News Hollywood may demand DRM for big HDs

Hollywood studios may insist on DRM for the next generation of small-yet-capacious perpendicular recording hard drives. Who controls the contents of your Video iPod - you, or Hollywood?

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/07/21/drm_hard_drives/

 

implement onto the hard disk?!?!

and since when did holywood have any influance over hard disk manufacture?

 

-[silently] psttt....Hey guys, I have this video, I have this new movie, Doom on my vipod, best movie ever, the effects are amazing the resolution is only 320*240, but who cares. Here just look at it.... wait let's go to the basement, it's not dark enaugh here, all I see is a glare.
[in the basement] Here ya go! No I'll show you this part. See how he throws those two pixels up in the air, hits the other guy's head and catches those two pixels?
-[everyone] AWESOME.... and look at that chick with big boobs....
-that's not a chick.
-What?
-That's an alien from mars...
-WTF? How do you know?
-Tom said it, he went to watch the movie in the theater..


[silence]


-[everyone]Cool, let us download, let us download! I wanna see the chick again

[pause]

-[Billy]Hey guys but what did those two pixels represent?
-....hmmm I don't know,
-[Billy] Maybe it's a dil...-[everyone] Shut up Billy, this is not that movie about mafie where he get's beatin with the dil/-[Billy]Ok ok, let's go ask Tom.... maybe it was a shotgun..?

 

wtf?!

I'm quite sure DRM will be implemented in any legal video download iTunes / Napster type store, and I'm equally sure that the DRM will be cracked a la iTunes pretty sharpish.

But as for implementing it on the drive? How would that work? Surely the drive has no concept of the content of the data stored on it - it is just a (admittedly very clever and capacious) repository for ones and zeroes. DRM would have to be implemented by encoding the file in such a way that it is only capable of being converted to moving pictures and sound by an appropriately authorised hardware or software decoder.

I'm firmly of the opinion that no DRM will ever stop commercial piracy, which is ultimately what the industry really wants to prevent, and that its main function is to annoy the hell out of honest users trying to use their legally bought content in the manner of their choice.

 

Like someone said in another thread, if it's code, it can be cracked. The only thing this will do, even if they are allowed to do it (which I totally think is a bad idea), is prevent us from using it until some 14 year old Swede cracks it.

 

All I was saying is that low res movie copie will not compete with good movies [not that I think Doom will be a good one]. If the movie is well made, wathcing it first on a portable video player would just awaken the curiosity of most people and then they would go rent/buy/download/watch a high quality version of that movie. So if portable video players will not support high Quality TV out then there should be no problem. Solution to this arising problem should be delt differently I think... If you would make it easy and cheap to buy/download low res versions of those movies so they could be watched only 2 or 3 times then piracy on portable movies should not be extent. But If (most likely) they will charge users 20$ for a 320x240 res versions of a movie and only in some weird format then they will definnetly have a lot of privacy violations.

However I think that id Movie/Game/Music Industries will not stop new technology from developing in such pace a day will come when they will not be able to do anything about piracy. They have to understand that they just don't have that much power to prevent people from sharing copies of various content. If they would spend that amount of money that they do now on privacy, on promoting wathing movies in theaters and developing various ways to make people want to buy/own or watch movies legally, then I believe that they would have achieved much more.

 

I'm not the first to say it, and I won't be the last: DRM doesn't stop piracy. Period. DRM can be cracked. Period.

If you are a media pirate, you have to deal with the pain in the ass of dealing with the DRM one time as you make a non-protected copy of the media.

If you are not a pirate and are just an general consumer, (the people who actually SPEND MONEY ON MOVIES,) you have to deal with the pain in the ass every time you try to use the media in a way other than in your commercial player or what-not.

[/rant]
sorry.

PS - Will someone let the movie studios know this please?

 

Cheap, I am getting to love your posts more and more, every single day...

And dream, you are dead on. It won't stop piracy. It CAN'T stop piracy. What it CAN do is piss me as a consumer off enough that I never want a legitimate purchase of hollywood material again. Ever.

 

the encryptions must be decoded before they can play, or they would be horrible screeching sounds for the length of the track (for mp3's) so even if i just connect the mic in and speaker out on my computer, i can pirate music. the industry bitches so much about losing money, but they're really losing it by spending money on new technologies (that take two weeks and are cracked), lawsuits, and advertising. if they took that money and spent it on the actors, everybody would win.

i'm not going to waste 12 bucks on a crappy CD when i can download it for free and burn it on a 30 cent disc. the RIAA and MPAA need to stop bitching about how they're losing money when they are hemmoraging it out of every orifice on lawsuits and technologies that don't work.

[/mp3 rant]

... movies are the same way!!!

 

Right so the artists dont deserve any payment for their hard work?
Record companies need to pay for studios/advertising/etc?

That's the reason they are having to resort to such measures to try and stop their loss of earnings.

Not that I'm saying DRM is right, and that CDs arent overpriced, or whatever. But you do have to think that their might actually be a reason behind DRM other than the record companies trying to annoy you for no reason!

 

Sorry - my "wtf!?!" was in reference to the article itself, not your post! I agree totally with what you're saying, and tbh I don't really see the attraction of watching crappy quality (or even good quality) movies on a screen the size of a postage stamp. What I can see taking off is online movie rental, where you pay a small fee (say £2/$3, i.e slightly less than renting a DVD) to download a near-DVD quality file to watch for a limited period on your PC / HTPC. I can imagine set top boxes for this kind of thing taking off in a big way. I think we're already part-way there - there's a service in the UK (think it's London only at the moment but expanding) called Homechoice that has true on-demand movies, and IIRC there is a site offering rental downloads already.

Personally I will never buy a movie (as opposed to renting one) in digital-only format, unless it costs WAY less than the DVD (like half the price), in the same way as I refuse to purchase iTunes - I get a lot of enjoyment out of having a rack of shiny CD and DVD boxes, even though I rarely open my CD cases now that every one of them is ripped. Why anyone would pay the same (or more) money to download an inferior quality, restricted use product without the bonus of the physical media is beyond me.

 

no, i'm saying that i download a CD if it's for one song i've got stuck in my head. or if i'm not sure about it, and want to check it out. i like having the storebought CD because i can read the lyrics of a song if i can't figure it out, and sometimes they even have small posters inside (i got one from Combat Rock on my wall)