Global Security Watch > Ed Felten: DRM Wars, and ”˜Property Rights Management’

[Architectures of Control in Design] At Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten has posted a summary of a talk he gave at the Usenix Security Symposium, called “DRM Wars: The Next Generation”. The two installments so far (Part 1, Part 2) trace a possible trend in the (stated) intentions of DRM’s proponents, from it being largely promoted as a tool to help enforce copyright law (and defeat ‘illegal pirates’) to the current stirrings of DRM’s being explicitly acknowledged as a tool to facilitate discrimination and lock-in ”” and the apparent ‘benefits of this’:

Some related posts from Technorati and Google.

Global Health Policy: Freedom to Tinker asks whether Bill Gates now believes in sharing intellectual property, following the decision of the Gates Foundation to require researchers to pool their results. It is worth emphasizing that the Gates Foundation is a completely separate organization from (via Cosmos)

http://yarbroughs.org  yarbroughs dot org: I haven’t been a subscriber since 2002, and only look in there on VERY rare occasion. They have other more specific non-tech forums, too, like the Velvet room (for matters of love and sex) and Soap Box (for political fun). (via Cosmos)

http://blogs.chron.com/helpline  HelpLine: LINKS I LIKE Boing Boing Technorati Freedom to Tinker The Gadgeteer The Spam Weblog Technology Bytes Radio Bald Heretic (via Cosmos)

Architectures of Control in Design: * Free your VHS tapes: You’ve probably faced the unhappy choice between rebuying your VHS collection on DRM-restricted DVDs or lugging around a legacy player. The R2 helps you liberate your movies from their VHS chains.” (via Cosmos)

aTypical Joe: A gay New Yorker living in the rural South: To do this, they want to stop consumers from buying cheap third-party toner cartridges. So some printer makers have their printers do a cryptographic handshake with a chip in their cartridges, and they lock out third-party cartridges by programming the printers not to operate with cartridges that can’t do the secret handshake. (via Cosmos)

ebyblog: First, they argue that DRM enables price discrimination ”” business models that charge different customers different prices for a product ”” and that price discrimination benefits society, at least sometimes. Second, they argue that DRM helps platform developers lock in their customers, as Apple has done with its iPod/iTunes products, and that lock-in increases the incentive to develop platforms. (via Cosmos)

http://clintjcl.wordpress.com  Clint’s blog: It basically said that keyboards can be manufactured in such a way as to add an imperceptible delay to each keystroke.  The delay is used as a way to modulate an undetected signal into a user’s TCP/IP traffic.  In other words, your typing can cause your information to be silently sent to a 3rd party (NSA? Russian hackers? (via Cosmos)

http://zestyping.livejournal.com  wolog.net: Clarke recommended the movie The Battle of Algiers as a depiction of what happened to the French when they tried to do just the same kind of thing in Algeria, and lost the war despite having captured or killed all of the important people they targeted, because in the process they generated so much hatred and resentment that a new second generation of terrorists grew up hating the French. (via Cosmos)

http://jessekornblum.livejournal.com  A Geek Raised by Wolves: Technical Track agenda (via Cosmos)

EFF: DeepLinkshttp://www.eff.org/deeplinks  EFF: DeepLinks: Never Mind the Piracy, Feel the Profits Ed Felten says that the DRM debate has moved from combating piracy to supporting price discrimination... "DRMs Enable Business Models, They Don't Stop Piracy" - Universal VP . (via Cosmos)

http://www.adusum.org/etech  Emerging Technologies: First in a series on Next Generation DRM Wars. (via Cosmos)

http://www.ddmcd.com/managing-technology [Dennis D. McDonald's ALL KIND FOOD - Managing Technology] DRM, File Sharing, and the Protection of... : There's a great series of comments over on the Freedom To Tinker blog regarding Ed Felten's post DRM Wars: The Next Generation. The post and the comments provide good insight into where arguments and enforcement efforts are headed.

Slyck - File Sharing News and Info Slyck - File Sharing News and Info: The gist of the talk was that the debate about DRM (copy protection) technologies, which has been stalemated for years now, will soon enter a new phase. I’ll spend this post, and one or two more, explaining this. (via Cosmos)

Freedom-to-tinker.com[Freedom-to-tinker.com] Freedom to Tinker: There are educational benefits that come from tinkering and, perhaps most importantly, the freedom to tinker keeps technologies flexible and leaves room for them to interoperate in surprising ways not initially envisioned by their creators. And, as Alex has pointed out to me, the social costs of tinkerproofing are cumulative in such a way that there may be a collective bargaining problem–we may have a situation in which the freedom to tinker does not matter very much to most individuals, but we’d all be better off if, collectively, we assigned a higher value to our individual freedom to tinker than we actually feel for it.

Techdirt.http://www.techdirt.com [Techdirt.] DRM Supporters Changing Their Story?: Though, as Felten points out, neither of these arguments (whether or not they make sense) have anything to do with copyright -- yet, supporters still seem to be focusing on bolstering protections for DRM within copyright law. It's great that these content providers want to introduce new business models, but there's no reason that those business models should need to get extra special legal protection.

[Educated Guesswork] Why weak DRM is OK: I'm not a lawyer but as far as I can tell it basicallymeans one that works as long as nobody is attacking it.Back in the old days, we used to say that you couldn'tdo strong DRM without trusted hardware, since any attackercould just break your software and get the keying material.But the DMCA's anti-circumvention procedures act as a kind oflegal hardware security module--break the security and you'vebroken the law. Better than hardware tamper-resistance, insome sense.

EFF: DeepLinkshttp://www.eff.org/deeplinks [EFF: DeepLinks] DMCA Encourages Bad Security: (Also, converter box vendors who accepted HDCP’s license terms might sue vendors who didn’t accept those terms.) The price of enabling these lawsuits is to add the cost of 10,000 gates to every high-def TV or video source, and to add another way in which high-def video devices can be incompatible.

http://netweb.wordpress.com [Netweb] Permalink: This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

http://bigredball.blogsome.com [Earth: Mostly Harmless] Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes: Before sending its highest-res digital video to the TV, the player will insist on doing an HDCP handshake. The purpose of the handshake is for the two devices to authenticate each other, that is, to verify that the other device is an authorized HDCP device, and to compute a secret key, known to both devices, that can be used to encrypt the video as it is passed across the HDMI cable.

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