Representation is arbitrary. IP laws identify "intellectual property" by representation. IP laws are not adapting, and they aren't able to adapt. The situation is hopeless and unenforceable: encrypt a DVD-rip or music file and then ask someone to identify it as such. It's impossible. We have to move beyond believing in copyright and IP laws because they are not enforceable.
Why is this true? Why do you think DVD copy protection is doomed to fail? Smart tech people who think this are usually falling into the trap of assuming DVD copy protection has to be perfect. It doesn't; it just has to make large-scale copying and distribution economically irrational.
So far, the BD+ scheme on Blu-Ray disks has had to be bypassed title by title, with Slysoft's breaks being corrected by Macrovision and Slysoft averaging 2.5 weeks on each of the refreshes. Nobody has come up with a scheme that completely defeats BD+. And BD+ is the first system of its kind; subsequent systems will be even more of a bitch to deal with. Add to that the fact that Slysoft has a really smart team that does almost nothing but this.
Take another example: DirecTV. The current DTV smartcards are unbroken, despite a ~7 year track record of breaks leading up to them.
Take another example: iTMS FairPlay. Last time I checked, there still isn't an equivalent break to JHymn, which does a direct decryption of audio files.
Take still another example, of protected media pathways on Windows kernels; currently shipping Intel hardware has chipset-enforceable RSA/SHA/AES locks on kernel integrity, which is something you want anyways, because without it you can't trust your kernel against malware.
And of course, all of this assumes that the goal is to keep people from copying at all. The industry could also solve the revocation problem, so that when copies are detected, players are shut off, accounts are closed, or people are sued. Ed Felten beat early watermarking attempts, but come on, do we really think watermarking is an intractable problem? It's the covert channel problem turned around to favor the defender; the media companies will win it.
I'm not making a moral stand here (although I really think that if you don't want to pay for DRM'd Miley Cyrus tracks, or pay for Miley Cyrus at all, you simply shouldn't give your money to Warner Music Group). But I object to the knee-jerk dogma that copy protection can't work. I think it can.
You're concentrating on the wrong side of technology. In order to prevent copying, one has to do so on _every_ computing/playback device, not only the content producer blessed ones.
As long as we've got private communications, it will become ever easier to share media over the internet. It only takes one "Pirate_0" to break the copy protection (even if it requires digitizing LCD signals). And if breaking the protection requires substantial capital, the market will oblige.
You didn't read the second-to-last graf of my comment. Even if they can't universally stop copying, and a small number of people can still introduce high-fidelity copies, they can use technology to create deterrents to distributing them.
Two simple examples:
If a license or physical player is needed to create a high-fidelity copy (for instance, by capturing raw video streams from a player), and the output video is watermarked, content providers can revoke the player. Now "free" copies cost players.
If the same technology creates a trail of evidence leading back to "pirate 0", people will start getting sued. Not everyone the RIAA sued was innocent, and there's nothing to say that the DVD legal teams will create the same PR firestorm the RIAA did by abusing the system. Just as importantly, if it takes a huge amount of effort to create a supply chain of unlawful copies, the court case is much more damaging.
Content protection is not really a practice focus for us (though anticheating and kernel protection are), so my thoughts on this are not an exhaustive summary of the space of solutions content providers have. I'm just saying, the content providers aren't always on the wrong side of computer science.
To render watermarking useless, pirate_0 only needs to periodically buy a new player+LCD with cash. Any scarcity created by discouraging amateurs from being pirate_0 will only encourage professionals to move into the sector.
Even if it costs $1k to get each movie release out of protected form, it's cheap for a (dubious) advertiser wishing to get a message out to a huge audience.
And further down the road, I suspect there will be an anonymous market for such content. $1k is only a penny from 100k people.
The sector is already dominated by professionals. The dynamics of satellite TV were similar, and though it was a painful process to revoke not only malicious players but the entire population of defective players that broke the protected path from DTV to the S-Video port, they eventually succeeded.
My point is, "useless" is too strong a word. It isn't silver-bullet simple, but it is a tool that can be made to work. Content providers are already costing Slysoft money; now they just have to figure out how to increase that cost fast enough to push them out of business.
Both satellite piracy and creating DVD decryption software require cracking the decryption process in a sustainable way.
But for getting one-time copies out, there will always be an analog output at the end of the chain. Watermarking allows the distributor to pinpoint the device used, but the only thing they can do with this information is shut down the device. I don't see how this can be an economic threat when player prices must be kept low for consumers, but there are millions of people wanting pirated content (which is easily distributed after extraction).
There are two things they can do with the watermark: revoke the device, and sue the person who bought it. You can't get an AT&T SIM card or a DTV smart card without a contract. The only difference between those and a DVD player is the form factor.
Given a budget of $10k, I'm pretty sure I could obtain either one of those anonymously.
How hard is it to forge the required identification or bribe a store clerk to not check identification?
If someone's house is broken into, are they going to be liable for piracy through their stolen media player? (Assuming there's a several hours before it can be disabled)
The value of an anonymously acquired media player would be a lot higher than either of those two things. There's no market because nobody is willing to pay $1k for an anonymous cell phone when they can just get a prepaid one. But if one absolutely needed an AT&T SIM card, with that budget I'm sure they could forge all the required identification.
Of course it's hard to speculate the difficulty of such forging in the future. But I would think that $10k would be enough to break some human link in the chain.
To make copy protection work, consumers have to be coerced/convinced into using locked-down systems. If we use systems that we have total control over, then copy protection will never succeed. There still is the analog hole, as well.
> coerced, convinced--or without mainstream alternatives:
"Starting in 2006, many new laptop computers have been sold with a Trusted Platform Module chip built-in... Intel is planning to integrate the TPM capabilities into the southbridge chipset in 2008..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module
Or simply unaware, and with little chance of ever finding out:
Consumers don't care about locked-down systems; if they did, the dominant portable MP3 player would run Linux. It doesn't; it's the iPod.
The analog gap isn't an unsolveable CS problem. Yes, you can't encrypt photons. But you can watermark and trace them. Preventing copies is CS-hard. Preventing covert channels is also CS-hard. Watermarks are a defensive application of covert channels.
Watermarks -> revocation -> economic disincentive to copying transactions.
Watermarks -> evidence -> lawsuit -> economic disincentive to copying at all.
Also, none of these things has to work perfectly. The industry's goal isn't to stop copying. It's to capture the maximum amount of revenue per title.
It's lame because the number is irrelevant, so it is not the core of the IP.
The important thing is whether a certain number maps to a mechanism. The mapping is the thing people are really copyrighting when they copyright IP, and that is not a number.
