Dear Home Entertainment Industry,
Any company that tells you their DRM will keep pirates from copying your material is either stupid, or lying to you because they think you are stupid. Buying or developing new DRM and copy protection stuff all the time is probably costing you a lot of money. This drives the price up for consumers, widening the gap between expensive legitimate media and cheap pirated media even further. Worse, it creates compatibility problems meaning they can’t even view your content after they buy it!
Your mistakes are making pirating media even more attractive, completely defeating the purpose of the copy protection. You may dismiss that comic as silly, but remember: The guy that drew it has a degree in physics, and was a contractor for NASA at the Langley Research Center. He seems like a pretty smart guy, and it would probably be a good idea to listen to him. He drew a comic about music DRM being dead, but you skipped the funeral, and are now trying to pull off a Weekend at Bernie’s. His comic gets millions of visitors, and his simple art has made him enough money to make the comic his day job. Clearly, he understands a good bit about marketing, and quite a bit about technology. Google seems to think he’s a pretty important guy. It’s looking more and more like he has the right idea.
Lets get down to the core of the issue: You don’t want people to steal your hard work, or the hard work of the artists you work with. The fact is, you can’t keep pirates from pirating your material unless you stop making material. If you cut the crap and just sell the media unprotected at lower cost, most of the people who buy pirated copies will just buy your material instead. They’ll love it, use it, and maybe share it with other people who will then buy even more of your stuff! Media pirates win over DRM every time. They can defeat your expensive copy protection on one device, rip the media to an unprotected format, make a gazillion copies, and then sell them for a far lower price than you can manage. The cost of your DRM may be more than their costs from start to finish. They will continue to win as long as you keep spending money on your crappy technical bandages. Instead, think like a pirate. Emulate them. Hell, use them as a distribution platform! Research how to easily distribute your content to more people for less cost, and then do it. Media piracy will all but dry up because nobody will need to pirate anything, and you will make even more money!
It’s amazing to me that this DRM stuff is still around. For me, believing DRM will prevent piracy is a bit like believing the world is flat. We’ve seen that it’s not true. We’ve circumnavigated the global market, and we’ve seen the flaws in this concept. Media pirates still pirate the media, and consumers are finding it more and more difficult just to PLAY the legitimate media. Yes, I know I could just buy a receiver that decodes HDMI’s audio stream before passing it to the TV, or buy an HDCP stripper, but I shouldn’t be FORCED to spend more money just so it’s slightly harder to copy your products. I don’t need to copy your stuff, and if I did, you couldn’t stop me anyhow. Devices with HDCP compatibility and other DRM products must cost more to make, and this cost is passed on to the consumer. These devices don’t mean I get any better audio or video quality, they just mean I have to deal with more headache and confusion. I’ve finally got my HDCP compliant setup working, so I can ignore your DRM crap, just like the pirates do. I’m getting really close to where I’d rather do without your products than buy them from you.
Do us all a favor and get rid of all this DRM crap so we can all get back to watching movies, listening to music, reading e-books, and playing video games.
Sincerely,
Mark Smith
P.S: Below is just one of many reasons why I hate DRM.
I own a PS3, an XBox 360, a Nintendo Wii, and have a Comcast HD DVR, and I wanted all of them to show up on my nice big Samsung 50″ Plasma TV. I had a receiver with two HDMI inputs and a half-dozen Component inputs, along with two Toslink optical ins and one Coaxial digital audio in, plus a half dozen stereo audio (Red and White RCA) inputs. Initially, I wanted all of the inputs to go to my receiver, and then have one HDMI cable going to my TV, just to carry the video. I then realized my receiver was only and HDMI pass-through, which meant that the audio signal was not decoded from HDMI by the receiver, and required Toslink Optical or Digital Coax input to get sound to the speakers. This was especially true of surround sound. Bummer.
I hatched a new plan. The TV had a Toslink optical output on the back. Whatever source was selected on the TV would dump it’s audio to this output. Since all the devices had combination audio/video cables, I could just connect all my devices to the TV and then connect the Toslink from the output of the TV to the input receiver, and thus do all switching between game consoles and DVR with the TV remote. This would also mean I would only need my three existing HDMI cables, my one Wii Component cable, and one Toslink cable to connect all my systems to the TV. Six devices, five cables! Perfect!
I set all this up, plugged in all the cables, fired up the receiver, and started up an HD movie channel. I noticed that my Receiver was only showing two speakers active, indicating standard stereo. I thought I had perhaps picked a channel without surround sound, so I tried switching to my PS3, making sure that the audio out was set to 5.1 surround. I still only got stereo. I tried connecting the optical cable directly to my PS3 instead of through the TV. BAM! 5.1 channel surround. Back to the TV. Two speakers. I was getting fairly confused at this point. Surely the TV wouldn’t degrade the output to the optical out, right? There’s no way they would actually try to make it HARDER to hook up a home theater system to a TV, right? RIGHT?
WRONG. Enter HDCP, or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. The devil-child of the otherwise friendly Intel Corporation, HDCP is designed to prevent the copying of digital content (video and audio) over a variety of digital signal ports (source: Wikipedia). Since a digital copy would theoretically be a perfect copy of the original material, it was deemed necessary to prevent Joe/Jane Consumer from simply copying this media and throwing it on the internet. In order to view most HD material at full quality, you need HDCP enabled devices. You need an HDCP compliant player, an HDCP compliant TV, and if you want to decode HDMI signals, HDCP compliant audio equipment. From the minimal research I did, it seems that the device has to disable outputs that would allow you to thwart the copy protection in order to be HDCP compliant. This means that when HDMI is the input source on my TV, it is required to downgrade it to regular stereo audio out on the Toslink optical port. The practical upshot of this? I can’t use the Toslink optical output port on my TV to send surround sound audio back to my receiver if the original source comes from HDCP protected HDMI. What?! Lame.
So what could I do instead? My Video game consoles support surround sound. My DVR/Cable TV box support surround sound. They all seem to have Toslink out, and in the case of the cable box, Digital Coax out. Below is the monstrosity that I came up with. It works, but not nearly as nicely as the original idea.
First off, notice that I need five cables just to go to the receiver! I needed five cables total in my original plan! Also note that the Wii now plays through the TV Speakers, rather than the sound system. This is because the Wii has a combined Component/Stereo Audio cable. In order to get the sound from the TV back to the receiver, I would need to run another stereo audio (red and white RCA ended) cable from my TV to my receiver. This setup requires three extra cables, and a far more convoluted setup. If I want to play Wii or XBox 360, I change the input on my TV. If I want to play PS3 or watch TV, I have to switch the input on my receiver, and if I was playing Wii or XBox 360 before, I have to change the input on my TV too. Since the HDMI on the Receiver is pass-through, I have to mute the TV speakers for the PS3 and the DVR, but I have to turn them back up to play Wii. SUPER LAME!
All this is worth it to the media companies though. It prevents people from pirating their content after all! How does this prevent pirates from copying the material? Well, frankly, it doesn’t.There are devices that are sold to circumvent HDCP since some older hardware didn’t have it. I’m sure those consumers were THRILLED about having to buy extra hardware that added no value to their viewing experience. Even better, HDCP may have been cryptographically broken since 2001, before it was even in commercial products! This didn’t stop it from being required by the EU to get their official “HD Ready” label. The media pirates are ginning out “Protected” material at full tilt, and probably have been since HDCP first went commercial. Some HDCP compliant devices even have a point where the unencrypted digital stream is available, like in this article at Hackaday.com. Basically, HDCP is worthless when it comes to stopping high-volume pirates.
What are the side effects? HDCP makes setting up home theater systems even harder than before. Even if you get the cables connected “Correctly” (i.e., the setup would work if HDCP didn’t exist), software and hardware restrictions may prevent your setup from working as expected (like it did in my case). Worse still, sometimes even with all your 100% HDCP compliant devices correctly connected to one another, you still have problems! Because HDCP is complex, it has some issues. Some devices handshake incorrectly, resulting in the blinking screen issue. There is no excuse for this. HDCP is a lame duck, and should be a dead duck.
Phew, I feel your pain. Every technological industry seems to be fighting each other on just one front that makes our experience a bit annoying as we straighten out their systems. This process leads to smaller, upstart companies to solve problems that shouldn’t exist to fix things that are supposed to be transparent to the user, etc. Allow me to elaborate. First let me say that people really need to understand that many artists don’t make money when they deal with companies unless they are really big like Metallica, etc. The companies charge us tons for the media and pay the artist very little unless they’re huge. They then front money to the artists and run unnecessary multi-million dollar add campaigns so the artists in the end always owe them the money back. The artists try to make money by putting on concerts, and this sometimes works out, but usually the money made goes back into their advertising costs and leads to ticket prices that are $50 and up for nose bleed seats. So the system doesn’t work for artists which is why many have gone independent and is why we need to stop buying media from major distributors whenever possible. The dead artist explanation works best here. Miles Davis is dead, yet you will still pay $15 and up for his recordings, many of them made when he was between 20 and 50 years old. The record company simply makes almost pure profit off of this stuff. The guy is dead, he doesn’t need his money. You are paying for a great album, but you’re also paying to cover the cost of the record companies mistakes, like promoting artists that suck in comparison. The same is true of the movie industry. Remember how the first Mickey Mouse cartoon was made in 1928? Mickey has been around so long that he is an American icon, and was about to become public domain. Ever wonder why he didn’t? Disney could afford to rewrite the law. They can do this partially by making their stuff in sweatshops, and partially by charging you $20 and up for their oldest movies. Look at a Disney display in most stores. Ever notice how really dated media is still expensive from major companies, especially if it’s popular? It’s because the company looks at this old media as an investment, and will always charge you the most. Part of this is business, but part of it is pure greed. The people that made the movies often work on contracts and are paid when the movie is completed so they will never make extra money on it, only the company will. Plus in many cases they are totally dead. Meaning that the amount of people to pay has gone down significantly. Companies love to overcharge for old media because the profit margin is so big. Just grab a master tape, pay some kid too little to push it through a set of converters and release it again on a new format. Sure that was an oversimplification, but if you grab some old movie with proper mono tracks and then listen to what the converters do to them when their wizards turn on track into 6 or more you’ll know what I’m taking about. Sure there are some people that specialize in restoration, even teams, but that hardly justifies a re-release of some old Hitchcock movie that has been “restored” and had it’s audio track screwed up at a rate of $27 bucks and up.
So why do the manufacturers play ball. Obviously the distributors think they are benefiting from this process and then want to lock down the media so that they don’t lose the material they “stole” so craftily from so many artists. The hardware manufacturers want compatibility to be open, but only on the standards that they produce. Still they don’t want to deal with DRM unless they distribute media as well and this is the problem. Hardware guys want your stuff to work on their hardware so they can sell it to you, but they want you to use something that uses the S/PDIF standard (Sony and Phillips especially like it when you use this), but in comparison with DRM this is a moot point. The hardware guys say, fine we’re going to use TOSLINK, HDMI, RCA, and whatever and then making those things work with other hardware is essential to getting you to buy their equipment. So although their is some proprietary BS at this stage, it comes out in the wash, but the distributors say “hey what about us, we need our booze money too?” So they demand DRM so they can charge you again and again for the same crap and keep you from sharing it.
This problem is best viewed from the point of the CD. You see every other form of media wore out and created a worse copy of itself when copied from device to device. They loved records, cassettes and even 8-track because they could just wait you out and get you to buy another one, but the hardware guys wanted to bring you better and better stuff to buy so you would upgrade your equipment. Both want your equipment to fail, and want you to buy the same thing again, but a consumer that has watched the VHS of Star Wars 26 times, before it broke in half, isn’t that likely to buy it again if they are simply buying the same thing again. So we got CD, an awesome, lossless format, that covers the entire human hearing range and doesn’t really wear out. At first the record companies, well just about everyone, loved this because people bought a ton of them. Finally a format where they could buy something of great quality, and as long as they didn’t misuse or damage the disc, have it for decades at the very least and make clean copies from. Of course there was a legit market for better formats to come out like SACD, etc. So the motion picture industry followed suit with DVD and one day the executives woke up and said “what the hell is wrong with us, we gave consumers a format that doesn’t inherently wear out?” The rest is the history that led to DRM.
Still this is a problem with consumers and their lack of technological understanding. When DVDs were region coded to only play in certain countries the motion picture industry wanted it because they didn’t want you getting your hands on the same film, traded legally, for less from another country. The manfacturers had to follow suit because they actually wanted content that would play in the players they were building, and consumers went “well it’s just like how I had to get a different Betamax and VHS deck to play foreign films” because they didn’t understand the reasons behind it. The tapes were encoded from masters magnetically using different frame rates, and different electrically in some cases. The tapes were physically different. DVD players do not have that problem. They convert whatever power they’re getting to usable power so a region 1 DVD will play the same way in Germany as it does here as long as the player has power, and it is region free or being played on a region free player. Region codes existed to screw consumers that the motion picture industry simply decided should pay more, but most consumers never understood this. Region coding requires chips, programming, etc. and therefore can fail meaning that your may not be able to watch the movies you paid for much less pirated. This simple problem becomes more complex when way more complex tools are used to restrict media playback, copying, etc. like in current DRM schemes. The companies think they are getting what they want, control, with transparent technology providing it, but even if this stuff worked correctly consumers should be outraged.
Also, two last points. Digital copies can be excellent, but they are not always perfect. The converters used to make the copy can make you lose some bits here and there so no one should be messing with the source you paid for. If you use a crappy 16-bit converter to copy 16-bit stuff from your CD you may actually end up with 15 bits, and so on as you copy it. Sure it’s still a good copy, and if you have a good converter the loss is less, but consumers have a right to backup the media they paid for. Also, XKCD is awesome, but he is probably preaching to the choir. Most people still turn their brains off when you talk tech in general and that is a problem that shows itself very well with a problem like DRM. People don’t even know that they’re being messed with and stolen from in the long run, and when you try to explain it, many of them don’t care to listen.
No, you simply don’t understand how to, or do not have the correct hardware.
Everything should be connected to your receiver via HDMI (or whatever the best connection you have available), and then the receiver will pass though the video to the display when required.
This way you use the receiver as the “hub” instead of the TV, and the HDCP rules are not broken.
So, one cable from Receiver to TV, and once cable from each device to receiver. Problem solved.
If you stick to 1 brand (I use Sony with braviasync), then the devices will even control each other over the HDMI cables according to your preferences, which while not needed, is a nicety.
eg, turn on the PS3, and it will turn on the receiver and TV (and set the right inputs) for you, and you can use the TV remote to control the PS3 – handy for blu-ray playback).
Or if the TV is on, and you turn on the reciever the TV will mute and the audio will come only from the receiver (and switch back the the tv if you turn it off).
Yes, there are still compatibility issues, you may feel duped into buying a new receiver, and it can be counter-intuitive at times, but with a bit of thought a good solution can be found with minumum cable-age.
I have no problem getting video to the TV. The problem is with the audio. My receiver is a repeater that does not decrypt the HDCP encrypted signal, so it can’t pull the audio from the HDMI cable. It can only pass it through to the TV. If I eliminate the TOSLINK and Digital Coax, I do not get surround sound. Period. There is no way to do it. Oddly, the HDCP compliant devices have no problem outputting the audio signal digitally to the receiver unencrypted, as long as it’s not over HDMI.
Frankly though, the techincal details aren’t all that relevant. I should not have to shell out extra dollars to get a receiver with HDCP decryption and decoding just to watch movies in surround sound. HDCP was cryptographcially broken before it was even released as a digital content protection scheme. Pirates had the ability to copy content almost immediately. All HDCP does now is make it complex to connect many devices to audio and video output devices. Pirates remain undeterred.