DRM and intel chips
Hardware DRM on mac and windows frightens me, it is yet another way for the **aa to fuck the consumer, I am not for theft or illegal P2P but this is a move to stop me from copying DVDs for backup, divx rip it to my laptop HDD for that long trip, what have you.
My concerns are the above and how does the chip allow for fair use? and how does it know if I have copy right holders permission, and could these things deny access to my own content too (think back to the nikon raw v Photoshop thing and imagine that on every device)?
Wirth DRMed hardware, are we signing our souls over to the devil of having to ask big pro permittion to do anything on OUR OWN hardware?
My concerns are the above and how does the chip allow for fair use? and how does it know if I have copy right holders permission, and could these things deny access to my own content too (think back to the nikon raw v Photoshop thing and imagine that on every device)?
Wirth DRMed hardware, are we signing our souls over to the devil of having to ask big pro permittion to do anything on OUR OWN hardware?
Comments
Originally posted by a_greer
My concerns are the above and how does the chip allow for fair use?
Fair use? Hah! DRM "renders quaint" the notion of fair use.
I'm not sure how much of a chance, if any, this bill has, but if you care about fair use in the US, write to your representatives in favor of HR 1201, the "Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act of 2005". This bill, if passed, would help reverse some of the worst parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Here's a convenient link for e-mailing your congressional reps.
Not only can DRM be used, it almost certainly will be used, to give "content providers" unprecedented control over exactly how, when, where, with whom, and how often you are permitted to access their oh-so-precious content. With preventing infringement as an excuse, however, DRM goes well beyond content protection to business model protection.
As much as I love my iPod and the iTunes music store, Apple is certainly guilty of abusing DRM this way. Their DRM is not only protecting the content they sell from infringing uses, the DRM is being used to create "lock in" with iPods, Airport Express, and any other music-related product Apple might choose to try to sell you some day. Now, Apple's lock-in is far from complete -- you can still burn iTMS music to CD. But if you want to use someone else's MP3 player, or a product like a SoundBridge or a Squeezebox, you have to burn CDs you might not otherwise need, and then re-rip them, ending up with much bigger files and/or a loss of sound quality from doubled-up lossy compression.
Apple puts an artificial barrier of inconvenience and possible loss of quality up between you and other people's competing hardware. Now, if Apple makes it more convenient to use their hardware and software by superb design that one thing -- more power to them. But deliberate technical barriers, backed by the threat of jail time if you attempt to circumvent those barriers even for personal, non-infringing uses, is quite another.
I wouldn't be surprised if the mere process of burning iTMS music to CDs and then re-ripping those CDs could be construed as circumventing Apple's DRM, and thus technically be illegal under the DMCA. Buy a few albums from iTMS, burn them to CD, rip them back to play on your Squeezebox in the comfort of your own living room... and you could be sent to jail for longer than the time a lot of people convicted of manslaughter serve.
Of course, Microsoft isn't any better than Apple when it comes to this. Sure, they license their DRM to many different companies, and Microsoft tries to sell this as "giving the consumer choice". But what Microsoft is shooting for is a world where there's no choice in whose DRM and whose media formats you'll need to listen to or watch anything, so that no matter who you buy your media from, and no matter whose hardware you play your media on, Microsoft will get their piece of the action in licensing fees.