Ted Ritzer: DRM 4$

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 01:04:01 GMT

Gleanings from Tim Bray's Blog:

Tim introduces people to how to blog from OpenOffice

Tim points to:

yet another discussion of how to use Open Office for blogging

a InfoWorld article on MS's Don Box's opinion re SOAP and getting results with it

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 00:18:27 GMT

Ted Cohen did not disappoint a packed ballroom at Digital Hollywood Tuesday. His panel, "Music Industry, DRM, and Piracy" tackled the tough issues facing the biz, including format incompatibility, next generation music stores, compulsory licensing, DRM issues, and new P2P distribution models. Cohen wielded the water pistol over the debate, though mostly pointed it at himself. Panelists were Howie Singer, PhD (VP Technology, Warner Music Group), Bob Ohweiler (SVP, Business Development, MusicMatch), William Fasig (EVP, Business Development, Sales and Marketing), and Amanda Marks (Senior Vice President, eLabs, Universal Music Group).

[found on pho by Paul Resnikoff [pho@digitalmusicnews.com]

[Marc's Voice]

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 15:25:20 GMT

Canadian Minister Promises to Fix Copyright Law. Slashdot Apr 4 2004 9:07AM GMT... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 23:50:58 GMT

CRN.com : Breaking News - Study Shows Big Uptake On DRM. Weblog: CRN.com : Breaking News
Source: Study Shows Big Uptake On DRM
Link: http://www.crn.com/components/weblogs/article.asp?ArticleID=49110

The use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology to manage content will skyrocket over the next two years, increasing by a factor of tenfold, according to a new study released this week by the META Group.

[PubSub: DRM-Digital Rights Management]

Mon, 29 Mar 2004 02:48:54 GMT

Waffles of Thought - Bleep. Weblog: Waffles of Thought
Source: Bleep
Link: http://blog.chadbrandos.com/archives/2004/03/28/bleep/

Music CDs are going to obsolete within the next five years. Today I have made my first digital music purchase at Bleep, the digital download store of Warp Records.

I bought the the album ”Sheath”* by LFO. That’s eleven songs for just $9.99. Payment and downloading was quick and painless. It gave me the option of downloading each track individually or all at once in a contained .zip archive. Very nice.

Bleep is set apart from other music download services such as iTunes and Napster because they do not use Digital Rights Management (DRM) on any of their tracks. Each song is encoded in a very high quality, variable bitrate MP3 file. More information about the lack of DRM and file quality is available in their FAQ.*

They are being fair to their customers and to their artists. I am not limited to the number of CDs which I may burn. The music artists get 50% of profits after bandwidth and site maintanence fees. That’s quite a chunck when you consider that with iTunes, the artist may only get 10% of total price.

I will no longer have to pay outrageous prices at the small, overpriced stores with little selection. Sure, Bleep won’t have it all, but with Aphex Twin, Plaid, Beans, Squarepusher, Boards of Canada, Red Snapper, Luke Vibert, and Nightmares on Wax, I will be busy for a while.

*The Bleep site uses embedded iframes, which makes linking to an exact album or artist difficult. You’ll have to navigate in through their homepage if you want the full pages.

[PubSub: DRM-Digital Rights Management]

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 18:48:08 GMT

The Firefox opportunity.

The future of "great Windows applications," we're told, lies with Longhorn's next-generation presentation subsystem, Avalon, which will reboot software development sometime in the latter half of this decade. Of course, even Microsoft can't wait until then. Consider InfoPath. It's a great Windows application and a rich Internet client that had to ship in 2003. Its foundation is none other than Internet Explorer -- or rather, the suite of components and Internet standards on which Internet Explorer depends. Could InfoPath have been built on a Mozilla foundation instead? You bet. And the result wouldn't just be a great Windows application. It would be a great application, period. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

After I wrote this column, I checked out an interesting new application that I wish had been built on a Mozilla foundation: Onfolio. You can't fault Onfolio's creator, J.J. Allaire, for targeting the overwhelming majority platform: IE/Win. Of course as a .NET app, Onfolio targets a minority within that majority. We live in interesting times! ... [Jon's Radio]

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 04:07:37 GMT

InfoWorld: Standards & Protocols - Intel's Barrett calls for more flexible DRM system. Weblog: InfoWorld: Standards & Protocols
Source: Intel's Barrett calls for more flexible DRM system
Link: http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/redirect?source=rss&;url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/02/24/HNbarrettdrm_1.html

TOKYO -- Craig Barrett, the chief executive officer of Intel Corp., has called for the adoption of a worldwide DRM (digital rights management) system that allows consumers the flexibility to manipulate the content they own in ways of their choosing and has criticized some existing or proposed systems for the restrictions they enforce. Barrett was speaking in Tokyo on Tuesday as part of a seminar to promote Intel's vision of the future digital home. [PubSub: DRM-Digital Rights Management]

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 01:18:53 GMT

PaidContent.org - Macrovision's CEO Shares Insights on DRM. Weblog: PaidContent.org
Source: Macrovision's CEO Shares Insights on DRM
Link: http://www.paidcontent.org/pc/arch/2004_03_14.shtml#005812

(by Ed Keating, Partner, Easton Consultants): William Krepick, President & CEO of Macrovision, was the featured speaker at the SIIA's Executive Roundtable Series on Friday March 12th. He spoke on the topic of Digital Rights Management and Implementations. He suggested that four themes need to be considered for DRM to be successful:
-- Content Owners Need to Change Business Models: Krepick discussed the challenges some content owners face in coming up with business models that attract customers, yet protects content. He provided the example of how TurboTax removed Macrovision's DRM solution from the 2004 version because of customer outcry about the limited printing and software sharing restrictions.
-- Patent Overhang: Technology companies need to eliminate the "patent overhang" and come up with good solutions that are reasonably priced. Macrovision has a technologically effective DRM music solution, but the record labels are reluctant to put so powerful a tool on there content. They fear it could drive more users over to the file sharing networks. Even though the user experience is terrific, it only works with the Windows Media Player format, can only be used on Windows machines. It will not allow for the creation of MP3 files.
-- Courts and DMCA: The Courts need to support the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for DRM to work. He thought recent decisions were being made in favor of the content owners but he envisions some upcoming challenges with the proliferation of set top boxes that copy video content. He pondered what would happen when these boxes copy a movie that you only rented from a video on demand service? He thought it unlikely that the movie studies would let you pay $3 for the rental and be able to keep it forever.
-- Cooperation between Content Owners and Hardware Producers: For DRM to work in the long term, the industries need to work together as they did with DVDs. As a result of the cooperation between the movie studios and manufacturers, all DVD players and DVD disks have a DRM system built right in.
The biggest challenge here is software called DVD X Copy that can copy a DVD, along with the Macrovision DRM system. The company, 321 Studios, in St Louis is being sued by many players in the industry for violating a host of intellectual property laws.

Krepick concluded by sharing some information about a new product that Macrovision will be releasing in 2-3 months. It has three components:
-- Tracks and provides market intelligence on downloaded content. Helps content owners track market demand and losses.
-- Interdiction: can be configured to remove all content from all file sharing sites or have the download take 24 hours.
-- Redirect: the file can be replaced with a message and a redirect to the content owner's site. Here the content can be purchased. [PubSub: DRM-Digital Rights Management]

Sun, 14 Mar 2004 22:54:12 GMT

SECURITY++ David Cartwright's weblog - Like a mirage, users see the information, but do not control it. Weblog: SECURITY++ David Cartwright's weblog
Source: Like a mirage, users see the information, but do not control it
Link: http://davidcartwright.com/ipw-web/b2/index.php?p=152&;c=1

Today, one of my favorite topics, Digital Rights Management (DRM), makes a reappearance. The attention ... Finjan Software.

Finjan Software was founded in 1996. Its first products focused on proactive protection against malicious code including "Trojan Horses, worms, and malicious ActiveX, Java, VB Script and JavaScript programs." As a result of its strength in proactive content behavior inspection, during the late 1990s Finjan established several high-profile partnerships with various majors including IBM, Novell and Cisco.

More recently, Finjan has been building what it titles "the Vital Security solution for complete content security of all Web and E-mail traffic through the Internet Gateway." In addition to its own proactive malicious code and active content solutions, Finjan has partnered with McAfee to incorporate anti-virus technology and SurfControl for URL filtering. Its January 2003 purchase of Alchemedia Technologies has provided Finjan with a DRM component that is now also a member of its Vital Security suite.

Prior to its purchase by Finjan, the Alchemedia Technologies DRM solution called Mirage had already gained some significant customer wins including 20th Century Fox, AOL/Time Warner, AT&T, and Nintendo. Recently the product has been renamed Vital Security for Documents, although this is not yet reflected on the Finjan web site. Hopefully that will be addressed soon. Finjan state that over half a billion documents have already been protected using the product, so you can expect to hear the name Vital Security for Documents more often in the future. So how does the product work, and how does it differ from other DRM solutions?

There are a number of key features that reflect a different approach to DRM versus its competitors. These include:

The product is only focused on HTTP web documents including HTML pages, PDF and plain text documents.
DRM controls are dynamically applied on the web server, therefore the original documents always remain standard HTML, PDF, text documents. (This has both advantages and disadvantages).
All encryption is done using standard security software from RSA Security and the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.
There is no server component license as all licensing is covered on a per user basis.

The server components can run on either Windows 2000/NT 4.0 Server or Sun Solaris 2.6/7/8/9 operating systems. Client support is focused on Windows desktop operating systems. In order to view DRM documents, either Netscape Navigator 4.x-6.2 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x-6.0 must be used. Hopefully in the future this might be extended to include the latest Netscape/Mozilla browsers. Public key exchange between the Vital Security Key Server and client is done using PKCS#7. HTML and Text documents are encrypted using 128-bit AES while PDF documents use Adobe Acrobat's 40-bit or 128-bit RC4 encryption (Acrobat 5.x and later supports 128-bit).

In order to view a protected document, each client requires the Vital Security client software to support authentication and document decryption. The decryption only happens after the client has been authenticated. The client software supports various tamper-resistant features including not displaying documents if it is being run in a debugger or in an emulator. The various DLLs also authenticate each other to protect against rogue DLLs being used. By operating "within protected system-level functions that are responsible for controlling video processing and display," the client also disables screen captures and unauthorized printing. Of course, the challenges from alternative methods of capturing screen images remain.

For organizations needing to control web-based documents, the Finjan Vital Security for Documents provides a solution that can be relatively painless for end-users. According to a 2001 White Paper prepared by the Aberdeen Group, the "Key Server can easily support between four and six different business operations or departments, where access rights are likely different between the departments and are similar within a department." Hence its applicability will depend on the level of granularity required within the organization.

Vital Security for Documents is an appropriate new name for a DRM component within Finjan's Vital Security suite. However, I'll miss the name Mirage.

References
Finjan: http://www.finjan.com/index.cfm
Vital Security for documents data sheet (PDF): http://www.finjan.com/...
Vital Security for documents White Paper 2001 (PDF): http://www.finjan.com/...
What is PKCS?: http://www.rsasecurity.com/...
What is the AES?: http://www.rsasecurity.com/... [PubSub: DRM-Digital Rights Management]

Furl- File URLs

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 23:06:49 GMT

Furl stands for file URLs. Seems so simple yet is so powerful, now there is a place to file all those URLs as you find them. In a URL file cabinet, that you can load from any browser.

So Furl this! Honest, just click on the link to get to Furl.

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 02:36:35 GMT

HP Announces Moves in Digital Rights Management (Reuters). Reuters - Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ.N) said on Monday it had licensed digital content protection technology from chipmaker Intel Corp. (INTC.O) and developed copy protection technology with Philips PHG.AS PHG.N as the printer and computer maker seeks to stake out a strong position in the nascent arena of digital copyright protection. [Yahoo! News - Technology]

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 06:57:28 GMT

The Answer to Piracy: Five Bucks?. Here's a bright idea from a digital rights group: Get music file sharers to pay $5 a month on top of their ISP fees to compensate the artists. Of course, the music industry hates it. Katie Dean reports from San Francisco. [Wired News]

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 03:44:38 GMT

InfoWorld: Crypto stars sound off on e-voting, DRM. Speaking at the annual Cryptographers Panel on Tuesday, Ronald Rivest, co-creator of the RSA encryption algorithm, backed calls for paper ballots to supplement insecure electronic voting technology, while fellow luminaries Paul Kocher and Whitfield Diffie predicted heated battles between privacy advocates and intellectual property owners over the issue of digital rights management. [Tomalak's Realm]

Sun, 22 Feb 2004 19:09:37 GMT

Weekend Reading.

Jay Rosen: The Morals Squad at CJR's Campaign Desk. The Campaign Desk decided to police the Web on early release of exit polls. Triangulation was at work. The Desk wanted moral distance between itself and webloggers, so as to impress the traditional press. "We have standards, they don't. See....?" But the action was fraught with anxiety, and there are reasons for that.

Ed Cone: The medium is not the message in the John Edwards presidential campaign. But there is no sense here of a revolution, or a movement in which the Internet takes on a mystique of its own. The rhetoric of transformation I heard at Dean headquarters, of power pushed to the edges to create a new type of campaign, is lacking. The candidate, not the online tools, generates the buzz.

NY Times: Disenchanted Bush Voters Consider Crossing Over. "The combination of lies and boys coming home in body bags is just too awful," Mr. Flanagan said, drinking coffee and reading newspapers at the local mall. "I could vote for Kerry. I could vote for any Democrat unless he's a real dummy."

: .

Ed Foster: E-Books and DRM. There are many reasons why e-books have never really taken off, starting with the fact that many of us are quite fond of paper and print. And, judging by the gripes I've been hearing from e-book devotees, there's not going to be much reason to change our minds until book publishers cease their love affair with digital rights management. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 02:41:36 GMT

Microsoft's Deal with Disney: Mouse Steps or Great Leap Forward? [DRM Watch - Analysis of Digital Rights Management Technology]

Be Our Netalentine Vote for Still Running & Change Our Lives!

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 20:41:54 GMT

Be Our Netalentine-

Vote for Still Running & Change Our Lives!!!

"Souls in Rhythm" band

WE SUPER NEED YOUR HELP!!!!

help us get a record deal,

album produced and a music video!!!!

You can help us win the grand prize in Vibe 98.5's UNSIGNED VIBE contest!

We are 1 of 5 finalists.

The grand prize includes a record deal, a produced album, a music video for the first single and a national tour!!!

***Beginning Monday Jan 17th, through to Feb. 13th - listeners can vote for Souls In Rhythm's song "STILL RUNNING" by one of three ways!

#1. Go to: http://www.vibe985.com/ and then scroll down and click on UNSIGNED VIBE then you can vote for us!

#2. Call the radio station and vote &/or request Still Running by Souls In Rhythm @ 403-276-VIBE.

#3. Email a request to play the song: trv@vibe985.com

THANK YOU

THANK YOU!!!!!

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 16:09:55 GMT

The following article illustrates the crucial need for an effective DRM solution to stop the following madness:

Record industry enforcer raids Kazaa offices, by Sam Varghese, Sydney Morning Herald.

The premises of Brilliant Digital Entertainment and those of three universities - the University of Queensland, the University of New South Wales and Monash University - were among those raided.
Among other premises raided were those of Akamai Technologies AAP, NTT Australia, Telstra Corporation and NTT Australia IP. MIPI said proceedings had begun in the Federal Court after a six-month investigation.
MIPI said evidence had been obtained during the raids which would be used in the court proceedings.
Court action commenced in Sydney as Kazaa operates from offices in the suburb of Cremorne even though it is registered in the Pacific island of Vanuatu.

2:24:11 PM comment [ 0]

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 03:40:14 GMT

Open Mobile Alliance Announces Version 2.0 of DRM Standard [DRM Watch - Analysis of Digital Rights Management Technology]

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 02:50:17 GMT

from Anita Campbell's blog:

BitPass Micropayments User Survey

This post is a slight departure from our usual format here at Small Business Trends. I’m taking a few moments to describe our experience using the BitPass micropayments system.

From time to time we post photographs on this site to relieve some of the visual monotony that comes from having so many words on a page. Most of the images come from istockphoto.com. They were purchased using a BitPass micropayments account.

Our survey sample is admittedly tiny – one person, me. But I can report that using BitPass on 8 or 10 different occasions, the experience has been uniformly positive each time.

BitPass is a Web-based system, so all I need is a browser—no software to download. The BitPass user interface is streamlined. Screens don’t get much simpler to use.
Setting up my account initially was quick and easy. Just the bare minimum of information is requested. I was not required to provide age, gender, household income, hobbies, mother’s maiden name, or even number of pets.
The way micropayments work is that you purchase credits for your account (similar to buying a gift card). That process was very easy, too. I was given several ways to pay, including PayPal and credit cards such as Visa and Mastercard. I chose PayPal, and the interfaces with the PayPal system worked without a glitch. My initial $3 (USD) was transferred from my bank account to my BitPass account instantly.
Once I had a few dollars in my account, I went shopping. Off to istockphoto.com, where I downloaded photographs for $1(USD) each. Here again, using BitPass was fast and easy.

As a user, I saw only two issues: First, photographs are twice as expensive using BitPass versus istockphoto.com’s own in-house version of micropayments ($1 versus $.50). Somehow BitPass is going to have to close that price gap. Second, outside of stock photographs, today there is very little content I would want to purchase using micropayments. Until there are more vendors offering desirable content who accept BitPass, usage will be limited.

All signs suggest the market might be ready for micropayments to take off. The last time around, before the Internet bubble burst, micropayments never got much traction. Most of the original micropayments providers went under. But we are now in a different era, with paid Internet content gaining greater acceptance and music download services going mainstream and creating demand for micropayments.

That said, a major issue looming on the horizon for BitPass and other micropayments providers is competition from PayPal. A representative of PayPal has said "we think the stars are coming into alignment" on micropayments. PayPal recently kicked off its own micropayments rate. Backed by its parent, eBay, a cash-rich and well-run powerhouse of a company, PayPal could be a formidable competitor.

# posted by Anita Campbell : Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 04:40:50 GMT

Apple selling DRM'ed silence at $0.99 a pop. As the Apple Turns has compiled a playlist of silent tracks available as DRM-restricted files from the iTunes Music Store.

Yesterday we mentioned in passing that faithful viewer djsteve had purchased a track that cost him the "best 99 cents [he'd] ever spent." The joke, of course, was that it was the second track from The Whitey Album by Ciccone Youth, which consists of a minute and three seconds' worth of silence. To tell you the truth, while we're amused by the fact that Apple is charging 99 cents for a song full o' nothing, we're even more amused by the fact that said track contains the usual digital rights management code to prevent you from playing it on any unauthorized systems. And the most amusing thing of all, of course, is that the song has a thirty-second preview.
Well, as it turns out, the Ciccone Youth track is by no means the only all-silent untune for sale at the iTMS; faithful viewers ben, Scott Levin, and Michael Wyszomierski contributed their own suggestions, too. And you know how Apple recently added a bunch of "iTunes Essentials" playlists to the store, such as "Cover Songs" and "'70s AM Radio Classics"? Well, we've compiled all the silent tracks we managed to scrape together into the first AtAT Essentials playlist, "To Be Played At Maximum Volume."

Link (Thanks, noel!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Tue, 03 Feb 2004 02:07:37 GMT

digital economy.

The NYT has interesting perspective today about the new division of power between classical media "moguls" and entrepreneurs of the digital economy (read the stars of the '80s computer boom).

"The collapse last Thursday of the Disney- Pixar negotiations over a new distribution agreement appears to have been a clash of egos and business interests. But it was also very much a sign of the changing balance of power between the conventional media giants and the entrepreneurs wielding digital technologies that are rapidly changing the way media content is made and distributed.

The success of Mr. Jobs's digital film studio, Pixar, has come not from upending the business of distributing movies, but from employing computers as powerful creative tools for movie animators steeped in the traditional art of storytelling.

For all his talk of revolution over the years, Mr. Jobs has taken a disciplined, evolutionary approach to the media industry that has been remarkably successful: Apple is the leader in the music download market and Pixar's "Finding Nemo'' is one of the most financially successful animated films."

[TJ's Weblog "Technology, Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship"]

Tue, 03 Feb 2004 02:03:20 GMT

from "A Blog Doesn't Need A Clever Name":

Cory Doctorow makes a DRM observation.

(via BoingBoing)

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 21:38:27 GMT

DRM & P2P

article by Stephen Downes

Social Networking Article with Key Links Posted

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 19:21:29 GMT

Just posted a story on social networking and online collaboration with key links listed.

Vote for Still Running by

Thu, 22 Jan 2004 01:21:08 GMT

"Souls in Rhythm" band

WE SUPER NEED YOUR HELP!!!!

help us get a record deal,

album produced and a music video!!!!

You can help us win the grand prize in Vibe 98.5's UNSIGNED VIBE contest!

We are 1 of 5 finalists.

The grand prize includes a record deal, a produced album, a music video for the first single and a national tour!!!

***Beginning Monday Jan 17th, through to Feb. 13th - listeners can vote for Souls In Rhythm's song "STILL RUNNING" by one of three ways!

#1. Go to: http://www.vibe985.com/ and then scroll down and click on UNSIGNED VIBE then you can vote for us!

#2. Call the radio station and vote &/or request Still Running by Souls In Rhythm @ 403-276-VIBE.

#3. Email a request to play the song: trv@vibe985.com

THANK YOU

THANK YOU!!!!!

Sun, 18 Jan 2004 22:00:05 GMT

Apparently DRMwatch thinks the same way as WIFLblog's Digeconnix story:

"dare we suggest a broadly applicable DRM toolkit, a la IBM's EMMS, released under open-source licensing?"

source: DRMwatch

Sun, 18 Jan 2004 20:54:25 GMT

DRM Conference April 12-14, 2004 conference info

Sun, 18 Jan 2004 20:48:39 GMT

DRM Standards [DRM Watch - Analysis of Digital Rights Management Technology]

Sun, 18 Jan 2004 20:47:54 GMT

DRM Technologies [DRM Watch - Analysis of Digital Rights Management Technology]