I have earlier made several post to this blog on DRM – including telling that DRM just does not work. Still several industry groups are trying to push DRM here and there as a solution to their business challenges for example in web and HTML. For example under pressure from the movie studios, along with Netflix and Microsoft, the W3C agreed to add DRM to HTML5. There are also groups that run projects that try to get rid of DRM in one decade.
The newest application where the DRM is pushing is digital photography. Adding DRM to JPEG files is being considered by the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG), which oversees the JPEG format. The idea is that there would be option to have images that could force your computer to stop you from uploading pictures to Pinterest or social media. JPEG Looking To Add DRM To Images… Supposedly To Protect Images From Gov’t Surveillance article tells that the JPEG committee investigates solutions to assure privacy and security when sharing photos on social networks, (stock) photography databases, etc. This maybe look as a good to some people, but I don’t think that it would be in practice a good idea or even work. It also raises some concerns about whether such DRM would actually be used to protect an individual’s privacy or (much more likely) to try to limit public use of images for other reasons.
EFF notes that There’s No DRM in JPEG—Let’s Keep It That Way, and I can agree on that. Considering a proposal to add DRM to the JPEG image format – it does not look like a good idea. The professional version of the JPEG format, JPEG 2000, already has a DRM extension called JPSEC. But usage of JPEG 2000 is limited to highly specialized applications such as medical imaging, broadcast and cinema image workflows, and archival, therefore the availability of DRM in JPEG 2000 hasn’t affected the use of images online, where the legacy JPEG format remains dominant.
EFF attended the group’s meeting in Brussels to tell JPEG committee members why adding DRM would be a bad idea. Their presentation explains why cryptographers don’t believe that DRM works, points out how DRM can infringe on the user’s legal rights over a copyright work (such as fair use and quotation), and warns how it places security researchers at legal risk as well as making standardization more difficult. It is really worth to read though their Copyright, Code and Creativity – A Note of Caution About DRM in JPEG presentation slides.
1 Comment
Tomi Engdahl says:
People Would Pay A Hell Of A Lot More If DRM Were Gone
from the paying-for-value dept
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170710/16293537759/people-would-pay-hell-lot-more-if-drm-were-gone.shtml
An argument that we’ve made for years is that for all the whining about how the legacy entertainment industry insists it needs DRM, adding DRM takes away value. It limits the content/games/software/etc. that people purchase a license to and therefore limits the value. You don’t need an economics degree to recognize that providing less value decreases how much people are willing to pay (and how many people are willing to pay). Thus, there’s at least some economic force when using DRM that decreases the potential market for DRM’d offerings. Supporters of DRM will likely counter with some version of the argument that this decrease in value/addressable market is okay, because it’s less than the expected decrease in the potential market that happens when “OMG I CAN GET A PIRATED VERSION FOR FREE!?!?!?!??” enters the market. I’m not entirely convinced that’s true
But, one thing that hasn’t really ever been made clear is just how much DRM depresses markets. Until now. Some researchers at the University of Glasgow have just released some preliminary research (found via Cory Doctorow and EFF) specifically looking at the market for DVD players — and how things work when they come with built in DRM and without it. The findings are pretty spectacular. People are much more willing to spend more money to be able to avoid DRM.
New Research Estimates Value of Removing DRM Lock
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/new-research-estimates-value-removing-drm-locks
Main findings
Overall we find that interoperability has a significant positive effect on the price that consumers are willing to pay for DVD players. The average price that they are willing to pay increases by $19 USD for players with any interoperability features present. The average price increases by $30 USD for players with the specific ability to play content in open file formats like Xvid. This feature has the strongest impact on price in our study. The lack of region locks also has a moderately significant effect on price. Backwards compatibility with legacy formats live VCD had no significant impact on price in any of our models
How big is the market for DRM-Free?
http://boingboing.net/2017/07/09/dont-rock-the-boat.html
The paper was written by a team from the University of Glasgow, led by Kristofer Erickson: they scraped Amazon DVD-player pricing data, and compared the sale-prices of players with (grey market) DRM-breaking features with the ones that obeyed all the rules that DVD players are supposed to obey.
They reached a shocking conclusion: DVD players with even minimal circumvention features sell for about 50% more than similarly reviewed DVD players of similar vintage — that means that in a commodity electronics category where the normal profit would be 2% or less, manufacturers that sell a model with just slightly different software (a choice that adds virtually nothing to the manufacturing costs) pocket 25 times the profits.
In one way, this is unsurprising. People want DVD players, but they don’t want DRM.
But laws that protect DRM are indiscriminate, overbroad, and thus an invitation to mischief. Laws like Section 1201 of the US DMCA (or EU implementations of Article 6 of the EUCD, etc) make it a crime to bypass DRM, even when you’re doing so for a legal reason. Ripping your DVDs isn’t illegal. Buying a DVD in one country and watching it on a DVD player from another country isn’t illegal. But breaking DRM is illegal, and since you can’t do these activities without breaking the DRM, these activities become illegal, too.
That means that anyone who makes a product with some software in it can force you to use it only in ways that they prefer, and make it a felony to use it any other way.
This all only hangs together because the US Trade Representative has pressured virtually every country in the world into passing DRM laws that mirror America’s version
How Much Do Consumers Value Interoperability? Evidence from the Price of DVD Players
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2998767