BAD: First HD-DVD, now Vista DRM

[andygates]

I can't keep the grin in any longer.  Vista's extremely silly Protected Media Path (PMP) has been hacked.  That didn't take long, did it?  Alex Ionescu describes how he did what he did in his blog, but daren't release actual code for fear of a black helicopter visit by DMCA attack lawyers.

The weird thing is that the commercial success of the entire IT sector relies on many perfect copies being made form everything.  That's the whole point: it's why cassettes were good too.  We get involved, we dick around, we don't just passively consume.  Mixtapes are cool to share.  The business model that was appropriate for manufactured pressings of vinyl - few high-quality originals dispensed from the central vendor - is totally and catastrophically broken by fast easy digital copying.  That model assumes a need for relatively low losses as the product is relatively expensive to produce; with digital media the cost of reproduction is trivial but the bean-counters haven't yet worked out that this means that massive unit losses are financially acceptable. 

The example of the MP3 player - mine is full of personal rips and allofmp3.com downloads - is canonical: because I can get lots of cheap easy music, I do.  Some I pay top whack for, and that's the profit.  But I wouldn't have bought the half-dozen CDs I have recently unless I had been energised and enthused - and engaged - by the dozen downloads.  And (listen up, suits) I would not have bought all eighteen; or all six, more likely one or two.  I would have passively flicked over MTV and Scuzz and shrugged and done something else.  Rob Zombie has a dollar to spend on shampoo and carny chicks because of piracy.

Anyway, there's the memetic imperative.  Information wants to get copied.  We, as memetic entities, like copying information.  "Hey, have you heard this?" is a memegasm.  And to play something, you have to decrypt it somewhere along the line.  So even without black-hat snarkiness at the corporate bishops, DRM will fail every time.  And it deserves to fail, and it will not be mourned. 

A wise geek observed that the internet routes itself around damage.  DRM is getting the same treatment, and with good reason: encrypted, unplayable data is damaged data.  The internet will route around it.  All things being equal, if you insert broken and healthy data into the memestream, the broken data will be copied less and will eventually die (a phenomenon which also explains the self-healing of Wikipedia and survival of healthy bittorrents).  DRM data is broken as designed.

Comments

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Although it beggars belief that they could be so stupid, I find it less credible that the entire industry could pretend for so long.

The thing is, pure stupidity really doesn't suffice here -- they've seen the studies and surveys, and the raw fact of the matter is that almost nobody who downloads music for free would otherwise have bought the music -- the industry is, simply and provably, not missing out on revenue they would otherwise have gotten. Even the very stupid can understand that, though it is counterintuitive when you insist on making the mistake of thinking of a digital recording as physical property. The industry is flat-out lying, but I'll grant you this -- I think they might have gotten to the point that they're not able to know that they are, the same way Wintermute wasn't able to know the word that would free him. Financial interests warp ontology, which, for me, is the central terror of capitalism. And humanity.

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

You know, looking over what I wrote, I realize that I tromped over a lot of the same ground you already covered. I think that's what I get for getting on LJ less than half an hour after waking up. Beg pardon.

But, I think there were two threads getting tied around each other, and in my uncaffeinated state I only saw one of them. I don't think Hanlon's Razor is exactly right here, because it's not stupidity that causes the problem -- it's the possibly-unconscious hammering of their worldview to fit into a meme structure which, though inconsistent with the facts, is self-consistent and essential for their survival. Which is worse than either stupidity or lying, really, because it's consensual insanity.

(Please note that I've been reading a lot of William Gibson lately, which is in part responsible for my current tendency to think of corporations as insane organisms.)

[andygates.livejournal.com]

I think running through the rest of this post, I'm coming to a convergent opinion: that the meme-structures of the industry have become calcified, and that people have bought into the structure so they are inside the dogma box. Alternative business ideas aren't bad, in those eyes, they're does-not-compute.

I disagree about the internal consistency of memeplexes though; I think most of the big ones are shockingly inconsistent and that they get away with it only because our eye is only on one or two aspects at a time. The right-wing Christian "pro-life, pro-war" 'plex is perhaps the most obvious, but "listen to our stuff / don't listen to our stuff" has to come close.

Internal consistency lends a memeplex beauty - a sort of topographical, structural elegance that I expect Ravenbait sees intuitively. But it doesn't necesarily make the memeplex any more useful, or strong.

[carl42nz.livejournal.com]

What is the survivability of the music-corp meme, if it takes on the information (" quorum sensing "*) wise

* for context, about a third of the way down the page, http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2000/september6/kornberg-96.html