This is important. I really want you to understand what’s going on with the video industry’s push towards HD. Under pressure from Hollywood, they are engineering a complete removal of the concept of fair use. They are setting up systems that will completely control how, when and where you can use content that you buy. Even worse, they can retroactively change the rules!
Today the AACS (aggressive automatic consumer screwing*) organization announced availability of the interim version of their system for protecting content providers from their criminal customers. Their noble intentions are pretty well summed up in this choice excerpt:
The AACS specification accelerates the ability of consumers to enjoy exciting, new, flexible entertainment experiences and storage options, while continuing to provide the traditional, straightforward playback mode, for the next generation of prerecorded and recordable optical media such as Blu-Ray and HD DVD. Additionally, AACS is designed to create unprecedented flexibility, portability and security for entertainment content to be enjoyed on networked home, portable PC or CE devices.
I especially love their mention of a ‘traditional, straightforward playback mode‘. I bet it pained them to have to include any way to play the content at all. Rest assured they have top minds working on making sure nothing will be straightforward in the future.
Further, if you download the AACS agreement itself, you find the frightening concept of the ‘analog sunset‘ (it’s on page 82). This is where device manufactures agree to not make analog devices after certain preset dates.
Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray have embraced this draconian system, and the studios are salivating at the prospect of you never actually being able to own content again.
My reaction to this abomination is simple: no way in hell. I will not buy any product that uses this crap, and I hope you’ll join me in that boycott. Let these morons see the early adopters staying away in droves.
Please pass this on; post it on your blogs, ‘digg’ it; slashdot it; whatever it takes to stop this insidious plan.
Here is the AACS announcement
P.S.
*I got some complaints about not giving the ‘official’ full name of AACS. Well, OK, if it’s that important to you: Advanced Access Content System. There; feel better?
At the advice of a reader I looked up an article from 2004 about DRM, written by Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Absolutely brilliant description of the problems of DRM. You’ll find it here.
P.P.S.
I set up a dedicated page to share information about AACS and related technologies and how they affect your rights to fair use. It is www.hdboycott.com
Do you find it kind of strange that you hold this position after spending years working on DVD authoring packages? Sure, iDVD et al may not support CSS (maybe DVD Studio Pro does?), but the hardware that you purchased to play your self-authored DVDs sure did. Now you’re saying you won’t buy any product that uses AACS? Do you mean the discs, or drives too?
I mean drives, TVs, computers, iPods, whatever. Just say ‘no’.
Well said Mike – to be honest I am fed up with the content industry as a whole. I am OK with DVD’s as they are and don’t see a drastic reason to upgrade. I certainly will not upgrade to an HD format until they me the right to own stuff.
Saying that I have to admit that it will be difficult to keep up this boycott once, for example, Apple includes the next generation DVD drives in all of their computers. Does one avoid buying a Mac? I suppose I ought to and maybe we should also give feedback to Apple saying we don’t want these drives until we get to own content. Surely Apple has some limited influence in this.
So do you consider AACS fundamentally different than CSS? (Or FairPlay, for that matter…) What’s your personal policy on CSS, FairPlay, and other DMCA-enabled content protection schemes?
John – CSS never bothered me that much because everyone in the industry knew it was just a placebo to satisfy the movie studios. Nobody expected it to actually do anything. AACS on the other hand is being designed to work, by some very smart and very serious people.
I view the DMCA as a criminal conspiracy that should be prosecuted under RICO statutes, but of course it won’t be, as the conspirators are in charge.
But the big difference with AACS is that they can change the rules after the fact. If you buy an high definition DVD, you’ll have no certainty what rights you will be granted in the future. It’s insane.
PS
I find FairPlay to be a reasonable compromise, but it doesn’t work for me because I want to play my music from my server using devices that don’t support it. Hence, I buy my music elsewhere.
John, I know you were talking to Mike but i’ll answer your question as well.
I have an objection to all DRM including CSS, Fairplay, WMA DRM etc.
However some are less “evil” than others. CSS is fairly easy to crack although it does irritate me as it has prevented any legitimate and easy way of transferring DVD’s to computers/iPods etc. to be developed. This relates to the DMCA in America and although this does not apply in other countries (such as the UK) it has spurned developments of such products as the market is more limited as well as there still being legal issues. I also object to fairplay – it restricts my access to my music even if what I am doing is legitimate. However, I have found fairplay reasonable easy to crack (using JHymn which currently doesn’t work with iTunes 6) and therefore it is less of an issue to me than some forms of DRM. Also the advantages of the iTMS outweigh the disadvantages to me.
The difference with AACS is that it is more advanced and therefore harder to crack (I imagine it will get cracked but it won’t be as easy for the honest consumer to crack it), more restrictive I believe (for example HD content will play back as SD on all but the most modern televisions due to DRM restrictions and it can be changed in retrospective as Mike says (I believe this is also the case with Fairplay admittedly). I think that the content industries are hoping to be able to control what we consume and where we consume and I am concerned that nothing is being done to stop it. The content industry additionally wants us to pay separately if we consume the content on a portable device, a computer or in a car. Hopefully people will boycott the products but I have little faith that this will work. The difficulty is that only a small minority know enough about DRM to see why it should be avoided. Tell people and make sure that not only those who read technology blogs and news sites get to hear about it. Tell everyone (including your Mum and that old lady who has no interest in technology!) before they buys a new DVD player.
Warn them and maybe it will make a difference.
Count me in.
I with you Mike.
Damn. Cory Doctorow, EFF adviser on copyright, has been talking about this for months, and the media is almost silent. I think it’s the time for bloggers to show the muscle.
Do you think that’ll change anything? AACS will be cracked ten ways to Sunday…if it hasn’t been already. (I haven’t been keeping up with the particulars since I’m so sure it’ll be cracked in a timely manner.) I don’t think it’ll be any harder for the “common person” to defeat, once the number of friendly end-user apps ramps up. It was the same way with CSS, if you remember.
I don’t think it’s fundamentally different from CSS. What do I care if they can change the rules later if I already don’t like the initial set of rules? Sure, maybe AACS adds insult to injury, but the “injury” is the same as the one embodied in CSS, IMO.
This procedure looks a little bit like the Trusted Computer platform.
And to explain that, you all should see this animation:
http://www.lafkon.net/tc/
http://digg.com/movies/The_HD_Boycott_Begins_Now
People should read more.
The evils of AACS and the even more draconian add-ons in Blu-ray (see When a good format wins for the wrong reasons at philiphodgetts.com) have been a theme of mine for some time on almost any platform I can muster, so you have my support.
All Blu-ray and HD DVD players will require an Internet connection to play connected content – every time you play. Further should someone – say a friend of your teenage child – ever put an unauthorized disc in your player/drive it will be deactivated remotely and require a trip to a repair shop to be “reauthorized”. Seriously, I am not making this up.
Add to that the stupidity of the current Broadcast Flag/Analog Hole legislation being considered in committee and the major media players are proving they have a gun at their head threatening to kill themselves if we don’t play along.
Instead, we’ll bypass them entirely, finding new, sensible suppliers of content.
Philip
Well, since now all, and I say all, it’s been cracked, I guess this you are talking about will be so much difficult to crack, but I give you a data: Here in Europe, with the entry of the Euro, the governs tired themselves of say us this money was impossible to copy, well, now there are thousand of millions (or billion like you say) in euro copies running in the markets.
I mean ALL in Computing is possible to crack, and don’t forget that users are millions, what are they going to do?
I find this thing hilarious, actually. Do the content providers think that their products are really, truly, so wonderful that we can’t live without them? I don’t know why, when 99% of what they turn out is junk. This is just another suicide attempt, as they were still alive after DCMA. Let’s hope they get it right and wither up from lack of sales.