Archive for the 'DRM' category

it’s been years that you can find on the open market DVD players that can be more or less dezoned (made insensitive to the differences between DVD bought on different continents – more compatible than the DVD standard would like).

The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) decided this would end and, with that in mind, started an ongoing legal battle against the DVD player chipset manufacturers. Each time they can, and it’s been 6 times in the recent months, they challenge the manufacturer in court for not implementing correctly the so-called “CSS” algorithms or for leaving an open back door.

The most recent victim appears to be Taiwanese SunPlus, world second manufacturer of ICs for DVD players.

The small world of technical solutions to protect the copyrights starts seeing the same issues as the software industry observed fifteen years ago when trying solutions for software copy protection.

For example, we start seeing cases where two DRM solutions (Digital Rights Management) cannot live simultaneously on the same computer. This wasn’t enough that you couldn’t use the CD you just bought in any of the usual ways you’d like, now buying one CD may mean that you cannot use another. This is the kind of horror story that starts popping up like in the recent article from CDR-info which deals with the software conflicts between the technical offering of SunComm and StarForce (two providers of DRM techniques for companies willing to protect their audio CDs).

I guess that, like before, the industry will soon realize that this approach is putting more constraints on the legitimate user than real roadblocks against the hackers, pirates and casual crooks. But, we will see a number of customers bumping onto technical incompatibilities of all kinds, before the music and video industry starts seeing that this is actually limiting the sales growth.

As we are interested into the HDCP/HDMI technology that the manufacturers are preparing for a wide distribution, we start finding a few amazing facts.

We had seen previously that HDCP was a technology doomed to fail in front of the attacks by the media pirates, but there is already worse (for the legal users).

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The technology supposed to protect the equipments aimed at digital TV with a semi-secret protocol using techniques borrowed from the military in order to ensure that only approved devices can see the previous digital data of our movies, seems to be on its way to be broken and is already the target of very serious cryptological attacks.

I just found a couple of papers describing its detailed operation and proposing an attack mode worthy of attention since it has the capacity to break the secret quickly.
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Everything shows that the French Members of Parliament (Députés) are currently discussing the end of the attempt to install in France a law that would favor freedom for Internet downloaders.

The new law currently lacks any reference to the global license (and its explicitly included remuneration of artists whose music would be downloaded by the 3 to 4 million French P2P downloaders). On the contrary, it legalizes DRM (that will soon limit the rights that the user have in front of the CD she just bought).

Hope seems to be disappearing rapidly during the current debates.

If we look quickly, here are a few of the significant availability dates for some important technologies for PC computers around us:

• Windows Vista: awaited for the first week of October
• HD-DVD: announced for March 2006, but probably without write capacity (because DRM will not be implemented yet)
• Blu-Ray DVD: announced for May 2006 at Sony, without DRM.
• Panasonic, Toshiba and Sony announced their HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD equiped with AACS (it will limit the ability to copy files and medias) from the beginning of Summer.
• Apple launches it first Intel-based Mac Mini, but availability is not known (probably before Summer, maybe in May).

There are many technologies that seem to limit the availability (without copy-protection systems, the high-performance or high-capacity DVDs will probably not be allowed to write to media). the 1 billion dollar question is whether or not consumers will be lured into new features and added capacity.

It has just been confirmed that currently the existing graphic cards on the market will not be able to play High-Definition DVD. Even when they display an HDCP-compatible label. As said on Darknet.com:
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The Trusted Computing Group announced it will be publishing a specification describing how hard disc drives will include Digital Rights Management (DRM) to support the Trusted Platform that is being pushed in preparation of PCs that will be completely secured against free flow of information and to avoid hackers and pirates to steal information. This is targetting MP3 music copiers, industrial spies and set-top boxes hackers.

The implementation will include the use of internal memory on the disk drive that will not be accessible from the PC itself and may contain important information about the status of the disk (e.g. bad sectors) and encryption data or software.

See also “Does Trusted Computing provide security for users or from them?” from TG daily, where famous technical security expert Bruce Schneier comments negatively on where Trusted Computing (TC) is coming.

Trusted Computing Platform is an initiative that is going to help the media companies (music, movies, etc.) securing the media they sell in a strong way. Essentially, it’s intent is to keep everything encrypted to avoid users to have a direct access to it. This approach promises to stomp out pirates.

The problem is that, as a mere user, you will also be prohibited from doing a number of things that you consider quite normal today. As a matter of fact, today, when some content is protected, there is always a way to access it (for example, if you plug the output of your DVD player into a computer video acquisition card you are able to make a copy of the DVD you play). Trusted Computing Platform mandates that the equipment, the software and the media have all to play together or refuse to play. If your DVD player does not see a TCP-compliant video acquisition card it will not accept to send data.

So, if you want to make a personal backup copy of your DVD you will not be allowed to do it. If your music file is downloaded on your TCP-telephone, you will not be able to put it on your MP3 player. The fact that you paid it up front will only mean that you agreed not to be able to use it in more ways than what the seller accepted beforehand.

The big (or not always so big) media companies want to create a corporate playground where you will be allowed to enter on their own rules. The market will have to decide whether or not this is a success. But if it works like they want it you will forget about what made the growth of the PC market: flexibility and availability of zillions of easy-to-develop new extensions. We may move from a cheap PC market to an expensive video-game/TV-decoder kind of market.

Microsoft announced that the poor sequel to Halo (the console video game shooter) will appear on the PC platform. But this is going to bring a new marketing twist: It will only run on Vista, the upcoming Operating System of Microsoft.

It is not known if the reason is to use an environment where copying a HD-DVD media will certainly be more difficult than on any other platform (software copy protection), or if the reason is just to try and find a way to promote Vista (surprisingly, Vista is not considered by the consumer as the next great thing).
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If you are interested in getting news I published previously (mostly in 2005) about Digital Rights Management (and DRM technology), just have a look at the original page.