Posts by Paul Campbell
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As I mentioned locking you in locks in BOTH ends of the music purchase - as this explains that may not even be a good thing for the music middle men .....
maybe we'll see DRM go away not because it's too annoying for the user but because it's too annoying for the music industry ....
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BTW the "copyright is the cornerstone of our civilisation" is IMHO bunk - as I tried to point out copyright for printed stuff only started when the printing press was invented, and for music when people started to publish it on paper - 300 years ago when a minstrel played the latest hits at the local tavern an APRA rep didn't show up and try to hit them up for fees - historically it's all pretty recent stuff - for music just a few generations - I don't see why it has to work the same way for ever.
Having said that I think that copyrights for music does make sense - but the practical economics are changing - just like they changed when Mr Edison started recording
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took me a while to get back and reply .... as I said I do crypto - I know from the math you can't do the easy DRM thing - you can make a sealed box and make it work - anything else will be broken or subverted - your plan with box numbers really comes down to 'sealed boxes with embedded secret crypto certificates' - otherwise I'll just hack my box to have the same number as yours and then I can play your music
Vista's trusted boot chain and all the strife it's causing people (look at the guy who's story showed up this week - vista wanted to remove all the stuff he bought from Amazon because he added a new video monitor to his system) is an attempt to build one of the embedded boxes into a somewhat open system - the result is slow and annoying
anything else means that the crypto is going to be broken (look at DVDs where the secrets are printed on the disk or whichever one of the HD formats that was broken last year where the "9F .... " key had to be embedded in the software player)
it also means that EVERY system that will play music encrypted like this has to have one of these boxes - you're not going to give someone access to the magic keys unless you trust them not to give them up - you're not going to trust me because we use linux at home and since I'm a kernel hack I want to play on the machines that I own in just the places you don't trust me to look at
and that's part of the problem - you (the music company) want to own and control part of the computer that I own - why should I trust you to always do the right thing? things like Sony's root kit, or the recent Sears stuff are examples of just how badly that can go once corporate entities start to think they own part of my computer
Honestly we have a perfectly good system already - it's called the "legal system" - it makes it illegal to copy stuff that you haven't paid for and provides for penalties when you do - as I said before I've paid a lot of money for all the CDs I've bought over the years, I've never stolen or downloaded stuff i haven't paid for - ever - stop foisting this (eventually) unworkable DRM crap on me the customer who's paying you money and go off and prosecute the people who are ripping you off
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I do crypto for a living - in essence what you're talking about are crypto keys from the music vendors - it's how DRM works - and what you proposed is not going to work well from the consumer's point of view - in essence you're saying to the customer that either they buy music that comes preauthorised for N known devices (you're screwed when you want to replace your phone/ipod/computer because the music dosen't know about the new one) or you install a crypto key (or lots of keys) into each newdevice to reauthorize the music - (you're screwed there because if the music label goes belly up you can't authorize your new devices and your music becomes unuseable when your phone/mp3 player/computer die)
It also means that people like me who own a LOT of CDs (storage is a problem), don't pirate stuff and are the music industry's best customers but who don't use DRM encumbered software (windows is banned in our house) are screwed because if you've bought into the DRM solves everything world view there's no way that you can trust me ..... yet if I buy a CD and rip it onto my laptop/mp3/player/whatever you do trust me .... which is silly because
what's happening here is very simple: 300 years ago there was no copyright on music, music basically got played 2 ways - wandering musicians who happily played other peoples songs and court musicians (think of the great composers who had some rich guy paying the bills) - the music didn't belong to anyone and anyone could play it - what happened? the industrial revolution and the rise of the victorian middle class - they bought pianos for their parlours and sheet music came into vogue - it was printed on paper for the same copyright rules for print were applied to it - largely to protect the guy who went to all that effort to typeset it (the printer) - remember copyright came about with the invention of the printing press - in Rome if you wanted a copy of a book you went down to the forum and had a slave make you a copy - when music recording started the same regime as for printing was used - the modern problem is that we have this quite archaic mechanism for protecting the rights of the middle men - the publishers - the guys who get the bits from the author, make lots of copies and get them to us - now days that's so easy that there's no value to it - recording studios, CD pressing plants, warehouses, ships, trucks, brick and mortar stores, the record executive and his coke habit, his lawyers - these all do the same thing that the computers and the internet can do at 1% of the cost
What we're seeing at the moment is a dinosaur industry after the asteroid has touched down, nuclear winter has kicked in and they are suing everyone in sight to stay alive, meanwhile the mammals are hiding in their holes, adapting, and getting on with life
The music industry has to change, the record execs mostly will go, David Byrne's recent piece about how to make money as a musician shows how this is already happening -it's going to take some time and eventually the RIAA (the record execs) will run out of money for lawyers and the dinosaurs will die out - I look forward to a wonderfull future full of garage bands and live music
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well I wasn't trying to be grinchy, just honest - I understand what you're saying but I'm decidedly in 2 minds - and the same son when he found out that we'd been lying to him about the tooth fairy got physically quite violent (probably the only time he ever did) - he obviously felt really betrayed by us (his sister had found all the teeth ...)
I think it's really important to be really honest with kids - later on having them believe you becomes much more important - now they're teenagers I feel it's paying off - they do listen to us when we give nuanced talks about alcohol and drugs (not just the 'everything bad' which they'll find out is not true soon enough)
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In a fit of honesty I once explained to my then maybe 6yr old about Santa - he came back from the mall a few days later and announced that I was full of crap, he'd seen Santa and he was real.
I left it at that - Santa kept coming, presents arrived - and I was relieved that if my son believed his own eyes over what some adult was telling him I was probably doing something right
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firstly they did have those santa trackers when I was a kid I distinctly remember TV1 (in black and white) showing a 'radar track' of him on his way up from the south pole - because of course he does come to NZ first ...... explaining this to my (growing up in the US) kids was difficult "No! Santa comes from the North Pole!" - given the melting of the polar ice cap that argument's going to get a lot easier ....
Being decidedly non-religious too (but nominally xtian and jewish) we'll celebrate anything we can - we do it all.
What we did settle down to though was 'Xmas' - Xmas is the capitalist holiday of buying stuff - years ago as a joke my brother-in-law tied a $20 to the top of the tree, it's become a family tradition - it used to go out with the tree for someone to find on the street, then we gave it to the kids to give to a homeless person, nowdays we're back in NZ and the homeless are hard to come by - we haven't figured out what to do with it
This year though,. missing that winter xmas, I think we're going to get a tree in June and celebrate solstice
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I mostly agree - and know that money in politics is bad, corrosive even - to put in a rather righty frame: politics is all about a market place of ideas - letting one group be able to afford to push their ideas over people who can't seems to me to be the moral equivalent of protectionism or something - we want to choose the best ideas not the ones with the best money.
Quite apart from whether the bill is a good idea or not does anyone else in the rest of the country feel this whole fuss is an Auckland storm in a teacup (yeah I know it's a big teacup) - we were talking about it the other night and no one could understand why such a big fuss was being made
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thanks for making the "ironic" point
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back to the dual US citizenship thing .... (since my family is a wonderfull mixture or all of these) - the rules are weird and various:
- if you take US citizenship you MUST renounce any other citizenships you have - some countries (NZ included) ignore you, sensibly our country imbues us with a non-revokable citizenship at birth
- US citizens who take other country's citizenships used to re required to give up their US one - until a court case made it to the supremes in the late 70s - now they cant provided you have a reason to keep it ("want to visit family" is a good one) there's a list of evil countries you cant take citizenship of and you may not become part of another govt
- my kids are dual citizens, they got both citizenships by descent - it's not an issue for anyone - but the NZ govt considers the 2nd class citizens - unlike the rest of us they cant pass theirs on because they were born in the US - now they've been living in NZ for long enough we can get them naturalised - then they'll be citizens twice over