CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Tag: DRM

  • SunnComm Follies

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    Ashlee Vance at the Register tells the amazing story of SunnComm, the DRM company whose CD “protection” product was famously defeated by holding down a PC’s Shift key. It’s one of those true stories that would be hopelessly implausible if told as fiction. Here’s the opening paragraph: You might expect one of the world’s leading…

  • DRM and the Market

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    In light of yesterday’s entry on DRM and competition, and the ensuing comment thread, it’s interesting to look at last week’s action by TiVo and ReplayTV to limit their customers’ use of pay-per-view content that the customers have recorded. If customers buy access to pay-per-view content, and record that content on their TiVo or ReplayTV…

  • Self-Help for Consumers

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    Braden Cox at Technology Liberation Front writes about a law school symposium on “The Economics of Self-Help and Self-Defense in Cyberspace”. Near the end of an interesting discussion, Cox says this: The conference ended with Dan Burk at Univ of Minnesota Law School giving a lefty analysis for how DRM will be mostly bad for…

  • Apple Threatens Real

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    Pay attention now, ’cause this story gets kinda complicated. See, Apple had this product called iPod that lets you listen to music. That sounds like a good idea. But Apple thought it would be better if the iPod could do less. So their engineers pulled a bunch of all-nighters to make sure that the iPod…

  • Industries to Form Yet Another DRM Consortium

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    A group of large movie and technology companies is about to form yet another consortium to solve the digital copyright problem, according to a John Borland story at news.com. This looks like one more entry in the alphabet soup (SDMI, CPTWG, ARDG) of fruitless efforts to standardize on an effective anti-copying technology. The new entity…

  • Velvet Revolver Album Not DRMed in Japan

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    I wrote recently about the Velvet Revolver album that is “protected” by SunnComm ‘s ineffectual CD anti-copying technology. The technology was doomed to fail – and has in fact failed – to keep the music off the popular P2P filesharing systems. It turns out that things are even weirder than I had thought: the very…

  • Fancy DRM For Academy Screeners?

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    Movie studios are considering an elaborate DRM scheme to limit copying of promotional “screener” videos distributed to Academy Award voters, according to an AP story by Gary Gentile. The article’s description of the scheme is a bit confusing, but I think I can reconstruct how it works. The studios would distribute a special new DVD…

  • Lame Copy Protection Doesn't Depress CD Sales Much

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    A CD “protected” by the SunnComm anti-copying technology is now topping the music charts. This technology, you may recall, was the subject of a paper by Alex Halderman. The technology presents absolutely no barrier to copying on some PCs; on the remaining PCs, it can be defeated by holding down the Shift key when inserting…

  • DRM as Folding Chair

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    Frank Field offers an interesting analogy: DRM is a folding chair – specifically, it’s one of those folding chairs that people use after shoveling out the snow from a parking space that they use to claim it after they drive away. For those of you who don’t have to cope with snow, I know that…

  • Stopgap Security

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    Another thing I learned at the Harvard Speedbumps conference (see here for a previous discussion) is that most people have poor intuition about how to use stopgap measures in security applications. By “stopgap measures” I mean measures that will fail in the long term, but might do some good in the short term while the…