Eric Goodwin

Digital Rights Managment Gone Wrong: An Overview of the past couple months
05/12/09

For the past few months I have been following the progress of a steadily growing Digital Rights Management(DRM) movement as the worlds biggest entertainment companies have been pushing their twisted views onto countries around the globe. For those of you who haven’t been following it lately or don’t have a clue what DRM is, here’s a little background.

Digital rights management (DRM) is the umbrella term referring to any of several technical methods used to handle the description, layering, analysis, valuation, trading and monitoring of the rights held over a digital work
-Wikipedia

Basically DRM is a techincal method of protecting digital content. One example of this that is in wide use are region encoded DVD’s. So if you buy a DVD in Europe, you cannot play it in your DVD player in Canada. What is bizzare is that it’s not illegal to watch your European DVD in Canada, but it is illegal to circumvent the DRM to watch it in Canada, so that DVD you got of your bungy jump in NZ is now useless. You are not allowed to circumvent the region code so that you can watch it while sitting at home with your family here in Canada. There was just a big case in Australia about this very topic. The High Court there took the side of the consumer and changed the law, making it legal to circumvent region lockout. As of the moment, this is still illegal though in the US under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Just last month Finland passes a controversial copyright law. The new laws make it illegal for people to circumvent DRM to make copies of any digital media for their own use. You can no longer buy and CD and then rip it to your computer so you can listen to it on your iPod. The laws also make it illegal to talk about how to break or bypass DRM.

At the moment there are simularly crippling laws waiting to be passed in France.

During the night of 22nd to 23rd December 2005, while everybody is preparing for Christmas, the French Parliament will rule about the “DADVSI” law. This vote will be made with minimal discussion, as an “emergency” has been declared on this law
-VideoLan

One of these new laws will make it illegal for freeware programmers to write programs to watch DVD’s, or for users to use those programs. Any programmer who write these programs can face a jail term of upto three years. Along with this restriction is will also be illegal to lend a CD to a friend, make a backup of a DVD, incase your kids scatch it, and transfering mp3’s to your portable music device.

The French laws are also going after the open source community.

SNEP and SCPP have told Free Software authors: “You will be required to change your licenses.” SACEM add: “You shall stop publishing free software,” and warn they are ready “to sue free software authors who will keep on publishing source code” should the “VU/SACEM/BSA/FA Contents Department”[1] bill proposal pass in the Parliament.
-FSF France

New laws aren’t only news in the DRM world as of late though. Just the other month is came out the Sony had been including a implemntation of DRM on their music CD’s called a root-kit.

Sony uses genuine black-hat techniques to install a rootkit, even choosing a Windows-sounding name for a service just like your favourite backdoor, and about as easy to detect or remove. Basically, Sony puts the sort of malware on its customers’ PCs that the rest of the world spends alot of money fighting
-Boing Boing

This DRM method would install a program on your computer and then hide it deep inside so that you, or even Windows would never know that it was there and even if you did find it and try to get rid of it, it would kill your operation system. A month after the news brooke Sony finally offer a uninstaller for the program,but when run it would leave a security hole in your operatingn system, leaving your computer valnurable. Once this was out in the open some people decided to take a close look at Sony and found their End User License Agreement (EULA) quite interesting.

If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That’s because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD.

You can’t keep your music on any computers at work. The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a “personal home computer system owned by you.”

If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids “export” outside the country where you reside.

You must install any and all updates, or else lose the music on your computer. The EULA immediately terminates if you fail to install any update. No more holding out on those hobble-ware downgrades masquerading as updates.

Sony-BMG can install and use backdoors in the copy protection software or media player to “enforce their rights” against you, at any time, without notice. And Sony-BMG disclaims any liability if this “self help” crashes your computer, exposes you to security risks, or any other harm.

The EULA says Sony-BMG will never be liable to you for more than $5.00. That’s right, no matter what happens, you can’t even get back what you paid for the CD.If you file for bankruptcy, you have to delete all the music on your computer. Seriously.

You have no right to transfer the music on your computer, even along with the original CD.

Forget about using the music as a soundtrack for your latest family photo slideshow, or mash-ups, or sampling. The EULA forbids changing, altering, or make derivative works from the music on your computer.
-EFF

Sony have stop shipping their CD’s with the root-kit now, but only after several lawsuits were launched and a publicity campaigned waged.

Sony isn’t the only company that’s in the spotlight as of late. Altough not “evil” Microsoft has done something annoying lately with their new XBox 360. They have included DRM measures that make it impossible to copy mp3’s to the xbox’s hard drive. The only way you can get mp3’s onto the drive is to copy them from CD. So if your CD collection is locked away, or back home at mom and dad’s place, tough luck, and even if you do have all your CD, I doubt you really want to spend another long weekend ripping them all to mp3’s again.

The latest victims that the entertainment industry is going after are the people who run websites that have song lyrics on them. They have already got the writer of PearLyrics, a program that automatically downloads song lyrcis for you, to stop offering his freeware program and it seems that all of Apple’s widgets that downloaded song lyrics have disapeared from their site. The Music Publishers Association(MPA) isn’t just out to slap people on the hand either, or give a small fine, they want their to be jailtime for offenders to make it little more effective.

And it’s not even like the artist like what is happening here. There is a campaign waging to boycott Sony this Christmas for their evilness. Artists on their label are most likley really upset with what Sony has done. Damian Kulash of OK Go has written an excellant article about DRM and how he fought to have his album realeased without it

Luckily for my band, our recently released album, Oh No, escaped copy control
-Damian Kulash

I’m not going to write any conclusion here as this wasn’t meant to be an essay. I just wanted to get some information out there and hopefully I’ve accomplished that.

“If consumers even know there’s a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we’ve already failed,” says Peter Lee, an executive at Disney.
-Economist

Recommended Readings

http://eucd.info/index.php?English-readers http://www.videolan.org/eucd.html http://www.fsffrance.org/news/article2005-11-25.en.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management#DRM_opponents http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony_anticustomer_te.html http://www.eff.org/ http://www.onlinerights.ca/

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