simply not the case. For instance, DRM covers schemes that allow unlimited copying with strong tracability so that you can make all the copies you need but if you start selling them the owners will know the who the culprit is.

You should all remember that this is an open IRTF group. If you have ideas about how DRM should work to both protect the fair use rights of consumers and also allow fair dues to the authors, then go and let them know. Sitting around on Slashdot moaning that the IETF is going to become a branch of the MPAA is both disingenuous and unproductive.

The winds of change

All this shouting about IP and digital copy protection and DRM has everyone upset and thinking the virtual sky is going to fall on them. All the history of commerce and ownwership and copyright and the related shows that no matter what is legislated, mandated, or threatened, any conclusion that makes a technology or product inconvenient to have or use or own will fail. Any product that cannot be owned, transacted, or used without inconvenience will fail to be profitable. Any technology that keeps a product or service from being used easily will be replaced with something new, or will be morphed (legally or not) into something that people appreciate. Otherwise it will fail. It's why radios and cell phones got smaller. It's why newspapers still cost $0.50 and books are expensive, and why flying cars aren't everywhere. It's why liquor is still legal.

What's important to remember is that it will not happen overnight. It will happen over years, decades, or generations.

meetings?

I really want to participate in this, as it seems o be a fairly democratic process, and I know the the IETF and RFC's really truly matter.

My only question is, when is the next meeting? It's not mentioned on the site. Are the meetings help online? I'm not exactly flying to stockholm, no matter how much I care.

Has anyone here participated in this kind of thing before?

real digital rights management

As far as I can tell, technically there *IS* one slim sliver hope for digital rights management on the internet.

For concreteness, suppose we're talking about an eBook. It is a given that you can't secure an eBook: someone can always run it an emulated environment and dump the text to an ASCII file. And you can't prevent it from being passed around the internet once it is broken. A system like Freenet can be made more or less unbreakable (provided automatic passing of encrypted messages remains legal and permitted by ISPs.)

The ray of hope is to make every copy of an eBook slightly different. In one book, use "grey" instead of "gray" on page 67. In another, put a comma before a short prepositional phrase on page 123. By using various combinations of these, a publisher could at least identify which copy is being passed around the net and prosecute the hell out of that person. (Copyright holders can probably get the law changed to prescribe a many-year prison sentence.)

Clearly, this is no panacea. What if someone in Cuba breaks the eBook? What if you steal the book off someone else's computer, break it, and distribute their copy? What if you buy the eBook in a way that conceals your identity? Futhermore, it might be possible to combine several versions of the text to destroy these markers. (But this doesn't look easy to me.) And even if you can identify and prosecute the original copyright violator, that's little solace to the publisher after everyone already has a free copy of Harry Potter V in hand.

But that's it: the only ray of hope I see for DRM, unless the internet itself is significantly hobbled-- which seems entirely possible.

Puppet

It sounds as if the IETF is a puppet group trying to enforce the whims of some major corporations. Think they'll be as big and bad as the RIAA in 5 years when ebooks get more mainstream? Maybe I'm reading too much 2600

Re:hmm

As it stands now, faxes are legally just as good as the original, including (especially) any signatures you fax. Kinda tricky to do with with e-mail.

Re:DRM...

dude! that's what i thought

Re:hmm

I use my old modem as a fax machine now. Since I have a broadband connection, I don't need the modem, and its a lot more cost effective (ie cheaper) to use an old modem than go buy another device that just takes up space.