Hari's Corner

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The DRM issue and government intervention

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 at 17:59 IST (last updated: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 @ 21:14 IST)

It's interesting to see how the recent debate on DRM and Trusted Computing is going. I'm particularly alarmed by the implications of this technology and its potential to arm-twist consumers tying them down effectively to using a particular software on a particular media. No matter how many people put forth positive arguments to support this technology, I have an instinctive feeling against it. It's all very well to separate the technology from its application, but for all practical purposes, I see no difference.

The application of this technology puts enormous clout in the hands of the already powerful global IT and media giants and restricts the end customer even further while offering a few lame sweeteners (security, reliability and trust, huh) to make it palatable. How they use that clout is a completely different story, but it's amazing how many people are willing to trust corporate entities that have a history of monopolistic tendencies and unfair (and often illegal) business practices to gain market share.

The point of this post however, is not to argue for or against the technology, but merely to show why active (and not passive) opposition is necessary if we need to prevent it from being adopted as a standard in software, hardware and digital media products. And more specifically, why we need our elected representatives in government to stand up for consumer rights and protection.

Most people tend to argue in this manner
If you don't like DRM, just don't buy products which have DRM in them. The technology is useful and governments should not interfere/put a blanket ban on its use. Also DRM doesn't affect FOSS, so why should I care?
The assertion, in effect calls for passive resistance by the "market." Unfortunately, I see some big flaws in the above argument.
  1. Implied in the argument is the fact that if we (the small group of enlightened and empowered users) boycott those products, that'll convince the powerful global multinationals that the technology is not marketable and it'll be a failure. Unfortunately, it's a proven fact that the majority of software and hardware multinationals do not give a damn (to put it mildly) about the "enlightened" minority. Sure, consumer awareness is growing, but it's still nowhere near large enough to cause any major headaches for them.
  2. The second assumption is that the FOSS community will not be affected by the technology. I seriously doubt this but even otherwise, is this any reason not to be worried about DRM? What about the rest of the world? We certainly do not live in a vaccuum and whether we like it or not, anything that Microsoft, AMD, Intel or Sony does affects us directly or indirectly.
  3. Lastly, even if we, as individuals, are in a position to successfully boycott DRM-infected products, how practical would it be in the long run? Assuming a market where 80-90% of the products are DRM-enabled, how much choice do we have as consumers? And if the major multinational corporations do adopt DRM and Trusted Computing in a big way how can customers keep avoiding it forever?
In order to overcome the first obstacle, we need to educate and inform the general public about the perils of Trusted Computing. I don't think we'll have much trouble about this one though as awareness is already spreading. The second point is implicitly tied with the first point. As far as this issue is concerned, I doubt whether the voice of any single group of consumers will make a big impact. It's necessary for us to have a (huge) collective voice to seriously trouble the likes of Microsoft and Sony.

The third point is the clincher though. Going by the current trend, it's becoming increasingly clear that the major hardware and software companies will adopt DRM and Trusted Computing in some form or the other. Even if the whole of the consumer world protests against these technologies, sooner or later the world will be forced to use and adopt them. If you're not convinced, then consider how Microsoft has successfully used this tactic to keep their customers over the years -- by forcing them into the vicious upgrade cycle and tying them down to Microsoft-specific technology. The same tactic will be used in this instance too. They might not be too open and explicit about it and will try and hide it using every kind of marketing jargon, but the result will be the same. If the technology is adopted, they know that there will be a lot of initial resistance, but they're equally confident that the resistance can be broken down by using marketing techniques and unfair business practices.

The ultimate question here is this: is the market strong enough and competitive enough to resist restrictive technologies like DRM and trusted computing when implemented by powerful vested interests? Should we entirely rely on market forces to reject anti-competitive and restrictive technologies? Whatever be the answer to that, I think the key is that we need government support and intervention in the issue no matter which part of the world we live in. The likes of Microsoft and Sony are not just companies. They're powerful corporate empires and normal market forces do not affect them so much in the short term -- particularly when they are in a position to form cartels and alliances. An outright ban on TC/DRM may be the last step in that intervention, but whatever be the case, every government needs to step forward and keep the technology and its use under heavy control.

The point here is that we need one empire to balance the other. Only governments have that power. And that's why I fully support government controls to prevent the rampant abuse of this technology. Mere passive resistance from end customers will only delay the inevitable -- it will not prevent it.

13 comment(s)

  1. Hmmm. . ."offering a few lame sweeteners"? I've never yet seen a DRM scheme that was presented as good for anyone other than the industry supplying it. Even the *AA aren't daft enough to try and sell "We've taken away your ability to do stuff with our media" as an advantage to their customers.And there's nothing inherently-wrong with trusted computing. It's a system wide-open to abuse, but no more so than technologies like encryption, and the Internet itself, are.As Linux becomes more mainstream, attracts less-knowledgeable users, and thus begins to be more of a target for malware creators (You know it'll happen), TC has potential to spare us all a lot of grief by being an effective anti-malware tool. I've blogged on that subject in the past..Incidentally, you missed out one other effective counter-measure: Show how effective non-crippled products can be. FOSS has MS worried for that very reason. Blogs are challenging established media outlets. The Creative Commons project, podcasts, Project Gutenberg, the list goes on & on, example after example of just how much better unencumbered projects do than their crippled brethren.Remember "Elephant's dream" - the movie created with Blender? Did you know that, because it was created in high-def format and released under a CC license, it's become one of the most popular movies for showing off HD-TV sets? All the other HD stuff is proprietary & expensive, or low-quality & not much use. Suddenly, TV retailers are discovering the value of free media content.And so are the poor suckers who bought the Zune after they bought "Plays for sure" music - a superb illustration of just how valuable DRM-free media is. . .Governments have a very poor track record of making intelligent decisions about technology. I'd rather leave them out of it where possible, myself..

    Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 20:56 IST #
  2. Well you have admitted that it's a technology open to abuse. The problem is, how it would be controlled without a powerful force to prevent it. The difference between this technology and other technologies are that other technologies haven't been abused because they were not made for the purpose of placing restrictions on users of hardware/software.I differ from you in that aspect that Linux will become inherently insecure when it becomes popular. And even if it does, Trusted Computing is the last technology I'd support to protect my system. There are plenty of better technologies to protect user's privacy without actually placing insane restrictions upon him.The problem is that as I see it, there's no difference between the technology and its application. And practically no way of reigning in the big guns from adopting it in a big way. What's to stop them? You argue that the market forces are strong enough - I think maybe, maybe not. Why take that risk and allow this technology in the first place? As you said, even the big corporates know that it does not benefit the end customer in the slightest. Yet why do they adopt it? Because they want to control the market share.To me, the only force powerful enough to reign them in are governments and to me you have openly admitted the failure of democracy by saying that governments make poor decisions about technology. As our representatives, we have to make them understand the dangers of TC. That's the only way.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 21:05 IST #


  3. Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 22:35 IST #
  4. Coincidentally enough: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/07/1543207&from=rssEMI trials DRM-free MP3 downloads, because DRM self-evidently isn't working. My point in a nutshell.

    Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Thu, Dec 7, 2006 @ 22:37 IST #
  5. Well Dominic, you've made a good case why DRM is a failure in the music and movie industry. But then again, as I said before, you assert that market forces are strong enough. And I am not sure. Just because such technologies have failed in the past there is no reason why it will fail in the future. And that's what really worries me. My feeling is, whatever be the case, the technology *should* be heavily controlled to prevent abuse. We shouldn't look for cures as you suggest. The fact that there will be ways around it doesn't mean we shouldn't look to prevent it. And even though the hardware and software manufacturers might not use DRM in a few products is no reason why we should not oppose the technology that has the biggest potential for abuse.DRM was *designed* for placing restrictions on end users. It has no other use... quite frankly. Your equating DRM with other technologies does not make sense to me, because other technologies have *primary* benefits while having a few small side effects. DRM's main effect is to put restrictions on end users and tie them down to using only a certain hardware/software combination.What about Trusted Computing in computer motherboards. Because the more I read about it, the more I'm worried. And no I didn't read any scare-mongering sites. Just wikipedia.However, my point about the technology that it's useless and *only* open to abuse still holds. There *are* better ways to do what DRM does without the same threats it holds out.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Fri, Dec 8, 2006 @ 08:25 IST #
  6. The more heavily something is controlled, the harder it is to innovate it. Compare the Internet with MS Windows for illustrations of this point. The last thing technology needs is heavy-handed government restrictions.DRM is indeed useless, exactly as I said as well. And as the industry is very slowly coming to realize as well: It's already on the way out, and without any outside intervention. Just consumers who didn't like it and an industry that derived no benefit from it. Trusted Computing has been installed in most new laptops for the last few years. Has anything bad happened yet? Have you read up on the Linux distro's that are TC-enabled and the advantages they bring? TC is just hardware-based encryption. Almost all the things that anti-TC people talk about could already be done with software-based encryption. For instance, a Wikipedia-example: "Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor."Nice idea, but fails a simple reality check: Microsoft is already a convicted monopolist with anti-trust violations. Their latest Word format came very close to dying before it was even released, and was only saved by MS opening up the standard to allow inter-operability AND promising not to assert patents so other people could use it.Does this really sound like a world where they're going to get away with making it utterly impossible for any other word processor to open Word files? It's *technically possible* that they could use TC to do this, but it's *technically possible* that they could use secretly-installed functionality in Windows lock-up all Windows PCs tomorrow and hold the world to ransom for billions of dollars. Just because you can argue it's possible, doesn't mean that it can actually happen.It puts me in mind of Jurassic Park: You can argue it's possible, you can put in enough fact and science to make it sound plausible, and it makes a really fun "scary" idea. But you're just not going to see it happen outside of fiction.Wikipedia's a great resource, but it still has its problems. Example: It claims TC would make for an almost-unbreakable DRM scheme. Given that it still can't defeat the "analogue hole" (Detailed on Wikipedia itself as "a fundamental, and inevitable vulnerability in copy prevention schemes";) this is clearly untrue, and is a hallmark of the quality of the article itself: It's biased and unreliable. You can't trust it. (Pun intended ;))

    Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Fri, Dec 8, 2006 @ 15:18 IST #
  7. What about encrypted DVDs then? How are Sony still allowed to sell DVDs with CSS in them? I've personally experienced the fact that I am restricted from playing my own DVDs on my computer. And that's why I am a strong advocate against DRM as a concept itself.And hardware encryption -- I'm fundamentally against this idea as it puts too much power into the hands of already powerful corporate entities. I appreciate your post, though. You've tried to clearly explain the "other side" of the technology, as it were. Again, it all boils down to your theory that the "market" will reject the bad uses of the technology. But since the so-called "digital revolution" of the 80s and 90s, I think we've gone generally backward in empowering customers.A case in point is the VCR -- it was a device that allowed people to record television programmes for future viewing. Today, inspite of advanced technologies, we haven't seen a single successful device to replace the VCR... Doesn't that tell you that there is a deliberate move towards reducing the choices of consumers and forcing them to buy a DVD or VCD every time? Hasn't everything become so commercialized that we can no longer do the things that our fathers were able to do a couple of generations ago without any problems?But for me, personally I still distrust the very technology itself... maybe it's a case of the same FUD that *they* used for years now against Linux, backfiring on them. Or maybe I am basically and inherently wary of technology itself...

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Fri, Dec 8, 2006 @ 18:03 IST #
  8. Encrypted DVDs? They're still being bought & sold because, let's face it, CSS encryption is a joke. Most people watch DVD's via a DVD-player, where CSS is invisible - I know my combined VCR-DVD player is quite willing to copy a DVD movie to a VCR tape, CSS or not.Those of us using Linux? Well, we just grab libdvdcss and then ignore CSS encryption like everybody else. It's a DRM that is, at best, a very minor inconvenience. Kinda like iTunes, I understand. . .I'm not sure I follow your VCR example - DVD recorders exist, and TiVo- and MythTV-style TV-to-hard-drive boxes are becoming steadily more widespread. You can probably build a MythTV-capable PC for less than the cost of a VCR if you really wanted to. You'll have to elaborate on your reasoning before I can agree/argue with it ;)It's good to be wary of such technology: I am myself. It makes you scrutinize it closely, and keep an eye out for abuses of it. TC worried me as well, for a while. It was by studying both it, and the examples of its potential misuses, that I came to stop worrying about it.e.g. If MS can't stop various worldwide governments deciding to switch to ODF because they don't like proprietary formats, how will they ever succeed in making those same governments accept unbreakable TC-based vendor lock-in to MS formats? If anything, such a move would drive even more people away from MS Office, not lock them into it.Let's not forget, even in places where MS has succeeded in getting vendor lock-in, it's never had it long. Whether by reverse engineering (OpenOffice and MS Office formats) or by monopoly-abuse court rulings (The EU ordering them to open up their standards), every measure MS has tried to introduce to make it impossible to get away from them winds up ultimately nullified or hurting them instead of us.The same goes for all the other corporations. (Sony rootkit, anyone?) However plausible claims of "They're going to take over everything!" might seem, they just aren't borne out by real-life experience. "They're going to try and fail" happens, as does "They're going to threaten to try and hope people fall for it" (Remember SCO?), but "They're going to take over quite a lot" is about as bad as it gets.

    Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Fri, Dec 8, 2006 @ 19:40 IST #
  9. Quite simply, all I'm asking is, is this:Because we know that they will eventually fail, is that any reason to allow the technology in the first place? Even you admit that it's pretty much useless as a value-add to the end-consumer. And yet, I cannot understand how you don't denounce it and call it for what it really is.Also Microsoft's failures in the past haven't completely been failures. They know that it takes time for people to stop whining and complaining and before you know it, hardware encryption of the kind they want will pretty much become a standard. I know that you will say "but we're empowered to take them on." But Microsoft and Sony are not fools, you know. They are huge corporate empires who can take heavy short term losses if they think that a particular market can be captured in the long run by imposing their own restrictions and controls.As for boycotting those products, that's precisely what you and I will do. *We* will reject the technology, because we see it for what it is. But what about the typical home or business user who pretty much knows nothing other than Microsoft? Will they suddenly decide to throw away their computers because they find that it has DRM in it? Surely, they will not.As for the VCR example, you know what I mean. The DVD-type recorders you talk about are pretty new and still quite expensive where I live and are not at all common (may be it is common now in the UK, but I wouldn't know about that). The point is, they're nowhere near as popular as VCRs once where, because, let's face it - the media companies do not want every average consumer to own one. If people started recording stuff on their own, then they stand to lose heavily.You're right in the sense that there's no "doomsday" scenario. Even Microsoft wouldn't be foolish enough to be *that* heavy handed. But they will surely try and subtly control our devices more and more without actually saying it out loud... they will try and put as much pressure as possible without the average consumer finding out about their DRM. It will be a clear long-term strategy to eliminate their main threat which is FLOSS.The DRM you see today is a joke, simply because they're still in an immature state. But don't be surprised within a few years when they actually make it near-foolproof. And because it's hardwired into our hardware systems, that will make it that much harder to crack.I certainly hope you're right and I'm wrong, though. And the market is certainly indicating that you might be right, after all in your views... But I think it's good to be sceptical at this stage rather than learn one fine morning that *my* media and *my* software are tightly restricted to a particular hardware/software combination. We've won a few battles, but the war is still on as far as I'm concerned. :)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Fri, Dec 8, 2006 @ 20:01 IST #


  10. Comment by hari (blog owner) on Fri, Dec 8, 2006 @ 20:14 IST #
  11. Certainly they are - given that 9 times out of 10 it's them that allowed them to become monopolies in the first place (Copyright, patents, etc)The key difference is that those were cases when the government came in *when an abuse was already happening* and ordered them to stop it. That's very different from a situation where *abuse is possible so a new technology should be outlawed*That almost happened in the USA with encryption, as anybody who remembers PGP's history will tell you. America came perilously close to outlawing publicly-available, unbreakable encryption, specifically because *they wanted to be able to spy on their citizens*Governments should not be encouraged to be pro-active with banning technology: They *would* abuse that power. They should do exactly what they already do: Wait until a corporation abuses a technology, and then take steps to stop that abuse.Power to veto abuse is far safer than power to veto technology. Heck, the Bush administration would probably use such a power to ban the Web itself, because kids can use it to see pornography, you know!I'd be far happier to see TC come into being so that we all have a chance to see if we can make it work for us in valuable ways, and have the government come in and ban MS for using it to encrypt their .doc files; than I would seeing the government ban TC altogether because MS might use it to encrypt their .doc files.

    Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Fri, Dec 8, 2006 @ 21:47 IST #
  12. dominic, thanks for your valuable contributions to the debate. I appreciate your effort in posting your replies here. I'm pretty certain that there are two sides to this issue and it can be debated either way for a long time. At the same time it's good to get different perspectives like yours as well...Now after all that work it's time for some fun. Check out my next post. :)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Fri, Dec 8, 2006 @ 21:56 IST #
  13. And isn't it about time somebody else joined in the conversation anyway? :)

    Comment by Dominic (visitor) on Fri, Dec 8, 2006 @ 23:46 IST #

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