I think that watermarking could be a good idea... far more useful than DRM, in any case. It doesn't restrict use, but still allows enforcement of license violations (or confirmation of license violation).

As for a guy selling one CD at a garage sale, I'm doubting the cops/enforcement would move to arrest someone for that. Record companies would only really care about people distributing hundreds of pirated albums on a fairly large scale, because it's an absolute waste of their time to deal with the average people (minnows) which includes nearly every computer-user who listens to music at all. Granted, I think there have been individuals that the industry has "made an example of", but the odds of that being *you* would not be high, unless you are the aforementioned large-scale offender.

Everybody is having a hard time to understand the idea... sigh

No, the cops wouldn't arrest anyone for selling a CD at a garage sale. You are correct in that aspect.

What I and other people proposed are:

1. - You go to a store and buy a watermarked CD. You pay with your credit card, so the store database has the details of who bought that watermarked CD.

2. - You get tired of that CD and sell it for cash to some unknown fella at a garage sale.

3. - Said unknown fella is actually a member of a ripping group with a huge internet pipe. He rips the watermarked CD and spreads it everywhere.

4. - One of the copies of the CD falls in RIAA's hands. They detect the watermark and track down who bought that CD.

5. - They find you. Now, it's up to you to convince them that you got rid of that CD some time ago and it was actually someone that bought the CD from you that ripped it and made it available online.


Got it now?

You can do this with any codec.

It is simply recording the output of from Winamp.

You would either have to store the files in lossless - although the source was WAM 128 or have to transcode to a lossy format.
You can only do the recording in real-time.

In my view for a codec to be broken it should:
- remove DRM from the file without loss of quality or increased storage demands

*I* know you can do this with any codec, DRM or not. That was my point. However to clear up some misconceptions:

I did specifically say that you could burn CDs (meaning Red Book Audio CDs). Those are always the same size, regardless of codec you download. And they would be the same quality as if you had paid Napster for the right to burn them to CD, a facility which isn't included in the price of the subscription, or officially available during the free trial. So every track you burn is a 99 cent value according to napster (I've not actually checked the price, that's a guess).

Also, you can only do the recording in real-time, but you can run multiple copies of Winamp simultaneously, each one recording a different track, meaning the only limit to how much DRM'd music you can steal is your bandwidth and processing power.

But do you at least agree then that DRM on lossless filles is already 'broken' by your definition?

Yes, is it does not limit my use.

True, but the idea is that they'll eventually plug the 'analog hole'. Yet another example of record company stupidity and hubris - "we want to make money, so lets make people buy not only the same albums again, but new equipment too!!!"

>True, but the idea is that they'll eventually plug the 'analog hole'. Yet another
>example of record company stupidity and hubris - "we want to make money, so l
>lets make people buy not only the same albums again, but new equipment too!!!"


Hmm I fail to see how they could plug the 'analog hole'?
I mean, if you have to listen to the music through a sound output and can record with another device... I could use my Stereo to play a CD and my iRiver's audio input to record that (analog or digital) to WAV or even straight to MP3.

The idea is that the sound data is encrypted all the way through to the speakers. Obviously you could sample this, but it'd sound crap.

If you think it's an outlandish idea then you'd be correct, but bear in mind that digital outputs on sacd and dvda players are already encrypted through to the amp. They could also control whether any analog outputs are enabled or just crippled to a lower quality.

Then i will just buy a mod-set for my speakers to forward the output to an input of another device for record - because if it will be played back, then it somewhere has to be decrypted - this obviously would happen inside of the speakers - so i just hijack the signal after it being decrypted and voila.

Copy-Protection will NEVER work except against average-joe. For reasons why, read the previously posted speech of Cory Doctorow again.
http://junk.haughey.com/doctorow-drm-ms.html

As long as it can be played back, it can be recorded. It's that simple.
This is because everything - to be played back - has to return to the unencrypted physical domain. Virtual digital data is build upon the physical domain. Not the other way around. Someone else was right in another thread - the analogue physical domain will always overrule the digital domain when the result is targeted towards humans.
- Lyx

There's a lot of dancing around the idea of DRM and breaking it here, so lets clear some things up and define some terms so that everybody is on the same page.

1. What is DRM?
Digital Rights Management, as applied to the music industry, is essentially any attempt to put actual limitations on how a piece of digital content may be used after it is purchased. If you cannot convert the format, if you cannot play it on certain players, if there's any kind of restriction, then it is said to have DRM.

DRM is essentially encryption. The music is encrypted. In order to hear it, it must be decrypted. The real enforcement side of DRM is not the encryption, but the programs that do the decryption. ALL DRM enforcement is acheived by controlling the software that actually plays the music or puts it onto portable devices, or the firmware of those devices, etc. The software playing the music must understand the DRM to some degree in order to perform the decryption process.

2. What is "breaking DRM"?
There's essentially 2 ways to break DRM:

a. Resample the music, aka "The Analog Hole". Since it's going through a D2A conversion when you play it, simply wire it up such to put it back through an A2D conversion. Done. There's a subset here where you use various programs to grab the sampled digital output just before the original D2A conversion and save it off as a WAV file or other lossless format. This involves less loss than going to Analog and back, but it's essentially the same. If you recompress to a lossy format, some extra loss will occur. TotalRecorder and similar programs can do this in many cases.

b. Break the decryption. Get the key and decrypt the actual file to produce a decrypted version of the compressed music. This conversion incurs no lossy penalty because you didn't change the music format or anything, just decrypted and resaved it. JHymn can do this.

It is *always* possible to break DRM via the A method in one form or another. This is a simple matter of wiring and/or controlling the system doing the playback. However, this is a lossy conversion. In that sense, it is not preferred, although the amount of loss can be reduced a lot (or eliminated entirely in the special case of burning directly captured digital audio to audio CD's).

The B method is harder, but it is also always possible in theory. Since the software by the DRM provider can decrypt the music in order to play, you could write software to do the exact same thing. The whole thing relies on secret information. You don't know the algorithim, or how the communication works, or where the key is stored, etc, etc. Figure those out, and duplicate or work around them, and the DRM can be broken.

Anyway, when most people speak of "breaking" DRM, they mean method B. Method B is technically harder, and more interesting to somebody into this sort of thing. Method A is not preferred for all sorts of reasons, although it's more commonplace since it's simple and easy to do.



Now, all that said, why is WMA not broken yet (method B broken, of course)? Because nobody's really interested. There have been a couple of versions of WMA that were broken, but frankly later versions got ignored entirely. Nobody cared. Lately, what with Napster and some other big names starting to sell the new WMA10 stuff, and the whole new "Plays For Sure" logo program, Microsoft is making this big push into the marketplace. As the format becomes bigger, it becomes a higher profile target. Eventually, somebody will break it in one way or another.

My money says that it will be a portable device that gets broken first. Somebody works out how to pull the decryption keys or decrypted music from a Plays For Sure device. Then the keys get found on the PC itself or in the network traffic, and a WMA decryptor gets created. Maybe refined a bit, if there's still any interest, but until the market is big enough, nobody's likely to crack it. Real's own DRM is uncracked thus far too. It's not that it's impossible to do, it's that nobody capable of doing it is interested in doing it.

Lyx: I agree with you that it doesn't work, but obviously the Microsofts of this world will differ in their opinions.

The problem with analog hacks is that the music is degraded, even if only slightly. You also have silly formats like sacd which would have to be transcoded via the analog hole to pcm, which would be quite different from the original dsd stream.

I'm actually surprised nobody has cracked the WMA later versions. It's all very well saying that people aren't bothered, but surely there's a couple of crackers with the skills who want to stick one in Microsofts eye? Unless they're keeping quiet about it of course.

Damage-maximization - MS's plans promise much more "fun" in the near future *g*


BTW: There may indeed be a working DRM-method achievable - but it would only work when a medium should only allow a limited amount of plays - because it would involve self-destruction or deterioation of the media on the physical level. That may indeed be achievable - but which consumer wants to buy that?

- Lyx

PyMusique is history

Apple closes security hole

HAW HAW HAW

Took them long enough

So, what's the over/under on how long it takes them to work around the block? Any bets?

Oh yeah, I understood the implications of that, I guess I wasn't paying attention to that aspect of it. That does make me think though... because of the threat of this kind of thing, it would make people unwilling to share their licensed music - the entire point, really. But what if the original user doesn't want it anymore? How can a person resell their license for the music?

The new technology is making it painfully clear that the economic model that we have relied on in the past isn't necesarily compatible with upcoming technology. When we are buying a shiny plastic disc, the CD/DVD is just "packaging" for a license for us to listen to/run/view some kind of intellectual property. The CD is an accessory, it is not what we are paying for. Thus, music download stores make a lot of sense. It's more environmentally friendly.

But if you give away/sell a CD, you are automatically transferring the license with it. What if you copy your DRMed files somewhere and delete the originals? Should this not function in the same way? Surely you won't want to listen to that copy of your Technotronic MP3 you bought in the nineties FOREVER... or maybe you die. Or lose your hearing, or something. You won't need it anymore. So why should we not have the right to transfer our license (easily) to someone else?

What's interesting is that media companies *really* don't like the thought of people reselling their CDs, DVDs, books etc.and would outlaw it if they could. In their tiny, greed-obsessed minds one extra person buying a cheap second hand copy means one less person buying a full-price new CD (which is tantamount to theft in their eyes). Witness the fuss over Amazon's promotion of second hand books.

What they are missing (and what several economic studies have shown, particularly for the second hand car market) is that you are more likely to buy something, and pay more for it, if there is a vibrant second hand market that will pay you good money for it when you want to pass it on. Just the other day I bought an expensive tech gadget and the deciding factor was that I could punt it on eBay if I got bored with it.

Well, like everybody, they're in it to make money. I'm not faulting them for that. However there's a difference in the music industry in particular.

The system of making/producing music in mass quantities has, until now, been a bit difficult. You need to have production space, recording studio equipment, and then eventually vinyl or CD pressing facilities. Then you need to distribute it. Not cheap to do in other words. This is a bit outside the range of the people who actually create the music, namely, the bands. The upshot is that it spawned the entire recording industry. Essentially, these are middle men to take care of all that difficulty.

In the process, this system of middle men created the radio system of advertising, and essentially tried to control the public taste in music. Again, I'm not faulting them for that. I would have done the same thing. It's about making money, and the more albums you sell, the more money you make. Controlling the public taste allows you to promote and thus sell more merchandise.

Copyright is essentially what lets them do this. The problem here is that copyright is not a natural right. It doesn't stem from natural tendancies. Copyright really only applies to things that are easily copyable by their nature, things that are ephemeral like music or a series of words. We, as a society, decided that it might be a good idea to not allow other people to copy these things for a limited time, to encourage more creation of new things. Since copying them always involved some kind of physical medium to put them onto, this was easy enough to enforce.

But like Lyx said above, the creation of networks designed to transmit large amounts of data for essentially no cost blows that out of the water. Data is ephemeral too. It's just numbers. And this data can represent any other ephemeral thing as well. This reduces the costs of copying anything that is ephemeral (and thus protected by copyright laws) to nearly zero. Thus putting it within the realm of anybody, thus making it incredibly hard to enforce copyright again.

The middle man system grew because enforcing copyright was fairly easy to do when you had to force ephermal works onto physical objects. It was costly to produce the physical objects and distribute them. But data networks destroy the need for physical objects and also make it easy to distribute the ephemeral works globally.

The natural result is the collapse of the middle man system.

Admittedly, the system still serves some purposes. Production of new works still takes skill and resources. Advertising still needs coordination, although the data network allows for wider communication scope and thus the "word of mouth" method gains much, much more power. This would naturally increase the range of types of music that are popular, at the expense of the topX who were popular before.

But because the works are so easy to copy and distribute, selling them becomes more difficult. This lowers the price point. I recall that CD's were normally $18 a pop back in 1996. Now they're averaging around $12, or $8 on sale. Some of the CD clubs are down to $6 a pop or less, for their entire collection (BMG, for example). Individual tracks online are running a buck each, or less, and the result is that you see a lot of people buying one or two tracks instead of entire albums.

But in the long run, I think the inevitable result is that the middle men companies *must* decrease in size. The amount of money to them will eventually decrease, although it has increased at first with the advent of online sales. Eventually they'll be reduced mainly to advertising agencies.

A new band with some intelligence, right now, would be pretty smart to produce their own tracks and hire a big major ad agency to promote 'em. Then sell the tracks online at iTunes and other online methods themselves. Cut out the middle men. Pay the ad agency a percentage for their part. Whatever the cut they pay for advertising, it'd damn sure be less than what the middle men recording industry would have taken in the past.

But that's just my opinion.

No more bets, please...

PyMusique is up and running again on Linux

Jon Lech Johansen's blog

Furthermore the reasons for making PyMusique are decribed here:

Realm of the BlackBlade Clan

Hah. Less than a day.

This gives a bit of insight into what they did though. They simply blocked the old revision of the protocol. All Jon did was make the needed changes to implement the 4.7 revision. The new revision is still sending out the music sans-DRM and the iTunes 4.7 program is what is actually adding the DRM wrapper and encrypting the music.

Just too funny, man.

Someone mentioned the Blu-Ray HD-DVD DRM issue as a non-issue at this point. I disagree.

In one way, however, I do agree. DRM on DVD-A is a non-issue, because most people don't see a benefit to listening to music in 5.1--yet? To most people, there isn't a clearly definable difference between 5.1 and a good stereo recording. Availability, and thus price, only adds to the low demand to crack the DVD-A DRM.

Video is another issue. People will want to crack the DRM on BluRay and HD-DVD media as fast as possible because they (read: most people) will want to illegaly copy them or at least rip them to a hard drive.

As far as the Apple DRM thing is concerned, I don't really think it matters either way. The vast majority of people using ITMS probably don't even know what DRM is or how it may affect them.

Don't you think that news about apples DRM being cracked will rise the chance that your above described situation changes(that more people become aware about DRM)?

- Lyx

Perhaps. I still believe, and rightly so at this point IMO, that most consumers do not know how the DRM affects them. Or maybe the problem is really that most of them do not recognize the importance of the issue at hand, of understanding what DRM is and how it is not in the best interest for him or her as a consumer (mostly).

Basically, until somebody has DRM bite them in the ass, they never know about it. However, as more and more people get online and buy music with DRM, more and more people are getting bitten. You should see all the posts on the Apple forums by disgrunted iTMS customers who can't understand why they can't convert that downloaded song to an MP3 in order to put it on their portable player. Invariably they get angry at Apple for it, until you explain that it is in fact the RIAA they should be angry at and why. And then that only works sometimes. Usually I recommend simply not paying for music and downloading via their old P2P apps instead, or emailing them a link to JHymn if it feels warranted.

The problem with emailing them a link to JHymn is that if they can bypass the DRM entirely with these tools, then they're invariably satisfied and nothing changes. In that sense, cracking the DRM is bad for the goal of proving the point as a whole, since the people don't care if the music has DRM as long as they have a way to bypass it when they need to. And most of the replies to that sort of thing over there tend to be along the lines of "burn it to CD and rerip it" which is quite annoying as well, IMO.

I bet Apple's iTunes sales will go up since people are so happy that they can *buy* DRM-free music...not bad...maybe Apple should offer DRM-free songs for $2 That would make the tool highly illegal since you'd only pay $1 using that tool + I'm sure some people would pay the extra money to get DRM-free songs...

From what I've heard, even the labels think this is a problem with iTunes. The record companies dictates most DRM requirements, but it was definitely Apple's own idea to lock users to iTunes/iPod.

I guess you can blame the MPEG too for never coming up with a standardized DRM scheme (they tried, but couldn't come up with something that would please the entire industry).