Well, I’d just like to point out that they haven’t taken the ball and gone home, they’ve threatened to do so, but at this point I’m confident this is an empty threat. 
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Spinach and Caramel sounds really gross.
This was how they operated for years before iTunes came along and more or less forced the cartels to acknowledge that not everybody on the internet is a dirty thief and a liar. There were a few exceptions of course, but the idea of legally downloading a Beatles album was a joke for far longer than it should have been.
It’s arguable that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but media companies seem more than willing to simply not sell their product to willing buyers if those buyers aren’t willing to bend over backwards to give up all freedom to the cartels. Look at the very limited selection on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, and other video streaming services. There’s no technical or legal reason studios couldn’t list most of their back catalog on those services, even with DRM loaded on every one of them, but still the studios won’t budge. There’s nothing forcing them to adopt to a new world, and they’re more than willing to cling to out of date business models for as long as possible, writing laws to protect them when they can and spending billions of dollars on lawyers to scare would be consumers of their product.
It’s a fundamental problem with DRM, not cryptography.
Here it is in a nutshell. A traditional crypto system is intended to protect a message sent from A to B from malicious party C, who wants to copy it or alter it in some way. A & B are assumed to be trustworthy, so most of the effort is spent in trying to figure out how to get a key from A to B safely. In a DRM system, B and C are the same person. You want to deliver product to the same guy who wants to steal it. Simply handing B the key won’t work, because then C will have it. That’s why there is so much effort on encrypting every little interaction in a DRM system, the problem of course is that if someone dumps the state from even one component in the system, they can get the key and thus everything that goes over the box.
This is why media companies love set top boxes so much and hate PCs. STBs, especially ones that are only leased from the cable company, are much harder to hack than a PC. But like I said, it only takes one guy to blow the system wide open.
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How soon until the black box of DRM code is used for malware authors to attack your computer or other devices. Flash is already a mess, and anyone with a clue will set it for click to run instead always running it. ANY hidden source code can be decompiled and bugs found, but then have no way of reporting them. White Hats that do that can be prosecuted for “breaking” the DRM. The black hats will use the code blob written by the DRM masters that want it secure from copying the content, as a new virtual machine with new attack vectors. ALL code needs to be public and subject to AUDIT!
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Hmm, the problem is in the distribution of keys not crypto in of itself. Right?
I’m honestly having trouble seeing this as anything but a win. Can you explain in what way we wouldn’t actually end up better off (at least in the long run) if “taking their ball and going home” was exactly what they did?
Because that’s kind of exactly what I want them to do.
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I agree. The studios need to realise some hard truths:
- Their crap isn’t worth what they charge
- If they charged less, economies of scale would dictate that there would be less piracy & they would make their money.
- They need to be less greedy.
So for example this in the end never happened but this article says it all about my point above
Because it’s a return to the old days of PirateBay and the media cartels randomly suing people who were maybe near people just trying to consume content that aren’t otherwise offering, and winning. Then your grandma is in debt to the **aa’s for a trillion dollars because a neighbor grabbed an otherwise unavailable album off of a torrent. Also, artists don’t get paid (well, don’t get paid even more than they don’t get paid under the current system).
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Ooooh, I thought you meant actually taking their ball and going home, not doubling down on the dickholery and refusing to leave at all.
I already get most of my media through original sources that aren’t the major studios, so I would be super-cool with them simply not existing anymore, and was hoping that was what you meant would happen!
I was referring to the DRM requirements committee.
Actually, yeah. I bet a camera / mic combo that can record in high fidelity would be a great Kickstarter.
When you’re rich, remember who you owe 5% to, ok?
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You want to Kickstart a camcorder? I think you might have gotten beaten to the market on that one.
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Oh I’m not disagreeing with you at all, In fact I agree with you completely. Its just that the only arguments the “content owners” have ever put forward that seems to have swayed anybody’s opinion, is that if they don’t get what they want, they won’t be able to produce anything new, In other words, “take their ball and go home”.
But as we’ve seen, that just hasn’t happened, otherwise you could not get an article like this:
Sure, the article talks about 900 Indie films, but I’m also confident that most people would agree that trying to compare the cultural enrichment provided by a no name indie filmaker’s 10,000 dollar movie vs the big studio backed die hard just leads us down a rhetorical cul de sac.
(Oh and please, nobody say that any money earned there is not going to the big studios, that’s an empty argument on its face as well)
And to top it all off, Netflix now gives the studios a way to profit off their, up till then, stagnated back catalog.
So I just wanted to add to your comment by taking away even the insinuation that there is anything to the threats and arguments from these people 
Well, a smart one that, rather than producing ok images, is as precise in its rendition as George Bush Jnr.
Let me confuse things here. For the longest time, I didn’t get why in the hell open source could in any way be secure. Hell, it’s fucking OPEN. Little did I understand the beast. And it is in that sense, I think, that any DRM is screwed from the gitgo.
Actually, maybe it’s Hollywood driving the brain-computer interfaces. If they can just get rid of the screen and the speakers …
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A bit above my head, yet partially understandable. Hey, fuzzy! Lets date. You think like I do, only better.
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Hmmmm,
Yes, but still too literal an interpretation for my tastes, I would say that the technology is sound, in that it does what it says it does, but the implementation is flawed and corrupt.
Flawed because it targets its users (only people who pay money get a DRM restricted license for the product so they don’t make copies, while people who pirate, get the DRM free thing for keeps)
And corrupt, because it is illegal to fix it. You cant even vote with your dollars on this one, since not buying into the system is used as confirmation that DRM is necessary.
And lets be clear. If DRM stops casual copying, (you buy a “media unit” and make a copy for yourself and one for a friend), it does not stop piracy (you buy a copy and distribute it for X amount of dollars to millions of people)
There’s another possible outcome, and I think it’s pretty plausible. A “secret” standard might end up just getting ignored. Big Content might have a hammerlock on HTML5 - but because of that, the rest of us might just stick with the older standards - or flip over to whatever is still open-source. They might end up like the guy with the patent on Betamax.
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