While these systems made copying more awkward, they did very little to stop piracy. Also, it didn’t take long for legitimate buyers to begin noticing something strange. For some reason, games with copy protection errored more often when loading than games without it.

Fast forward more than 30 years and technology is almost unrecognizable from those early 8 bit days, but perhaps surprisingly today’s copy protection – or DRM as we now know it – is still producing conundrums similar to those of three decades ago.

People who use pirate copies these days are generally unaffected by DRM since it is removed in advance, whereas legitimate buyers often have to jump through several hoops in order to get their products running as expected. This punishing of ‘honest’ customers is at the root of most DRM complaints.

Still, many of the world’s games developers see DRM as a necessary evil, claiming that without it copying would continue completely unchecked and as a result sales would decline. One such company is Square Enix, the gaming giant behind Final Fantasy and many dozens of other iconic cross-platform titles.

Adam Sullivan, Square Enix America’s Senior Manager of Business and Legal Affairs, informs TorrentFreak that the company’s choice to include DRM in its products has its roots in a simple concept – maximizing revenue.

“The primary benefit to us is the same as with any business: profit,” Sullivan explains.

So does DRM really work?

“We have a well-known reputation for being very protective of our IPs, which does deter many would-be pirates,” Sullivan adds. “However, effectiveness is notoriously difficult to measure — in short, we rely on the data available to us through our sales team and various vendors, along with consumer feedback.”

Of course, consumer feedback in the Internet space often includes fierce criticism of DRM, especially when it goes catastrophically wrong, as it has done on a number of occasions in recent years. So has Square Enix learned from these mistakes?

“The key to DRM is that it can’t interfere with the customer’s ability to play the game,” Sullivan says.

“It’s not uncommon for people to get a new computer every few years, or to have multiple computers. Sometimes they don’t have reliable internet connections. There’s no perfect solution yet.”

But while the problems persist, Sullivan says that Square Enix will pursue its anti-piracy strategy while considering the factors that are most important to the company and the game’s target audience. So is DRM here to stay?

“This depends on your definition of DRM, but generally yes — I think DRM will be essential for the foreseeable future,” Sullivan explains.

“When F2P [free-to-play] began trending, lots of people thought it would be the death of DRM. I remember talking with one F2P developer who couldn’t imagine why hackers would want to attack his game, since it was free and all. Two months later they were barraged with several hacks.

“So long as we’re concerned about things like data privacy, accounting sharing and hacking, we’ll need some form of DRM,” Square Enix America’s Head of Legal concludes.

More of Square Enix’s thoughts on anti-piracy and DRM initiatives will be heard during the Anti-Piracy and Content Protection Summit in Los Angeles this summer where Adam Sullivan will be a guest speaker.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

To prevent music from spreading like wildfire all the major labels have experimented extensively by adding DRM to digital music files. While this did little to stop piracy, the restrictions did hurt legitimate consumers.

It turns out that consumers find music with DRM less attractive than the pirated alternative, and some people have argued that it could actually hurt sales. A new working paper published by University of Toronto researcher Laurina Zhang confirms this.

For her research Zhang took a sample of 5,864 albums from 634 artists and compared the sales figures before and after the labels decided to drop DRM.

“I exploit a natural experiment where the four major record companies – EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner – remove DRM on their catalogue of music at different times to examine whether relaxing an album’s sharing restrictions impacts the level and distribution of sales,” she explains.

This is the first real-world experiment of its kind, and Zhang’s findings show that sales actually increased after the labels decided to remove DRM restrictions. “I find that the removal of DRM increases digital sales by 10%,” Zhang notes.

This effect holds up after controlling for factors such as album release dates, music genre and regular sales variations over time.

Interestingly, not all albums are affected equally by the decision to remove DRM. Older albums selling less than 25,000 copies see their sales increase by 41% and overall lower-selling albums get a 30% sales boost. The top selling work, on the other hand, doesn’t benefit from less restrictions.

“Relaxing sharing restrictions does not impact all albums equally; it increases the sales of lower-selling albums (the “long tail”) significantly by 30% but does not benefit top-selling albums. My results are consistent with theory that shows lowering search costs can facilitate the discovery of niche products.”

According to Zhang, the 30% sales increase for lower-selling albums can be explained by the fact that DRM-free music makes it easier for consumers to share files and discover new music. The finding that removing DRM from top-selling albums has no effect on sales makes sense in this regard, since the discovery element is less important for well promoted musicians.

While DRM is still prevalent in the book industry and elsewhere, most of the major labels are now in agreement that it’s not a good fit for music.

Those who look around will find that there’s hardly any music being sold with classic DRM in place. Even the RIAA admitted that DRM is an endangered species, probably because what the researchers report today is rather accurate.

The late Steve Jobs already knew this a long time ago. “DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy,” he said back in 2007.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

To counter this threat, publishers are constantly looking for new forms of DRM. With financial support from the Government and backing from the publishing industry, researchers at the Darmstadt Technical University in Germany launched SiDiM, a project to find DRM innovations.

One of the solutions being worked on at the moment aims to make individual ebooks unique through so-called “text watermarks.” The researchers have developed a technology that will make small changes to book texts so each buyer gets a unique copy. If the book is later uploaded to the Internet it can be easily traced back to the source.

“The goal of the SiDiM project is to develop new protection measures for eBooks and electronic documents. Texts in digital format are particularly threatened by unauthorized copying, for example via the Internet,” SiDiM’s Dr. Martin Steinebach explains.

“A solution to this problem is to alter documents with visible and invisible marks that make a single copy distinguishable. Users are encouraged to take responsibility their their copy and it will deter illegal file-sharing, as copies can be traced using these marks,” the researcher adds.

While the general story-line will remain intact, the DRM shuffles some words around, inserts synonyms, changes the paragraph format or the punctuation. For example, the word “unsympathetic” could be changed to “not sympathetic,” and so forth.

The researchers see this as a ‘consumer-friendly’ form of DRM as it doesn’t lock the book to an account or prevent copying between devices.

Whether readers will be equally enthusiastic remains to be seen. Since the process is completely automated there is a risk that errors will occur. For example, sentences may no longer carry the nuances intended by the author.

To see what kind of reception the text alterations might receive, publishers and authors have been sent a list of 15 “text watermark” examples along with a request to assess the changes.

The researchers don’t explain how they intend to deal with creative pirates, who might add in their own alterations, so it’s unsure whether the system is foolproof.

While the “text watermarks” are not particularly intrusive for readers, the assumption that all consumers are potential criminals may not sit well with everyone. Additionally, most book fanatics will probably want to read the book the way the author intended.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The old guard, however, are pushing for ever more draconian measures in an attempt to turn back the tide. Now the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has reached out to some groups it hopes might provide the metaphorical Silver Bullet (or at least white one) to deal with it.

On Thursday, the IPO and the Department of Business Industry and Skills (BIS – better known for being the department that rammed the Digital Economy act through after some back-room deals) proudly announced two anti-piracy grants. Contracts totaling £196,000 were signed with two companies as a result of a competition by the Technology Strategy Board called “How to promote Legitimate Online Intellectual Property Markets”. The simple business-oriented answers of “adapt to new technologies” and “give consumers what they want” clearly were not submitted.

£83,000 went to the University of Surrey for what the BIS calls “a novel scheme for protecting digital media content”, or as we generally call it, DRM. Few details are actually available at present, but the IPO describes it thusly:

Digital content which has been obtained illegally is automatically blocked by the system. A key feature of the proposed technology is not to inconvenience legitimate users like existing Digital Rights Management systems do: Users don’t need to worry about how to configure and use the system; they just use their devices as usual without even knowing about its existence. The technology is patent-pending and further details will be available once it is published.

And if this sounds like the claims made of every other DRM product, you’d be right. Once removed for one person, it’s removed for anyone else, making DRM’d goods MORE popular for piracy.

Meanwhile those using the DRM’d product are restricted to what the DRM allows, which does inconvenience others. Just ask Apple about Fairplay and why they removed it, or users who’ve fallen foul of CSS, AACS, or indeed any other DRM scheme. In reality, ditching DRM reduces piracy

The lion’s share of the money – £113,000 – went to a company called ‘WhiteBullet’. If you’ve not heard of them, you’re not alone. Started less than 3 months ago, its big idea is that websites really need a colour-coding system so people can tell how ‘legitimate’ it is. Called the “IP Infringement Index”, or IPI, it’s a red/amber/green rating for sites based on how ‘infringing’ they think a site is.

Of course, like all automated systems there are going to be significant errors. When Viacom can’t tell if it uploaded stuff to YouTube itself in court filings, or music blogs get seized because record labels forgot they told them to distribute songs, any automated system assessing 3rd party infringement will be next to useless.

Also missing is exactly how this IPI rating will be used. A consumer-based system would require either a browser plugin, or the likes of Google to integrate it. A private ‘look at our score for your site’ model, by contrast, will have all the wide-ranging appeal and accuracy of a Special 301 report. Also, its claim to be “developed in conjunction with industry and law enforcement” and “in accordance with legal best practices and have been openly reviewed with key Internet stakeholders” might be more believable if they had some actual specifics.

Of course, that’s not so surprising when you find out the two people behind White Bullet are Peter Szyszko and Jane Sunderland. Peter was Senior Legal Counsel at NBC Universal from January 2006, until he left to form White Bullet.

Sunderland is no slouch in the establishment anti-piracy world either. Between 1997 and 2011 she was Vice President of Content Protection at Fox, with another three years before that as VP Intellectual Property. Some of her most memorable actions there include the statement back in 2007 that episodes of 24 uploaded to YouTube before their airdate could cause irreparable harm to Fox (and yet they’re still here)

So never fear our British readers. Public funds are being spent wisely on yet another DRM scheme and a ‘scoring’ system that has no obvious method of use, all to protect massively profitable media companies. Isn’t austerity great?

And if we find out more about how these new white elephant bullets, or DRM-that-isn’t are supposed to work,  we’ll let you know.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In addition to the premium edition, GameMaker is available in a feature-limited free version to entice new users in. Of course, this doesn’t stop the software crackers who regularly release pirated copies of the top-of-the-range product.

YoYo Games, the company behind the software, admit to being in a continuous battle with pirates, trying numerous techniques to mitigate unauthorized downloads. Their latest attempt, however, has completely backfired.

Over the weekend it became clear that Game Maker’s DRM system had gone postal. Indie game developer Brian Heidrich reported that in one of his projects the graphics he had created were now gone, only to be replaced with pirate-related emblems.

“When I opened the project today I was surprised to see skulls on almost all my sprites,” said Heidrich complaining to YoYo Games.

Initially, other members of the GameMaker community found the modification of the game dev’s project amusing and were quick to accuse Heidrich of using a pirated version of the tool.

But quickly it became evident that something was amiss when YoYo’s Head of Development Mike Dailly responded in defense of Heidrich. Dailly, who was the first employee of DMA Design, the company behind Lemmings and the debut Grand Theft Auto, said there might be another explanation.

“Please don’t ASSUME folk are using pirated copies, sometimes a virus or something can effect an exe and gives some issue like this,” he explained.

Whatever the reason, the DRM was definitely causing problems. Not only was the system kicking in on pirated versions of the game, but fully paid-up and even free editions too.

“It certainly appears that GM’s anti-piracy code is registering a false positive and then vandalizing people’s projects,” a user complained on YoYo’s forum. “As much as I’ve been an advocate for GM and YYGs, this is just wrong.”

YoYo has now issued an update to remove this element of the DRM and Dailly has apologized to users affected by the problem.

“I totally understand that those who have paid for GameMaker and are getting this are feeling very upset by the whole matter, and I can only apologize for the problems. We try hard to make it as smooth an experience as possible for paying users, but are constantly fighting pirates’ understanding of the protection systems,” he explained.

“We’d LOVE to be able to remove the protection completely, but we know that vast numbers would simply copy it if it was that easy. A certain number will NEVER buy – EVER! These folks are basically crooks, and you can not count these as lost sales. No matter how ‘cheap’ you make it, some will simply never buy.

“We simply don’t care about them, but if I can piss them off, I will,” Dailly added.

Of course, GameMaker do provide options for users to get in on the fun for free, so they can hardly be criticized for not trying to convert would-be pirates into paying customers. But aggressive DRM is problematic, as summed up by another Game Maker user.

“DRM is, and always will be, a huge failure. It fails to do the one thing it was designed to do, that is stopping piracy,” wrote Big J.

“In addition, it just causes unnecessary trouble for the legitimate users, which is easy to see here.”

The good news is that YoYo not only responded quickly to the issues, but also appear to have taken something positive away from the experience.

“If I thought for one minute we were going to affect customers, I’d never have put [the DRM] in. Something we simply didn’t expect has been happening on end users machines, and while we think we now know, again, I agree, customers should never – ever – be affected by it,” Dailly concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

But all too often DRM hits the headlines when it either fails to do its job or generates unintended side-effects that cause headaches for legitimate users. Today could be the start of a very big headache indeed for Ubisoft and people who have purchased the company’s games.

According to hacker/researcher Tavis Ormandy, the Uplay DRM system designed and operated by Ubisoft could be opening up the company’s customers’ machines to a whole world of hurt.

“While on vacation recently I bought a video game called ‘Assassin’s Creed Revelations’. I didn’t have much of a chance to play it, but it seems fun so far,” Ormandy wrote on the Full Disclosure mailing list yesterday.

“However, I noticed the installation procedure creates a browser plugin for its accompanying Uplay launcher, which grants unexpectedly (at least to me) wide access to websites. I don’t know if it’s by design, but I thought I’d mention it here in case someone else wants to look into it.”

Just 24 hours later Ormandy was back with a worrying update.

“I got it working,” he wrote. “I submitted it to Ubisoft via the online form.”

What Ormandy appears to be suggesting is that once hackers understand how this vulnerability works, websites could incorporate an exploit into their designs which could then allow them to gain access to a Ubisoft game-player’s PC. The sky’s the limit with this kind of opening – software installs, keyloggers, bots or other malware all become possible.

A list of games running Uplay DRM can be found here – they include some huge names such as the Assassins Creed series, Call of Juarez: The Cartel, Driver: San Francisco, Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic, and all the Tom Clancy games.

TorrentFreak contacted Ormandy for comment and we will update this article with his comments when they come in.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The goal of the day was to spread awareness about the increasing need to adopt an open standard for public as well and privately held documents. The e-book industry is one which is in dire need of such a standard. Currently, ebooks are often protected with DRM, which has become famous for causing problems for the customers who pay for those ebooks.

Actor, writer and the recent hero to a Hobbit themed pub, Stephen Fry, is quoted at the Document Freedom Day website saying, “Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. It is time once and for all to end the pointless nonsense of one document sent on one platform being incomprehensible to the user of another.”

Having purchased a Nook Tablet a few days prior, the timing of this awareness day was quite relevant to my current interests. Since freshly rooting my tablet, my attention has been very much oriented on acquiring new e-books and reading the old e-books that had been getting stale on my PC.

Luckily many libraries are now offering a service for “loaning” ebooks. So I can easily borrow e-books to read on my new device, right? Wrong. Very wrong.

It turns out that a majority of the 6,495 titles available at my local library were accessible only through a locked .acsm file format. The open alternative had 49 titles available at the time. That is about as many as fit on just one of the small book shelves I’m sitting near as I type this.

What is a .acsm file anyway? If you understand how a .torrent file works you can think of a .acsm file as being very much like a .torrent file. If you use Windows or Mac, you can (theoretically) download and install Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). This software reads the .acsm file and then it will download the actual .epub book, complete with DRM. With me so far?

Before the .acsm file downloads the e-book (which you either paid for or used your library card to borrow against your good name) you must create an account with Adobe and log in. The stated reason had something to do with your assumed guilt should anything you download escape into the open internet. At which point, the copyright owner of the content will hunt you down and take severe legal action. But wait, there’s more!

Say you have a device you wish to read your e-book on. ADE must to connect to and authorize your device and handle transferring the book to that device. What happens if it failed to recognize your device? What happens if any step along the way fails? If Adobe has their way, you are out of luck.

Keep in mind that “device” includes the computer you are running ADE on. So what happens when you use a linux based operating system that ADE does not support? Then you are stuck with a useless .acsm file and can not download the actual content you either borrowed or paid for.

It requires a lot of tedious steps to access content that should normally be very simple to access. In the end, the only civilized way to access the content is to, remove the DRM. In other words, there is no legal way to access the content without breaking the law if you are using free (libre) software.

According to Adobe’s licensing terms, moving the e-book from one device to another is not acceptable unless Adobe authorizes each device. Not that they are offering you an opportunity to obey the law of Adobe. Go ahead and try opening a DRM e-book in an e-book reader or on a device that isn’t made by Adobe and the extent of your reading with be a short error saying the user is not activated.

Should you manage to find a way to run ADE on a linux based operating system, the software still doesn’t want to connect to other devices, such as an e-book reader. Without authorization, you have three options including not reading the book you borrowed (meanwhile, nobody else can borrow that title from your library for 14 days), you may break the DRM using available scripts for doing so or you can download a DRM free pirated version.

Oddly, downloading a pirated version does not seem to make the reader vulnerable to the same severe legal risks as breaking DRM does. Between that and being held accountable for any copy that may be made from your DRM laden e-book, downloading a pirated copy seems to be the ‘most legal’ method of accessing a given book in a situation where there is a sever lack of clear legal options.

“We are committed to providing easy access to books and information for all ages, through responsive professionals, engaging programs, and state-of-the-art technology in a safe and friendly environment.” says my local library

After inquiring with a few of the staff members, it was uncovered that the option of whether or not to provide ebooks in an open or closed format to the library is left up to the publishers. Should community libraries committed to providing easy access to books then accept into their system a format dedicated to making access as difficult as possible?

—

Ryan Smith, aka Green Pirate.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In short, Doctorow argues that the copyright industry’s fight isn’t against copying, but against general-purpose computers. As more and more devices we buy are general-purpose hardware devices with custom software designed to make that hardware do certain things out of the box, that custom software that drives the device is also custom-izable software that lets the hardware be recoded and repurposed to do completely different things.

Shortly, we’ll see basically every industry trying to crack down on the freedom to tinker, to keep the products they sold us in the same state as they were before we owned them. This is exactly where we’re headed if the current trends continue.

The problem is that many people don’t understand what a general-purpose computer is. Legislators still think in terms of hardware: A cassette player can only play a cassette. Therefore, a music player today must only play music.

That’s wrong of course. A music player today can be recoded to play, stream, receive, remix, or do other things with music. Or, for that matter, it could probably be recoded to become a networked earthquake early-warning sensor instead, if its microphone was sensitive enough to sense the low-frequency sounds that forebode earthquakes.

This idea — that an off-the-shelf entertainment device can be repurposed to become an earthquake early-warning sensor with just the copying of a file — is mind-boggling to today’s legislators. It is just so far out it doesn’t reflect sunlight any more. And it is with this mindset that they legislate that breaking any DRM — repurposing devices that you own — should be punishable with jail time.

This is the reason that I keep reminding the world why we need to ban DRM altogether. It is corporations writing their own laws restricting your property.

But it goes beyond that. Let’s return to the concept of the general-purpose computer. In the mindset of today’s oldish legislators, if you want to kill the possibility of broadcasting music from a music player, you remove some piece from that device. Just like you would remove a “stream” button from a keyboard.

But as we know, it doesn’t work like that. If you want to prevent a general-purpose computer from running a certain type of code, you have to add something to it. You have to add code that prevents it from running this type of code, which it has been designed to do, after all.

And this is where it gets interesting. Since you own the general-purpose computer, you can run any code on it — including code that removes the code preventing you from running some types of code. These instructions that kill the DRM restrictions, seen from the device’s point of view, is just any kind of code that the device will execute happily.

And so protection for the removal of the DRM code is built in next, like Sony did with its criminal rootkit in 2005 (which is why Sony is on my permanent blacklist). So then that code is removed first by the person owning the device, followed by the DRM code.

The general-purpose computer is, by its very definition, a device where DRM will never work.

The major problem is that legislators don’t understand this. They don’t understand that you need to add something to the device to make it less functional, and that this something can easily be removed by an end-user to restore full functionality again. So we get an endless nightmare where legislators mandate more code, more laws, more code, and yet more laws to try to add restricting code to our general-purpose devices, code that we can easily remove.

We need to shift the viewpoint and narrative on this story — we need to make legislators understand the concept of a general-purpose computer, and that by definition, you can’t restrict it from running code. We need a Freedom to Code at the citizen level, at the same constitutional level as Freedom of Speech, even if it goes against corporate interests. No, scratch that: especially when it goes against corporate interests.

Of course, one might argue that a general freedom to code would also be a freedom to code those pesky DRM restrictions. That is true on a philosophical level. The fight here, however, is to get an understanding of the general-purpose computer on a conceptual level into legislatures.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Therefore, to begin with, a ban on DRM can be seen as a form of consumer protection.

Second, it doesn’t matter if Parliament writes laws — which is its job — if corporations can rewrite those laws at their own leisure with the help of technology. It is also Parliament’s job to make sure that writing laws remains Parliament’s job, and in particular, that it doesn’t bend over to the wishes of a special interest.

But while these two points are important, the third is the most important of all. Libertarians, in particular, have asked me why an open and honest goods declaration and a legal right to circumvent DRM isn’t enough. If people want to buy DRM-defective goods which are clearly declared to be so, and corporations want to sell them, then what is the problem?

Let me illustrate by drawing parallels — as I often do — to the shift in attitude that followed the rise of the Greens 40 years ago.

A few years ago, the European Union banned lead. As in “banned lead, period”. You can find the stamp “RoHS” on many electronics products, which is short for “Reduction of Hazardous Substances”. As the solder needed to create circuit boards in all our electronics was a mixture of molten lead and tin, every piece of electronics manufacture on the planet needed to be retooled, recalibrated, reinvented. It was a huge undertaking, as the replacement lead-free solder had different operating temperatures, which in turn put new stresses on the boards and long-term stability, and so on.

So let’s ask the same question. If a technically savvy corporation argues that it is sound engineering and profitable business to use lead in electronics (which it is), and people want to buy the electronics that contain lead, then what is the problem?

It is exactly the same problem as with DRM.

As a politician, I have other concerns than sound engineering and profitable businesses. It is my job — it is my damn responsibility — to take a larger view and look ahead, decades ahead, generations ahead. I fully support the ban on lead for this reason. And it is the same reason that I support a ban on DRM.

It is toxic. DRM is toxic. Just like lead. And needs to be banned for exactly the same reasons.

DRM poisons the free flow, analysis, remix, and usage of information. It requires a very specific set of conditions to operate, conditions that won’t exist five or ten years into the future. (Have you tried playing a five-year-old DRM-defective game?) It poisons the information ecosystem.

As the free exchange of TICKs — Tools, Ideas, Culture, and Knowledge — is essential to the industries, citizens and social life of the next generation, I fully support banning a practice that outright poisons the ecosystem where this exchange needs to thrive.

The Greens supported banning freon in their early days and banning lead recently, despite both substances being good engineering, good business, and attrative end-user products. This is the way it should be, and this is why I support banning DRM. There are other concerns that take precedence in lawmaking than short-term profits.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.