Gamers, EFF Speak Out Against DRM 203
Last month, we discussed news that the FTC would be examining DRM to see if it needs regulation. They set up a town hall meeting for late March, and part of that effort involved requesting comments from potential panelists and the general public. Ars Technica reports that responses to the request have been overwhelmingly against DRM, and primarily from gamers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also took the opportunity to speak out strongly against DRM, saying flat out that "DRM does not prevent piracy," and suggesting that its intended purpose is "giving some industry leaders unprecedented power to influence the pace and nature of innovation and upsetting the traditional balance between the interests of copyright owners and the interests of the public." Their full public comments (PDF) describe several past legal situations supporting that point, such as Sony's fight against mod chips, Blizzard's DMCA lawsuit against an alternative to battle.net, and Sony's XCP rootkit.
Re:RIGHT battle! (Score:5, Informative)
You're wrong.
DRM circumvention is a trusted-client-subversion problem, not a cryptanalytic problem (which is, indeed, much harder, though not typically impossible).
In DRM scenarios (which is what distinguishes them from securable encryption scenarios), the attacker has the ciphertext and the key, albeit possibly in an obfuscated or hard-to-access form. Given a sufficiently motivated attacker who has the key (in whatever form) under their control, the DRM scheme will always lose. (I've never seen any copy-protection scheme survive a serious attack, and I probably never will.)
The VideoGuard scheme used by Sky is broken in various ways, but the crackers are very secretive, and the breaks are almost unpublished (thanks mostly to heavy crackdowns). The presence of unencrypted transport stream rips of HDTV broadcasts proves the existence. You can't get the cracks easily; but clearly someone must indeed have them.
Re:What a timely story (Score:4, Informative)
Also, you should go back to the store you bought the game from, ask to see the manager, and tell him one of his employees is stealing CD keys from the games.
Re:What a timely story (Score:3, Informative)
I had that happen with The Orange Box (sealed package with in-use key). A email to Valve and a copy of receipt was all it took to get a legit key. Took about 2 days.
Re:Wrong battle? (Score:5, Informative)
The DMCA was a horrid idea, just like the eternal "copyright extensions" (which should have been unconstitutional as ex post facto law changes anyways) the content cartels have been buying constantly.
"Ex post facto" has a specific legal meaning, which is completely different than whatever you think it means. Copyright extensions do suck, but they don't have anything to do with "ex post facto".
Just spinning your wheels (Score:5, Informative)
The use of the word "piracy" to describe copyright infringement is as old as the 1709 Statute of Anne
--- when the Black Flag still flew over the Caribbean.
The geek is NEVER going to win this argument.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DRM is essentially illegal in spirit (Score:2, Informative)
The idea was that the inventer would gain profit for a set period of time, after which the idea could be adopted by others. This had the net affect of reducing the price through competition, increasing quality, and innovating new ideas based off of the original.
The laws have been twisted so far from their original intent it's just rediculous.
Disney [wikipedia.org] is a great example of copyright gone wrong.
Every time their copyrights are about to expire they pump millions into congress to get them extended for another 20 years or so.
Re:RIGHT battle! (Score:3, Informative)
No, encryption is not unbreakable. It's merely hard enough to break that it's rarely feasible to do so.
Re:What a timely story (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wrong battle? (Score:4, Informative)
"Ex post facto" has a specific legal meaning, which is completely different than whatever you think it means. Copyright extensions do suck, but they don't have anything to do with "ex post facto".
Ex post facto refers to something that changes the legality of an action retroactively. The DMCA changes the nature of copyright retroactively. It's not that inappropriate. Close enough for government work, at least.
You're quite right, but... (Score:3, Informative)
While you're absolutely correct that ex post facto refers to criminalizing something after a person has committed the act, then arresting them, I would like to point out that the copyright extensions should have been unconstitutional for a very different reason.
I believe it was Eldred v. Ashcroft that pointed out that they were violating the "limited times" clause of the section of the constitution authorizing copyright laws by doing retroactive extensions. The only reason the Supreme Court didn't uphold that argument is because they thought there were enough other advantages to the law that they didn't want to upset the boat, though they indicated that they might not look so favorably upon another retroactive extension if there wasn't a compelling enough reason for it.
Of course, by the time of the next extension, who knows who the Supremes will be or whether they'll even care about those issues any more...
Re:RIGHT battle! (Score:3, Informative)
Every music CD you buy comes without DRM.
Not true at all. Ever heard of the Sony rootkit fiasco? (and that is just one example)