DRM rears it's ugly head

At the IPTV show yesterday, one of the key topics discussed in the morning was digital rights management. Will we ever escape this subject? If you thought that the issues were messy enough in the music space, try media. Any one given show may require obtaining rights from not just the studio that made the show, but certain graphics used in the show, the opening and closing credits, the background music, etc. It's enough to make someone go crazy.

And it might be a really big hurdle for new IP broadcast players to overcome if they want to start up. Sounds like managing rights management might be a real niche for another startup, not to mention DRM technology that easily fits into your systems architecture to help manage the business arrangements associated with obtaining those rights.

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dsiegel – Wed, 2006 – 03 – 08 05:26

DRM – IPTV

dsiegel's blog

DRM

Martin Geddes has made an interesting suggestion about DRM on [http://www.telepocalypse.net/archives/000887.html|his blog, Telepocalypse].

His suggestion is not particularly palatable to the content owners who want DRM to control the actions that can be performed on data--it's that we give up on that aspect of DRM, and use it solely as a form of meta-data to describe the ownership/sources of pieces of content, and make it illegal to tamper with that meta-data or distribute tools that do so.

The RIAA and MPAA, however, will only be happy with the sort of hardware-enforced DRM that Intel and Freescale have been putting together--but I don't see how that model can do anything but inhibit innovation by restricting applications that can use the content to those that the owners authorize. That's what gives us consumer-unfriendly results like commercials on DVDs that can't be fast-forwarded.

Craig Barrett of Intel has called for more flexible DRM (see [http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/02/24/HNbarrettdrm_1.html|this InfoWorld article]), but reading that article, I don't think he gets it. I don't just want to be able to move content from device to device, I want to be able to edit out the commercials or create new works using fair-use samples from content.

(BTW, the U.S. Public Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery has just issued [http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004465.php|recommendations on DRM].)

lippard – Wed, 2006 – 03 – 08 12:52

digital watermarking

I think that the big interest in DRM is more for the purpose of being able to track how many viewers have seen the content so that they can be properly compensated from their advertisers. Unfortunately, that does translate into restricting how that content moves around once it's been received by the set top box.

I saw an interesting demo of verimatrix's product at the show where the content was digitally watermarked in an invisible way, but when you run that content through their software, a code is revealed that allows them to track the video operator that originated the broadcast. They can then give the code to the operator and find out the time of day and subscriber info that it was captured on. It even works in movie theaters using a digital projector where a person video taped it, providing the theater operator that the show was pirated stuff.

I recommend that people thinking of stealing content off their set top box and putting it on Kazaa think twice as there are now some technologies that will nail you for distributing content illegally.

dsiegel – Wed, 2006 – 03 – 08 15:19

Digital watermarking

Dave, you might enjoy this Ed Felten [http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=981|blog post] on "How Watermarks Fail." Felten is a Princeton University computer science professor who has demonstrated the flaws in numerous DRM technologies.

lippard – Wed, 2006 – 03 – 08 15:49

DRM

That was a really interesting article Jim, thanks for sharing it.

In the case of Verimatrix, the watermarking is done on the set top box after the stream is received and embedded in the output signal, so according to that article a person could copy the file off two different set top boxes, compare the differences, and produce a cleaned file that didn't contain the watermark (or clean it enough to be misleading).

Hurray for the hackers, but will the average joe who steals a file and puts it on bittorrent go to this level of effort to provide a clean file, or will he decide it's not worth the trouble?

dsiegel – Wed, 2006 – 03 – 08 21:33

IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

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