The movie and music industries have figured out how to maintain growth without having to change how their business works. Instead of getting more high-quality content made and released, they just want you to buy the same stuff two or three or four times. How do they do this? Different formats. I can buy the same content on a DVD and UMD as well as via iTunes and cable/satellite service. Music is no better. I can get what I want via a myriad of subscription music services, CD, SACD/DVD-Audio (which, admittedly, have gone nowhere). So how does one avoid buying the same thing multiple times? And without having a vast knowledge of technology? And without breaking the law?
Getting you’re music in every form one could desire isn’t very difficult nowadays. There’ s no CD copy protection (any music disc which purports copy protection is not a CD according to the red book standard), which allows fair use without violating the DMCA. You can pretty easily rip your CD to various formats with a plethora of freely available software. What if you don’t want to pay insanely inflated prices for music CDs? You’re remaining (legal) options are DRM-laden. iTunes is by far the most popular online music service, despite Apple’s FairPlay DRM. Of course, the iPod, iTunes’ target device, can be pretty versatile nowadays. It’s good in your pocket, in your car, and now your home stereo. If you have an iPod, you probably will never notice Apple’s DRM. Unless you try to authorize too many computers or play your music via non-Apple software, FairPlay will probably be transparent to you…if you own an iPod. I shouldn’t have to own an iPod to use music the way I want.
Video — movies, TV series, etc. — is a much hairier situation. All video has DRM “protection” (I use the quotation marks since DRM gets hacked pretty quickly.), which makes it illegal to circumvent for any reason. So if I want to legally watch my favorite movie on my home theatre setup, iPod 5G, PSP, and computer, I have to pay for it three or four times. What if I want to get in HD? I have to wait for either the BluRay or HD-DVD release and cough up more dough. My pocket is being dipped into multiple times to watch the same movie on my myriad of devices. This is the future of music and movies. The RIAA and MPAA are not going to bother to release quality content continuously. They will hook you with your favorites and welcome you to buy them over and over and over again. Prior to the DMCA, this wasn’t possible. Now the RIAA and MPAA do an end run around fair use by making it illegal to exercise it.
The situation only continues to worsen. The new high-definition formats, BluRay and HD-DVD, are going to be swamped with DRM. You won’t be able to watch content at its full resolution unless you have an HDCP-compatible device. Only newer HDTVs have the necessary connection. Older ones don’t and neither do any current video cards on the market. So now to watch the content I rightfully purchased at its full, intended resolution, I have to buy a new HDTV and acquire a new video card when they finally release ones with HDCP on them. In short, if you’re equipment isn’t adequately secure, you don’t get what you paid for. This isn’t going to hinder piracy, it’s going to encourage it. Why buy a legal copy that I can only view at 1/4 of the resolution when you can download one for free at full resolution? I don’t need to pay 3000$ to watch the latest movie release at 1080p. It’s just a few clicks away.
Well, you might say, what about the AACS encryption scheme? That will prevent piracy of new content at full resolution. My response to that is simple: name one DRM encryption scheme that hasn’t been broken in the face of people trying for a significant period of time. You can’t because it doesn’t exist. Every DRM scheme for media to date has been broken. And it only takes one hacker from one rip group to distribute pirated movies in full HD resolution for it to permeate the internet. What about when the industry changes the encryption keys? It will get hacked again, and again, and again. There is no reason to think that AACS will actually stop hackers from pirating movies.
So what should the RIAA and MPAA do to not piss of consumers while trying to control the distribution of their content? Separate form and function. Make content as independent from its encoding — physical and digital — as possible. Why just give playback devices keys? Give each consumer their own keyring. Then you could have media players play content by decrypting it on the fly, without storing it on the hard drive, and then play the movie using a standard codec (H.264, MPEG Part 2, Divx, etc.). That would make it very difficult to gain access to the unecrypted data, especially with well-written software that would thwart such attacks. When people buy video, they could provide their public key and get the content. Heck, they could buy an encrypted copy online using their player’s public key, burn it, and then have a protected, useable media disc to put in their player. As long as the private keys stay guarded, the only risk is that somehow someone figures out how to derive a private key from a public one.
There are some issues with this, of course. Using a public key infrastructure (PKI) like OpenPGP is expensive computationally. It’s one thing to wait a few seconds for video to play on a computer. But a set-top box is completely different. Anything much longer than a noticeable delay is unacceptable. Also, there are a hell of a lot of players out there. Do you assign them all the same key or set of keys, or do you give each their own keyring? Practicality issues come into play here. Finally, who is to say that someone won’t share their private key along with the encrypted media? You could do what Apple does and authorize a computer to use a key. You could also have the formation of a keyring correspond to a computer, and then allow a person a certain number of keyrings for that number of computers.
While the solution I propose is by no means perfect, I think it is a step in the right direction in the debate on how to balance the rights of consumers while defending against piracy. Legitimate consumers must be allow to get what they paid for in full and without having to pay for it multiple times. Then implement measures that maintain this while thwarting piracy. Jack Taylor, founder of Enterprise Rent-a-Car, started his company on a single principle: “Take care of your customers and employees first, and growth and profits will follow.” This is the kind of thinking that will benefit all parties involved.