The Technology Liberation Front - Latest Comments in Complete Control?

Re: Complete Control?

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Re: Complete Control?

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Re: Complete Control?

Tim — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 13:28:33 -0000

"Widespread" is a matter of perspective, I guess. I think that for the most part, movie downloading is still restricted to college kids with too much bandwidth and too much free time. But I could be wrong, as I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse of the latest P2P trends.

Re: Complete Control?

Commons Music — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 12:14:09 -0000

Tim:

"So far, bandwidth constraints have prevented widespread use of P2P for movies..."

They have?

Re: Complete Control?

Ed Felten — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:17:06 -0000

I guess DeLong didn't read the rest of the Wikipedia entry he quotes. It gives a pretty clear picture of HDCP's security woes: "researchers demonstrated fatal flaws in HDCP for the first time in 2001 ..." It even points to commercial devices that strip HDCP protection off of video signals.

Re: Complete Control?

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 22:55:39 -0000

1. We still have no sympathy. Stolen copies of data don't amount to "loss," they amount to less profit that could be earned IF the stolen copies were paid for instead. This is a social/marketing issue, and will not be solved by a technical solution.

2. All technical solutions can be broken. The DMCA is a hollow, unenforceable shell that serves no purpose without excessive (and illegal) monitoring. No revise is impossible to reverse engineer. No program comes without bugs. I'm not a programmer, I'm the first to admit I have a limited understanding of computer security, but I do know how many update patches most software needs.

3. The MPAA/RIAA/others have a choice. They can waste money on DRM, which will never work, or they can try to adjust pricing (as George said) which might up their profits, which is their real goal.

Re: Complete Control?

MikeT — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 20:55:58 -0000

For the foreseeable future, and I mean for quite some time, it's unlike that they're going to offer such great broadband. They have to have a good reason to lease the dedicated lines, and for most small businesses, a gigabit of bandwidth on a cable connection would leave no reason to lease a T3 for the reliability since the cost savings would be dramatic. As for me, I'd much rather pay $60-$70 a month for real 5mbps/1mbps broadband than pay $15-$20 a month for glorified dialup with reliability problems.

Re: Complete Control?

Tim — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:02:59 -0000

Well, I certainly hope that current broadband speeds aren't the end of the road. I fully expect to get a gigabit pipe into my home within a generation. So far, bandwidth constraints have prevented widespread use of P2P for movies, but I think that's a temporary hiccup.

Re: Complete Control?

MikeT — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 15:45:13 -0000

DeLong also can't admit that P2P piracy has three big hurdles:

1) The movies distributed on it are almost never synced as well as DVDs (majorly annoying to anyone except a highschool or college student) and are often not even close to DVD quality

2) Broadband providers do not like providing meaningful upload capabilities.

3) Even if Blueray disks are cut down by 70%, that's still several GB of data that must be uploaded over a very weak upstream connection. Each generation of movies gets significantly bigger, and compression can only do so much to cut that back without making the movie not worth watching at all.

Even at 1-2mpbs of upstream bandwidth, the movies would take forever to upload. Hello James, downstream bandwidth only means anything when there is enough upstream bandwidth to feed it, and the average broadband service doesn't even come close. Once movies reach the threshold where they can only be compressed down to about 10GB without losing all of their quality, the P2P problem will resolve itself. Broadband providers are never going to provide large amounts of upstream bandwidth because that's incredibly expensive and for the telecoms, it also cuts into their other products like dedicated T1 and T3 lines.

Re: Complete Control?

MikeT — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 15:35:50 -0000

George,

You can tell iTunes to deactivate all of your previous activations so you can start over. I've done that before quite successfully. It's actually a standard feature in the software.

Tim,

What do you expect from DeLong? He's extremely opinionated about a technical subject that he has not yet shown any credentials for having an opinion on. If Linus Torvalds and Don Knuth both told him that DRM was impractical, he'd still think that he was right. In fact he'd probably find some excuse to sneer at them as being nothing more than cynical computer nerds.

Re: Complete Control?

George F. — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 13:59:52 -0000

The problem of competing with 'stolen' is only a problem if your customers view you as a crook. If they do feel like they are getting ripped off everytime they enter into a transaction with you, its easy for them to justify reciprocating.

I.e., if I think the recording industry has a habit of ripping me off by charging $20 for a 15-song CD with only 2 good songs on it, then I might not feel so bad about sticking it right back to them by finding free copies online. The answer here is to set a price which is irresistible. There are lots of studies showing optimal pricing for music results in increased sales, even in the face of free, illegal alternatives.

Similarly, if I think the recording industry is sticking it to me by selling me DRM'd songs that I can only play on 3 devices over my entire lifetime, I might be inclined to break the DRM myself or simply go back to the p2p systems for alternate copies of songs that I've legally purchased.

The solution in both cases is to treat your customers with respect and fairness. As the last decade has shown, copyright is a voluntary system. If the masses view it as oppressive, they'll simply toss it and go about their business.