DRM Dummies?

David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post September 5, 2005

One of the promises of the digital age is that memories that might have been lost in an earlier, analog era can now be easily preserved in their pristine, original state – and endlessly duplicated on all sorts of media, for the edification of generations to come.

Or so I thought. But the bloc of interests that make their money from selling “entertainment” have other ideas, and some of those ideas directly contradict the ideas you and I may have about how we should be allowed to use the stuff we pay good money for.

The watchword in digital media today is a rather innocent sounding term, “digital rights management” (DRM). The “rights” referred to are not yours, though; they are the rights that belong to the company producing the music or movie you've bought and want to duplicated for your own convenience – but cannot, because of the violation of the producers' digital rights that would be violated. You'll find everything you ever wanted to know about DRM at http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/guide.

But I come not to rail against limitations in copying permission built into music you buy from the iTunes store, for example (currently, you are allowed to burn a song you purchase from Apple's online music store no more than seven times). I am a sort of starving artist myself, so I can relate to musicians who want to squeeze as much cash as they can out of their work (although actually the vast bulk of that money goes to the management/record company).

If you're a media company executive, DRM sounds like a good idea – but it really isn't. In the end, it's a zero-sum game that ends up not only punishing thieves, but alienating honest people who feel they are being taken to the cleaners by the media companies.

At this point in the digital timeline, it's clear that whatever protection is put up by manufacturers to protect their works is going to be challenged, and probably beaten, by hackers who want to enjoy movies or music in the comfort of their homes without paying for it. Despite the publicity these people get, I firmly believe that they are (or have been) a minority among consumers; most people are willing to pay a reasonable price for their entertainment. And this group is a constant; they never go away, and are willing to take on whatever roadblocks get thrown at them. And so far, they have a perfect record; some have gone down quickly and some slowly, but every single DRM scheme that has been implemented so far has an antidote, to the best of my knowledge.

Instead of accepting this as a fact of life – like “shrinkage” (i.e. shoplifting) in retail stores – the media companies raise the stakes, determined to find some system that will provide the magic solution that will enable them to claim victory in the digital wars. But they go overboard – and in the process they frustrate and turn off the people who are willing to support them, forcing them to turn to the same solutions the hackers use, in order to preserve what are without question their legitimate rights.

For example: I have a bunch of old family videos – parties, Bar-Mitzvahs, kindergarten Chanuka parties – that I'd like to record to DVD. These videos were created with a series of video cameras, ranging from those circa 1990 behemoths to a “slimcam” to a VHS-C camera. These tapes play fine in any VCR, and I felt the time had come to clear off the shelf and file them away in digital format, save from dust and overzealous cleaning personnel.

As I described in this column earlier, the way to do this is to attach the analog video device (VCR, video camera) to a digital input (digital video camera, video card). From there you transfer the file to a hard drive and “treat” it with your digital software, either recording it to DVD or VCD, adding music, scenes, etc. or just leaving it on the hard drive. In my case, I connected a VCR to my Samsung digital video camera, with the intention of recording the video onto the digital video tape, and then connecting the camera to my Mac Mini and converting it to digital format, using iMovie and iDVD. Pretty straightforward, perfectly legal, and exactly what this equipment was built for – or so one would think. But to paraphrase an old song, the DRM got in the way.

For, no more than 5-8 seconds after beginning the recording, the digital video camera shut off its record button – and on the mini screen was a short message about how the tape I was trying to duplicate was copyrighted! Well, of course it was, in a sense – it was a videotape of my family, which I and my wife own the “copyrights” to. But for some reason, the video camera kept insisting that I was a stranger – that I was not really the owner of all these memories, and that I had no right to copy them from one media to another!

A bit of research indicated what I was up against. It seems that a copyright protection system called Macrovision (http://www.macrovision.com) which has been built into a host of digital equipment in recent years, including VCRs and digital video cameras, was repsonsible. Macrovision works by manipulating the tracking lines in a video, causing digital recording equipment to give up because of the lack of picture stability. The idea, of course, is to prevent folks from taking their old copies of Snow White and Aladdin, and copying them to DVD – even if their VCR is on its last legs and many stores don't even sell them anymore!

But OK – movies are copyrighted, they have a specific user license, and while many might disagree, most of us would probably be willing to shell out another 10 bucks for the digital version of our favorites movies, with outtakes, bloopers and director's comments. But while overprotecting media companies' precious creations, DRM experts have screwed amateur video enthusiasts who invested a lot of time and effort – not to mention money – in order to be able to enjoy their own creations using the equipment that the manufacturers said they could use for this purpose!

Yes, I understand that a dumb video camera cannot differentiate between the contents of a home and copyrighted videotape – but that doesn't help me. I will tell you that I managed to solve the problem by investing in a device that undoes the Macrovision protection on videotapes, allowing free copying of my home videos without errors.

But that same device can also copy commercial videotapes! In their overzealousness, the DRM folks have forced me to resort to a shady product made specifically to overcome their copy protection schemes – in order to allow me to enjoy my perfectly legitimate works! So instead of “protecting” themselves, the DRM folk are actually encouraging people who would never have otherwise considered it to purchase equipment that does exactly what they were trying to prevent with their protection scheme! I'm sure there's a fancy social science term for this phenomenon - yeah, I know what it is. It's called “stupidity.”

ds@newzgeek.com