LWN: Comments on "GStreamer to support DRM"

GStreamer to support DRM

petegn — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 18:27:49 +0000

>Please go to the nearest hardware store and pick up a DVD reader that doesn't read CDs or a unencrypted DVDs.

Thats a piece of cake a friend of mine has a fairly new june 2005 combined dvd/video machine it refuses point blank to read audio CD's also wont read VCD's and it cost enough ..

Here's the DRM support I could get behind

petegn — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 18:20:44 +0000

The only form of DRM that is acceptable is one that is opensource and you have the choice to use or not personally i think it should all be scrapped instantly it only serves one purpose that is to make money for the likes of the RIAA and friends .

We should not be bieng controlled by the lokes of them We should be Controling Them and if the music industry and co dont like it we as they say "suck it in " , And lets not make a mistake here it IS the Music and Film industries that are the Main protagonists in all this crap ..

Pete .

No kidding

dkite — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 16:01:24 +0000

Thats another issue.

Let me put it very succinctly. If I am required to run some kind of junk
that you folks put out to listen to music, I won't.

This industry may be your bread and butter, but it is in no way a
necessity to me.

I really don't care about your business model. If the music attracts me
in a format that I can stomach, you will get my money.

Let me repeat. It is not my concern whether you eat or not. My concern
when it comes to music is my enjoyment. Your sense of entitlement and the
drive to make it difficult for me to enjoy music is making me not want to
support you.

Derek

Gstreamer and GNU

ofranja — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 17:12:49 +0000

What if I dont care to "US Laws" and they do not affect me?

Gstreamer and GNU

zblaxell — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 21:18:15 +0000

Whichever law they're (ab)using now to prevent mass-market DVD players that can fast-forward through all video sections of the disc.

Actually that wasn't such a good example, since fast-forwarding is not copyright infringement--you only agree to not fast-forward when the disc tells you to in your implied acceptance of the DVD player's shrink-wrap license.

Suppose the example instead checked the resolution of the output port (as in the new analog hole bill) and refused to emit output without authenticating whatever's connected to said port. All software-based DRM systems boil down to basically the same code as in my example. The only difference between most of the systems in the field and a GPLed DRM-encumbered player is that you can grep the source code for the GPLed DRM-encumbered player and easily circumvent the restriction (although apparently sometimes this is illegal). Of course, such GPL code wouldn't survive very long without removing the restrictions, since users of GPL code don't really tolerate people trying to tell them what they can't do with their own machines.

Can't require phoning home

zblaxell — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 21:18:13 +0000

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.

No kidding

graydon — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 21:32:44 +0000

"artists who have a right to get paid for their art"

I see this assertion often, yet it is false. Artists do not have a right to be paid for their art. If you have an employment contract or a sales agreement, sure, you can enforce the agreement. Art in general? No. Society does not owe someone money because they create art.

If you create art, you have certain limited rights to control its replication, performance, association with your name, etc. For a while. If you cannot monetize those rights in the alloted time -- say because you produce lousy art, or are a lousy salesperson, or made the mistake of locking it inside a DRM scheme -- that is your problem.

Customers broadly understand that failure to pay will eventually result in production drying up. They'll pay for stuff. Most people are honest buyers of stuff priced at reasonable-seeming prices (i.e. not ever-rising prices when production and distribution costs are obviously falling).

People are not going to buy something "because you wish it so", or think you have a right to it. You have to be selling something a customer wants, at a price they like. If DRM turns out to be "sorta sucky", people don't have to buy it. They can buy a skipping rope, or put their money in a jar.

Here's a list of "sorta sucky" aspects of various DRM schemes which will drive potential customers away:

- no ability to timeshift
- no ability to share with friends
(which may result in friend buying)
- no ability to move between devices
- no ability to play on competitor's device
- no ability to reformat for another device
(small screen, lower CPU, different codec format, etc.)
- no ability to produce mixes, tributes, fan art, mods, extensions
- no ability to make backups to survive original media wearing out
- no ability to survive media, device, software upgrades,
requirement to buy all music again with each generation

All these things make the DRM'ed content unappealing from a sales perspective. They are not "sellable" features. Customers will not ask for them. Some customers might tolerate them, if you're the only game in town. But a certain number will just decide that your art sucks, isn't worth the hassle. They might go to your non-DRM-selling competitor. Or, if you're a real jerk and have legislated all non-DRM-selling customers out of business, your customers may just go play a video game. Or go for a walk. You have no right to their money.

Gstreamer and GNU

beoba — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 19:03:35 +0000

What law would that be?

I'd have difficulty seeing that work in a GPLed product.

Can't require phoning home

beoba — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 18:58:09 +0000

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"

GStreamer to support DRM

lilo — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 07:48:33 +0000

The author wrote:

The TPM chips being put into an increasing number of computers may make that kind of restriction possible, but the real target is probably elsewhere: embedded systems.

Again and again we see this battle between the consumer and the vendor in certain industries, and every time it happens, the notion is put forth that somehow, because a feature is attractive to the vendor, it will be prized by the customer. Nothing is further from the truth in the case of features such as DRM.

It's clearly best simply to not buy set-top boxes and embedded consumer electronics systems with industry-sponsored DRM—but it does seem as if this is a war the vendor can't win.

Watching the promo for one of those "weekend movies with features interspersed" on one of the satellite cable channels, I noticed that the topic, on this program viewed by millions or hundreds of thousands of users was, "how to copy your friend's music collection to CD as a thoughtful gift." I'm struck by the collision between the world views of the entertainment industry, which sees this sort of flexibility as a temporary setback, always about to be corrected in the next generation of products, and the consumer, who sees it as the only reason they'd ever buy consumer entertainment technology in the first place.

It's important to stay vigilant, and to fix the brokenness of IP law, but maybe we're not about to lose this battle.

Here's the DRM support I could get behind

ronaldcole — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 09:06:03 +0000

"How can DRM possibly work?" Fear, of course... fear of being plundered and pillaged by professional plunderers and pillagers: teams and teams of lawyers.

Can't require phoning home

zblaxell — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 17:49:56 +0000

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.

GStreamer to support DRM

mmarsh — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 16:12:39 +0000

Actually, there are (or at least were -- don't know the status now) DVD players that won't play CDs that you've burned yourself. That includes music that you've created and recorded yourself, so it doesn't apply solely to copyright-infringing discs.

Yes, the recording industry

felixfix — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 15:47:30 +0000

Very specifically, the bureaucrats and hangers on who spend way too much time and money on dubious projects, dubious studio time, dubious marketing. The artists themselves are not suffering nearly as much as the incompetent bloated middle layers. The *recording industry* will adapt, sooner or later, to the modern age and eliminate the bureaucrats and hangers on who pollute the artists' world. In the meantime, the Internet is exposing more clearly than ever how inefficeint that industry is, and voting with its ears to ignre their squealing.

GStreamer to support DRM

rrw1000 — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 15:44:17 +0000

Sounds like a good thing to me - frankly, if people are going to sell me DRMd content, I'd much rather play it under an OS I can hack to get the MPEG stream out than under an OS I can't :-). It's a bit like adding support for 40-bit crypto to Navigator back in the day - it's stupid, expensive, and it doesn't work, and everyone knows it's stupid, expensive, and doesn't work.

The only reason anyone does it is to humour the content providers, who want the warm fuzzies before they release any of their precious content. We're going to win eventually, but in the meantime this may relieve those of us with the know-how of some of the pain.

Can't require phoning home

felixfix — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 15:37:13 +0000

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.

No kidding

arafel — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:34:36 +0000

The reports I've seen - the independent ones, not the ones paid for by the RIAA - conclude that the impact of copying is at worst negligible, and at best positive, and that the sales reduction is primarily due to bad decisions by the record companies.

If you have credible evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested to see it.

Unix to support DRM

rjw — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 12:29:09 +0000

I think the point is that if codec licensors require a joke DRM scheme now, that is trivially defeated, do you really believe that they *won't* start requiring a hardware assured pipeline at sometime in the future?

At that point, will you throw up your hands and give up?

Or will you incrementally add things at the request of the licensors, to the detriment of the users control of his own machine?

This is a pretty dangerous road to go down, as it sets up an expectation that you will support any arbitrarily nasty DRM scheme that comes along, and some of those *do* require that you architecture is based on user-distrust.

Of course, none of them actually have any security value, but hey, who cares?

No kidding

zblaxell — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 08:07:23 +0000

"the recording industry really IS being impacted financially by people ripping and copying their music from CDs"

That is most likely true. Some data suggests the impact is a positive one for some parts of the industry, but whether positive or negative it's extremely unlikely to be exactly zero.

The recording industry seems to be suffering as much if not more from their own paranoia and bad business decisions than from illegal redistribution (note that ripping and copying per se have no financial impact on the recording industry whatsoever unless there is also distribution).

People who don't buy CD's today are basically the same people who weren't buying CD's ten years ago--they still listen to music, but now they can listen to music more easily, reliably, and with higher audio quality than ever before. If we magically made it impossible for these people to listen to music without purchasing a CD, they wouldn't listen to music at all, or they'd revert to some technologically backward behavior like singing to each other. About the only way the recording industry is going to extract money from these people is if they get a grant from the government.

New artists are adapting to changes in their environment. Signing up with a major record label is fairly far down the list of likely outcomes even at the best of times, but now one could get oneself featured in a game or TV commercial soundtrack, or run a website with a PayPal donate button to cover studio expenses without intending to make a living from music performance.

Why pay tens of thousands when a cheap laptop, some specialized audio gear (which you can often rent), and a web site or a popular blog is all you need to reach a worldwide audience? This is the *real* threat to the recording industry--not that individual consumers will rip off artists, but that the artists and consumers will figure out that they only need each other, and stop signing contracts with the recording industry.

This is why DRM targets media player vendors, and why consumer electronics vendors find DRM so fascinating. DRM prevents consumers and artists from connecting with each other without the approval of a third party. A widely deployed DRM system can put the recording industry under the control of the DRM systems vendor, at which point the recording industry is pretty much irrelevant--the recording industry will still carry all the risk, but the DRM system can raise fees or pull the plug any time the industry doesn't contribute enough back to the DRM system vendor.

Assuming we are not all forced to implement DRM, most good artists are not really going to notice when the recording industry implodes (or at least drastically restructures itself to cope with reality). By that time the artists will know where the audience is and have the technical means to reach them, and vice versa, so the benefits that a traditional recording industry can provide just won't matter any more. The recording industry is not going to go away, but it is going to have to change quite a bit to focus on the remaining useful things it does do well. One of the first things the industry has to do is stop trying to accelerate its own destruction with DRM...

Gstreamer and GNU

zblaxell — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 07:25:45 +0000

DRM support in free software is easy. Just write a bunch of code like:

if (event.key == BUTTON_FAST_FORWARD) {
/* Altering this clause of the if statement is a violation of US law. */
if (stream.permit_ff) {
do_fast_forward();
} else {
display_silly_dont_press_that_button_again_icon();
}
}

Not good enough anyway

zblaxell — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 07:15:26 +0000

DRM can require players to phone home (or provide an Internet connection that the GPU in your video card can use to phone home) for firmware updates on a regular basis.

Some of the proposed DRM schemes disable *authors* or *players*, not media. Some of the proposed media types require someone to sign (and therefore approve) every author's or player's key. Playback hardware (which doesn't have an unencrypted native data format, not even on the PCI bus) will refuse to accept the data unless it comes with a valid, unrevoked signature.

The idea is to force everyone trading things on the net to have their keys signed, then have video cards that can receive lists of revoked author keys, and refuse to play anything that came from someone who displeases their DRM masters.

correction/edit

xoddam — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 05:53:21 +0000

> a quick kernel hack will still make the capturing of unrestricted
> streams easy.

> I think you meant to say *restricted* streams.

To use the proper terminology -- the correct word is cleartext.

To dwindle away...

xoddam — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 05:44:57 +0000

> If the music and movie industries are not fueled with funds,
> they'll simply dwindle away under a model you desire.

Now that would be a rosy outcome! No longer will record companies be
able to profit by signing bands into indentured labour, throwing up some
glossy posters and videos then pressing the 'copy' button at $15 a pop.

More likely is that these industries will adapt to a different business
model that offers what the real market -- the consuming public, which
happens to have taste and duplicating machines of its own -- demands,
instead of demanding draconian enforcement of new artificial monopoly
rights.

People have already started spending less money on prerecorded
mass-market CDs and films and more on live entertainment, concert
merchandise (including indie recordings, often on CD-R, at a reasonable
markup) and art objects -- a direct financial return to numerous
individual artists.

No-one here is advocating the abolition of copyright. We *are* decrying
the attempt to keep general-purpose machines out of the hands of the
general public.

> The demise, however, will not be for lack of demand for the product.

It would be for a lack of demand for the product *at the inflated price*
it's offered for. I have no problem paying $20 for a disc if it cost $10
per disc to make the music. I simply don't buy music at those prices if
it has already amortised a million times -- unless it's *really* good (I
confess, I did buy a couple of Beatles albums at full price a year or two
ago).

GStreamer to support DRM

job — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:23:27 +0000

It's not unrealistic at all. Part of the original DVD designs hard wired area of the disc was a special bit that should make sure you could not play home made movies in stationary video players. This failed together with the region coding scheme only because the DVD Alliances control over the keys were to coarse. They will not do the same mistake again, I'm afraid.

No kidding

job — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:18:52 +0000

It is not, let me repeat not, an artists right to get paid for their work. That may be trivially true, but I still feel it's important to stress the point since it is one of the most often repeated untruisms (if that's a word).

The right lies solely with the customer. It is my right to buy whatever stuff I like. And I don't like revokable licenses to listen to songs on approved equipment. I do buy CDs from time to time, but never DVDs.

correction/edit

jabby — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 13:48:55 +0000

So even if the GStreamer pipeline is entirely secure and uncrackable, a quick kernel hack will still make the capturing of unrestricted streams easy.

I think you meant to say restricted streams. Capturing unrestricted streams should be easy without having to hack the kernel. :-)

Here's the DRM support I could get behind

ekj — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:39:46 +0000

DRM is not nonsense--it was never meant to protect against well-armed attackers like commercial pirates or dedicated warez groups.

If the dedicated warez-groups can crack the drm, then the undrmed media will continue to float freely over the internet, like it does today, probably in a better anonymized network. And they've gained nothing.

There are few enough commercial pirates and warez groups that they (or their distribution channels, including P2P) can be shut down with legal measures, at least in developed countries.

First, I very much doubt this is true. Secondly, even if it was, this still wouldn't help. It would only mean that the neweest Tittney-cd became available maybe an hour later, since it'd get cracked it some non-developed country and thereafter spread over the networks exactly as it does today.

Third, you seem to assume that all people are either amateurs or comercial operations. This neglects the large group of people who have lots of skills and expertize, but no interest in doing pirating comercially. These are a lot harder to catch than the comercial pirates, because the latter can be caugth by following the money-trail.

If I *don't* require any payment, it's pretty easy to make some file available to the world in such a way that it's pretty darn hard to proove it originated from me.

Here's the DRM support I could get behind

ekj — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:34:25 +0000

I always assumed they would finally create a sceme that worked reasonably well. Something based around hardware keying or whatnot. Or like were you are encryption a with a shared private key or something like that.

Most people never thougth about it. But the grandparent is rigth: DRM is, in it's essence, nonsensical. Bruce Schneier said it best: Trying to make bits non-copyable is like trying to make water not wet.

You want literally millions of devices to be able to play the DRMed media. This means they must posess all the nessecary information to decrypt it. The algorithm, *and* the key.

Yet, at the same time one assumes that *none* of these devices will ever do anything the publishers want. Display on screen ? Ok. Save unencrypted on disc ? Not ok. Output through headphones ? Ok. Output through digital-out ? Not ok. Output through headphones-connection that happens to be connected to the audio-in on another device capable of recording ? Not ok.

Notice that it's *not* enough to stop most of the people most of the time. They need to stop all of the people all of the time. If 1 in 10000 people are capable of ripping, mp3ing and uploading the newest Tittney-album, then the other 9999 people can download it like they do today, totally unaffected by the DRM. Infact they'd be *more* likely to download it than they are today because the downloaded drm-free mp3 will work on "all" devices (and give all freedoms) whereas the drmed crap will work on "many" devices and give you exactly those rigths (i.e. near none) that the publisheer wishes to give you.

Today, a good rip and an original audio-cd is equally good. (for most practical purposes anyway) In the drm-world the good rip is a lot *better* than the original plastic-thing-that-looks-like-a-cd-but-isn't.

Gstreamer and GNU

proski — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 05:37:19 +0000

Indeed, GNOME states that it's a GNU project and includes GStreamer, version 0.8.3.

Anyway, I think there is no need to contact GNU and GNOME until a DRM enabled version of GStreamer is actually released. Many stated intentions never materialize.

No kidding

bojan — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 04:48:53 +0000

> Yea, like I said, you can paint it any color of rose you want...

It is a matter of law that conditions exist for copyright infringement to become "theft" (a crimial offence, actually). Just because you think it is "theft", it doesn't make it so. You are just painting it in your colours, while I'm trying to point out the reality (US & Oz):

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca19681...

> If the music and movie industries are not fueled with funds, they'll simply dwindle away under a model you desire.

Quick, save the world! Oh, while at it, make sure open source is forbidden too. All the signs show that the "software industry" is already suffering because of those pesky FOSS lovers.

I certainly hope that human existence isn't about "survival of industries". Because if it is, we'll never do anything better than what we know today.

Unix to support DRM

drag — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 03:43:55 +0000

Well to be fair to LWN.. This is the _second_ thing they picked up from the Gstreamer release.

I don't think that it's actually about the gstreamer release much.. it's more about the idea that gstreamer (being free software) can be utilized to restrict freedoms. It's what people have been paraniod about for a while now (with IBM and Sony and such getting more interested in Linux stuff)

The release announcement for Gstreamer 0.10.0 at LWN is at http://lwn.net/Articles/163637/

It's quite unbiased. :)

Congratutions btw. I've been looking forward to this release. Hopefully it solves most, if not all, of the limitations in the 0.8.0 series stuff. (I wonder how long till it hits Debian Sid..)

No kidding

jeaton — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 02:27:28 +0000

Yea, like I said, you can paint it any color of rose you want...

If the music and movie industries are not fueled with funds, they'll simply dwindle away under a model you desire. The demise, however, will not be for lack of demand for the product. It will simply be due to a lack of people with integrity. Businesses, after all are all about making money.

No kidding

bojan — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 01:58:53 +0000

> Friends, this is nothing short of theft. You can paint it any color of rose that you want...it's still theft.

According to copyright law in the US and many western countries, it is well short of theft. It is called copyright infringement and generally speaking isn't a criminal offence (unless certain conditions are met). That's legally speaking.

Morally speaking, why do some people think that it is OK for them to work once and make money on that forever? I have to go to work every day if I want to make a buck. So does an actor that acts in a theatre, for example. Why should some other people be privileged not to put an effort in every single day?

No kidding

bk — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:29:21 +0000

I can say with a fair amount of experience that your views don't represent the majority of indie artists. In fact, many of my favorite labels sell CDs and vinyl only slightly above *cost* (Touch & Go, No Idea), because they do it for the love of art, not to make a buck. Likewise, I actually *buy* their products because I respect them and their non-profiteering stance. I also go to see their shows and buy t-shirts and other merch, which is where the artists really make a living.

Maybe you should tour more; your fans surely will support you through tickets and merchandising, right? If not, well...

No kidding

jeaton — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:02:30 +0000

OK, folks, as an indie recording artist AND experience SW engineer, I'll tell you that it is not a question of whether an indie or signed artist is in favour of making it hard to listen to or otherwise use a CD you've bought by introducing DRM measures.

Whether you all want to believe it or not, the recording industry really IS being impacted financially by people ripping and copying their music from CDs, which directly impacts signed artists who have a right to get paid for their art and impacts indie artists particularly who now find it a LOT harder to get signed since labels aren't in a financial position to sign as many new artists because it costs tens of thousands of dollars to produce, master, manufacture, market and promote. From my producer and other artists that KNOW the industry, I can tell you that huge numbers of staff have lost their jobs over the last few years as a result of people making copies of other people's CDs rather than for out the cash themselves. Friends, this is nothing short of theft. You can paint it any color of rose that you want...it's still theft.

In the vinyl and early CD days the recording industry made money on the fact that every person that wanted to make copies of vinyl or CDs had to accept a copy with degraded audio fidelity by recording to tape. Now with the ability to make digital copies of music on CD with virtually equal fidelity with ease, CDs are being copied in vast numbers resulting in MASSIVE dip in CD sales.

So, in summary, as an indie artist, I'm in favor of technologies that can prevent people from ripping me off by allowing others to get my hi-fidelity music for free by copying CDs or MP3s. What you are all talking about has nothing to do with free speach or consumer rights.

Unix to support DRM

wingo — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 23:06:10 +0000

I think the statement that "GStreamer will support DRM" is a bit misleading, inasmuch as GStreamer does not and, to my understanding, will not have any DRM components in it. You might as well say that GTK+ supports supports global warming, if General Motors happens to have any applications based on GTK+.

The thing is, if a distro wants to support decoding Windows Media Video files in a product sold in the US, they need to have the licenses. I don't think Microsoft licenses WMV decoders without the requirement that there be some kind of restrictions management system in place. Ergo if a company (Fluendo) wants to sell a WMV decoder, it has to make an honest attempt at DRM.

That's what Christian is talking about. Not an evil scheme to put some DRM structure deep in the core of GStreamer -- that's stupid on many fronts.

Finally I'd like to mention that I'm frustrated at this juxtaposition of GStreamer and DRM. We've been working crazy hard all this year on the GStreamer 0.10 release. All of the developers are extremely pleased with our current status. But the first thing that LWN highlights is a couple of entries from Christian's web log. I hope that people can see beyond one company's plan to make some money off of the project.

Disclaimer: I do work for Fluendo.

Gstreamer and GNU

cantsin — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 22:27:50 +0000

It was clear to me that DRM support can be implemented as free software as
long as the code is free. But that a program is free software is one thing.
It is yet another thing if this program officially belongs to the GNU
project, i.e. if it's not just being GPLed or LPLed, but part of the FSF's
official GNU software stack like Gnome is. In the latter case, DRM support
would contradict GNU's stated philosophy and politics.

Quite bad

man_ls — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:34:53 +0000

You are right. However, these laws are just making it clear that digital restriction measures are too draconian. Putting people in jail because they distribute a prime number which unlocks a DVD you purchased is hard to justify. If only people just cared a little bit more about things around them...

Not good enough anyway

man_ls — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:29:04 +0000

Good point. And yet remember that secrets cannot stay secret for ever, however well you guard them. One leak is enough to break any encryption scheme; and once in the open, you cannot recall all devices and media in the field to change them. Therefore, these restrictions systems are inherently brittle.

I think legal threats (as job outlines above) are more credible. And more scary.

Gstreamer and GNU

proski — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:00:18 +0000

I think DRM can be implemented in free software if the code is not intended to impose limitations on the users, or, in other words, if anything that limits the user is not a part of free software.

LWN: Comments on "GStreamer to support DRM"

GStreamer to support DRM

Here's the DRM support I could get behind

No kidding

Gstreamer and GNU

Gstreamer and GNU

Can't require phoning home

No kidding

Gstreamer and GNU

Can't require phoning home

GStreamer to support DRM

Here's the DRM support I could get behind

Can't require phoning home

GStreamer to support DRM

Yes, the *recording industry*

GStreamer to support DRM

Can't require phoning home

No kidding

Unix to support DRM

No kidding

Gstreamer and GNU

Not good enough anyway

correction/edit

To dwindle away...

GStreamer to support DRM

No kidding

correction/edit

Here's the DRM support I could get behind

Here's the DRM support I could get behind

Gstreamer and GNU

No kidding

Unix to support DRM

No kidding

No kidding

No kidding

No kidding

Unix to support DRM

Gstreamer and GNU

Quite bad

Not good enough anyway

Gstreamer and GNU

Yes, the recording industry