Over the top [LWN.net]

Over the top

Posted Jun 4, 2009 8:41 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458)
In reply to: Over the top by BrucePerens
Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

What you're saying about being swept into a corner strongly implies that you believe DRM measures will in the future successfully keep open source projects from using various media. I know of no major DRM implementation that has not been quickly cracked, and I strongly believe that the reason for this is that the concept of DRM is technically flawed. As such, I see no strategical reason what so ever to accept even minor restrictions in order to gain brownie points from the content industry.

Quite the opposite, the content industry has continually tried to block free software from accessing their content in any way they can, no matter what we do. If proprietary software keeps prioritizing partners over users, while open source does not, that will ensure free software use will increase, and content providers will be forced to take notice of us by sheer force of market share. We don't owe content producers anything, we owe it to ourselves and our users to ignore them and stay true to our ideals.

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Over the top

Posted Jun 4, 2009 20:18 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

DRM *implemented in software* is fundamentally flawed. I just hope nobody
starts really using the TPM and things like HDMI that move decryption into
the display/sound hardware :(

Over the top

Posted Jun 5, 2009 7:50 UTC (Fri) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link]

The decryption keys are stored somewhere on every HDMI device. Way harder than to sniff out the key from a software player, but definitely doable. Don't know enough about TPM to know how secure it is, though.

I know of no major DRM implementation that has not been quickly cracked - have you actually looked?

Posted Jun 17, 2009 7:05 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I know of no major DRM implementation that has not been quickly cracked, and I strongly believe that the reason for this is that the concept of DRM is technically flawed.

Have you actually tried to find such an implementation or are you living in your own phantasy world? The very first DRM implementation designed with help of cryptoanalysts - Cell - was successfully used for working DRM protestion of PS3 titles. The solution is on the market for 2.5 years, there are ove 20 millions players and 100 millions disks, yet DRM is holding? Will it work forever? Probably not - but then it has no need to: 20-30 years from now disks will deteriorate and the fact that DRM will be broken will have no practical significance...