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Can't require phoning homeCan't require phoning homePosted Dec 15, 2005 15:37 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)In reply to: Not good enough anyway by zblaxell Parent article: GStreamer to support DRM
No way can DRM manufacturers require or even expect that all units will phone home regularly. iPod? Car system? Even trying to convince people to plug their home stereo into a phone is problematical. Can you imagine when Joe Sixpack sets up his new stereo, he won't read the manual, he'll plug it in, plug in speakers, put in a CD and hit the play button ... and nothing will happen. He's going to get mad and frustrated when he can't make it play his CD, he's going to take it back or call the 1-800 number, and he's going to really come unglued when they tell him his stereo won't play a CD unless it is connected to the Internet.
Even if only 1% of the Joe Sixpacks demand a refund, the message will come through loud and clear.
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Can't require phoning home Posted Dec 15, 2005 17:49 UTC (Thu) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link] Don't be so sure. An average iPod is fairly often connected to an Internet-connected PC of some kind, which can act as a conduit for control messages from Apple.
It's not actually necessary to phone home if the device listens to broadcasts from home. Plastic discs (even blank recordable media) can come with embedded directives to the players from the DRM vendors. A DVD holds 9GB of data but many movies are much smaller...each one could contain a million author/player revocation certificates. These can easily reach the home and car stereos. The car stereo can also receive updates via its radio receiver.
Can't require phoning home Posted Dec 22, 2005 18:58 UTC (Thu) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] I have difficulty seeing many users going along with "you must plug your ipod into a computer every N days or it will stop playing your music"
Can't require phoning home Posted Dec 23, 2005 21:18 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link] I think it would be more like "if you want to put more music on your iPod, you must plug your iPod into a computer." At that point it can require Internet connectivity to its DRM masters since the whole point of the exercise is to transfer data from the same DRM masters to the iPod. The user experience might be "sometimes when you put new music onto your iPod, it stops playing some of the old music any more."
Of course if someone writes a free version of the software on the PC that talks to the iPod, there's no way they can fail to notice that for some reason the wire protocol to the iPod involves bouncing blocks of unintelligible bits back and forth to some Internet site that nobody has ever heard of.
On the other hand, if Apple starts embedding iPod DRM directives into standard formats (e.g. MP3) as audio watermarks, then Apple still owns the iPod unless you are a guru of stenography countermeasures.
Of course this doesn't do anything useful if the only data you put into your iPod comes from clean sources (e.g. ripped from standard audio CD's or analog sources by unencumbered DRM-free software) with no network access, but at this point you're maintaining a firewall around the iPod--if you ever stop paying attention or loan your iPod to someone who does, your iPod could escape its confinement and update itself.
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