Ripping entertainment

It's okay (in Australia) to take some entertainment you bought on a round plastic disc and copy that data to your computer for personal use, as long as it only involves sound, not moving pictures. When you look at it that way, this is a very weird and inconsistent law, and I think it's time it changed. Why am I forbidden from doing to my DVD movies the same thing I am allowed to do to my CD music - that is, to rip it and copy it to my tablet or phone? Why is the law so specific about the type of entertainment to which I can do this?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The same laws are in force in most countries.
PPS - Because ripping movies is stealing but ripping music is just using it.

HDMI

HDMI is a real pain. Because of the slow back-and-forth negotiation of HDCP security every time your computer monitor or TV turns on, there's a big delay. Monitor went to sleep? Wiggle your mouse, then wait a second while your computer convinces itself that the same monitor it was just using is not a dirty imposter. Dragging a video currently playing from one monitor to another and it will black out, pause, then resume about a second later if everything goes smoothly. It's as if the PC is saying "Wait, wait, wait! What the hell is that? You didn't tell me you wanted to play video on the other monitor, too! Just let me go back and check if that's okay. ... Yeah, okay, it's cool. Totally cool. Don't even worry about it. Forget I was here." For extra lulz, try dragging THE EXACT SAME VIDEO, STILL IN PROGRESS straight back to the first monitor again. Same result. It's like your video card poops its pants every time something changes, including things it has seen several times before.

But of course all this is worth it, because we finally beat the pirates. Did you notice how there's way less piracy these days? No? Huh. Weird. I thought that was the whole point.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Don't worry, I'm sure the next great technology will finally beat them.
PPS - And it's sure to be much less annoying and intrusive, right?

Watermarks for plagiarised digital content

There is a long-standing practice on the web of stealing other people's content without permission, scrubbing it of all identifying marks and passing it off as your own. It's despicable plagiarism of the most blatant kind, but people are getting away with it, for the most part, because it's really hard to track down and enforce. That's never going to change. The closest you can come to detection is watermarking, but of course people are going to remove that if they know it's there. The best you can hope for is a watermark nobody even notices. Doing that to an image or video is hard. Watermarking text is harder.

Well, Robert Evans, writing for Cracked.com, did so. I don't know whether it was intentional, but I noticed something in the middle of an article. The trick was to mention the name of the original site directly as part of the natural flow of the text. Deliberate or not, it worked as textual watermarking, both to point out the practice and to identify the true source of the material. The sentence fragment was "...whether you're reading this on Cracked.com or on one of the many Indian blogs that steals our content..." and, sure enough, those same content-stealing blogs lifted the entire quote as part of their theft. Now anyone who came across the stolen version might have a moment's pause and say "hang on, reading this where?"

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That is, if people even notice what website they're on.
PPS - Apparently, most people don't.

DisplayPort and piracy

On my new computer at work I am using two monitors connected via DisplayPort cables to the video card. I was poking around the video settings, getting everything arranged to my liking, when I noticed the "content protection" tab. It was just a status indicator, basically, containing a diagram of my monitor and the cable, saying "content protected" with a big green tick to let me know that it's okay, don't panic, the content is protected. Of course I breathed a big, sarcastic sigh of relief, because finally I have monitors and cables with content protection. All those years of using unprotected content had been weighing heavily on my soul.

The problem with this little status display is philosophical, and it probably won't affect me. The questions to ask about it are these: whose content is this, and from what is it protected? It's (usually) not "my" content. It's Windows, YouTube, GMail and so on, but also all the programs I write myself. The next question is more sinister. The content on my monitors is being protected from me. When a computer has to be designed to treat its primary user as if that user has malicious intent, something has started to go wrong. When the desires of Hollywood have greater influence on the design of electronics components than the desires of the customers who will buy them or even the companies who manufacture and sell them, something has definitely gone way off course. HDCP does not belong on everyone's computers just to try and Stop The Pirates. That's stupid, and it's certainly not going to work. There will be two kinds of people who notice this content protection. The first kind is trying to do something legitimate with their legitimate content when the protection scheme fails and locks them out. Those people have a broken computer for no reason. The second type of person who notices is a pirate, who will work around the protection scheme and continue pirating as if nothing had happened. That person does not have the broken computer that Hollywood wants him to have. Two failures, and piracy still present. Double fail, even though they changed the entire consumer electronics industry according to their fears. Surely they can't consider that a win?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - When you imagine a movie executive saying "pirates", you have to imagine wide eyes, hands in the air, running in circles and screaming.
PPS - Also, the DisplayPort cables seem to prevent Windows from remembering the correct monitor resolutions for me. So there's that, too.

Technology and people

Technology is inseparable from social forces and pressures. You can't talk about the internet apart from the people who use it. Bittorrent is not the threat, but the people who use it and the reasons they do so. Those people and their reasons are not going away IF the only thing that changes is more people being sued. The only thing that might go away is Bittorrent. If all file sharing services were forever shut down tomorrow (and they really can't be) then file sharing would only get more difficult, not impossible. If you want to stop file sharing, you need to figure out who those people are and why they do what they do, then give them a better option.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Like high-quality downloads at low prices.
PPS - And remember quick availability, too.

Hollywood, piracy and profit

Piracy is on the increase, and so are Hollywood profits (when they make good movies). Does that mean they're winning or losing? That depends on when you ask them. Sometimes they'll cry poor because of pirates, and sometimes they'll crow their success over pirates as evidenced by their profits. Clearly, however, it is possible to have both high piracy and high profits. Possibly because they make more money from merchandising than ticket sales. Happy Meal toys are the real Hollywood industry.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Hence, Cars 2.
PPS - It'll be worth millions in ticket sales, but billions in merchandising.

Hollywood vs hard drives

Anything you can download or store for yourself scares the pants off the entertainment industry. If computers (and phones and games consoles and portable media players and GPS devices and ebook readers and so on) didn't have hard drives, the MAFIAA would be a lot happier, because then everything would have to be streamed over the network every time, and piracy would be dead since there's no way to store anything. So all they need to do to retain their old business models is destroy the entire market for consumer devices with any kind of storage capacity.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Anyone else would look at that situation and say "oh, well, what else can we do?".
PPS - Apparently Hollywood says "challenge accepted!".

Piracy vs obscurity

The only thing worse than having your work pirated is not having it pirated. The only things that stop piracy are obscurity and indifference, neither of which translate to monetary success. If your work is popular, it is going to be copied, and if your business relies on that being difficult or rare, it's going to fail eventually. Your business model needs to allow copying or, better yet, thrive on it. That might be enticing people to come to your concerts by putting clips on YouTube and encouraging ticket-holders to do the same.

YouTube will never replace the experience of actually being there, and live experiences can't be copied. This may mean we return to live-action shows rather than movies, and concerts rather than CDs. They have value because time and space are genuinely scarce, while digital copies are not, and monetary value (in this case) derives from scarcity.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Prepare for a full-scale Broadway revival, planet Earth.
PPS - But not until the movie cinemas start to die out.

Just another DRM failure

The HDCP master key has been leaked, which means anything that used to be "protected" by this pseudo-secret is now very vulnerable to attack, including Blu-Ray discs and HDMI cable connections. The point is this: the movie studios crammed HDCP down the collective throats of the electronics industry as yet another form of built-in failure, and now their critical secrets are out in the open and the whole scheme will come crashing down.

Did anyone predict this? Yes, in fact. Just about everyone, including security professionals, DRM nay-sayers and, I dare say, many people inside the MPAA itself. Next, will it matter if they were proven right and the DRM-happy higher-ups were dead wrong? You can pretty much bet on "no".

What will happen next? First, a mad scramble to try and suppress the secret key, which won't work. Next, investigations into key revocation, which won't work. Finally, someone will suggest generating a new key, essentially invalidating the old one and making all previously-sold equipment into incompatible paperweights. This might actually be the preferred approach, which will mean we'll start getting "Blu-Ray 2.0", and have to buy new TVs, new set-top boxes and new cables all over again.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - According to Hollywood, this will be known as "the price of piracy".
PPS - The rest of us will call it "highway robbery".

Blu-ray ahead in the encryption battle

For now, it seems that the Blu-Ray publishers are winning the battle against disc rippers who just want to enjoy their movies in ways Hollywood has not yet caught up with. The end result seems to be that more people own old HD-DVD gear than Blu-Ray, and that shows no signs of improving. That's the cost of winning the DRM war for publishers: consumers abandon your platform.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The Sony PSP "won" a similar battle against indie game developers.
PPS - It didn't work out all that well for them in the end.

Forbidden DVD loans

According to the opening warning, we are technically breaking the law by borrowing Dad's Black Adder DVDs. And I'm sure the phrase is meant to forbid both lending by DVD rental places and casual friend-to-friend loans, because it said both "loan" and "rental" were forbidden. Does that seem wrong to anyone else? Of course they're not going to know, but they have specifically tried to prohibit it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I can't think of a legitimate reason to attempt that.
PPS - Imagine "I can't lend you my DVDs. You'd better buy your own.". Ridiculous.

HD-DVD key suppression

What happens when the HD-DVD folk win the key revocation war? That would mean that people stop being able to crack the HD-DVD encryption, which is something they very much want to do, mostly in order to (a) back up their discs or (b) play their legitimate discs on their legitimate players. The only way it will stop is if people don't want to crack HD-DVD encryption anymore. If people stop wanting to crack your encryption, you've lost, because nobody cares about your format any more.

This is what happened with the Playstation Portable. People figured out how to run their own software, so Sony started a firmware patch race against the cracks. In the end, they won: nobody bothers running their own software on PSP any more. In fact, nobody bothers running much of *anything* on a PSP any more. So was it worthwhile? What were they even achieving? At least the HD-DVD key hoarders are "stopping teh PYRATES!!!1!".

My main point is this: the copy protection doesn't work, because it has been cracked. Then the coping mechanism - revoking the key - doesn't work, because that was broken before it could even come into effect. If they "win" this one, nobody will buy or watch HD-DVDs.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not bothering with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray yet.
PPS - I don't need them.

Copy Stop

A significantly long time ago, technology-wise, Weird Al Yankovic included a copy warning on a video cassette stating that it had been protected with "Patented Copy Stop^TM technology". Among its claimed effects was the loss of function of your player and recorder, fading of household furniture, the death of pets and global weather disturbances. It was all a joke, of course, but Al proved to be a bit of a prophet in that sense. If a system exactly like Copy Stop existed, you know it would have been deployed by now, and you know someone would have tried to circumvent it, probably killing us all in the process. That's humanity for you.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't often mean to be cynical.
PPS - The warning has been transcribed here.

One perfect copy

The RIAA and MPAA are fighting to make digital music and movies (ie CDs and DVDs) impossible to copy because, as they see it, one perfect copy destroys all sales for that work. The problem with the argument is that every work on CD or DVD out there has been copied, and people are still buying them. If one perfect copy destroyed all sales, the entire music and movie industry would be gone by now, because no money would be coming in.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Just a thought.
PPS - I still think piracy is wrong, but it's not hurting as much as they'd have you believe.