DVD Jon, DoubleTwist crack Apple's FairPlay

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Renewability

That's the big issue with DRM. You buy it today under certain terms that seem reasonable. Tomorrow, those terms could be changed and you have no recourse. Good bit on it here:
http://craphound.com/cdtdrmresponse.txt
It's well and good to talk about transparency and disclosure and
consent, but a major problem with DRMs has been their
"renewability" or "revocability." That is the ability of DRMs to
change the deal after you buy your media. For example, iTunes 4.0
let you stream your music from home to your work PC. iTunes 4.0.1
took that away. TiVos recently had a�non-discretionary update
applied to them that added Macrovision restrictions, so that they
were transformed from Betamax-ruling-compliant devices that could
record any show aired to more constrained devices that could only
record shows that weren't flagged as "NO-RECORD." (Note that the
MPAA proposed this as an alternative to the Betamax ruling in the
80s, and were rejected by courts and Congress -- what they could
not accomplish through legislation, they've achieved by sneakily
crippling devices that are already in the field.).

All new DRMs are being designed to be "renewable." The Sony PSP
was repeatedly patched to force users to� stop running their own
software on their devices. BluRay and HD-DVD are both built
around a "renewability" system that can shut down devices. The
Broadcast Flag ruling provided for renewability to�disable
consumers' property on the grounds that if someone, somewhere
figured out how to use a DVD burner to circumvent the flag, all
innocent users of that burner should be punished to get at the
guilty. This week, Microsoft issued its fastest-ever OS patch to
remove a DRM crack that users applied in order to make lawful
uses of the content they owned.

What kind of disclosure is sufficient here? What constitutes
transparency? "This device will do the following five things and
restrict you from the following eight things. However, at any
time in the future, without your consent, a secret commercial
body with closed membership and meetings may shut down any of
this device's features, with no appeal."

Posted by: tic swayback   Posted on: 10/26/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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