There's No DRM in JPEG – Let's Keep It That Way
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So yes, I do feel a bit bad for small independant artists who watch the standards bodies work themselves into a fury to protect video and audio content while they have to deal with Google Image Search and 9gag.
Doing the same for still images adds a ton of work for little payoff. And it still doesn't prevent anything. At least in video if the system remains uncracked, it's hard to make a copy. You can't just point a video camera at a screen and get good results.
Whereas for a still image? Pretty easy to reconstruct the exact pixels, 100%.
Anyways, this is doomed entirely. They provide the case of social media sites stripping off metadata. Well guess what, if your DRM is gonna prevent them from modifying the image, it's gonna prevent them from loading the image in the first place. Even if the JPEG folks add it, it has zero chance of going anywhere. You'd need support from the hardware, OS, and on up. (Like video has.)
It never was show-stoppingly hard. Push comes to shove, if MAFIAA invents something really good to stop you from copying a file, someone in Shenzhen will make a physical screen recorder that captures subpixels directly off your monitor and turns them back into data.
The only things of value in the non-physical world are monopoly, reputation, and customisation.
I'm not sure this was ever the case in Western society for all but the top 1% of artists in any given time period.
I feel it might be stupid idea but it is not impractical.
The effort of extracting content should be less than the maximum value that can be generated by redistribution. Thus, returns from piracy diminishes as you go from softwares to video to image to text. The effort of extracting an image is too easy via analogue hole. This is assuming an open technology ecosystem not exactly the RMS world but at least Linus or perhaps Mozilla. The enforcers of the DRM do the sensible thing of spreading their proprietary black boxes to as much people, until, they can shut down their doors to the rest of community. That is precisely when certain open source foundations too had to back down. That is how you can enjoy netflix only within your chrome browser.
What bothers me is why are they trying to make it into the standards. If it is built into the standards, it will be built into the downloaders as well. Remember what happened with HLS AES encryption, it is now built into the video downloaders itself. While I understand benefits of standardization, how it has given shape to tech, it might not be true with something so un-technical as DRM. If you do want obfuscation, at least do not make it standard procedure. You know very well that the strongest DRM can not be technically secure.
> I feel it might be stupid idea but it is not impractical.
They are willing to fuck everything up to extract more royalties. Don't worry that you can't have a 100%-solution DRM now. When we get to the level of advanced optical implants or even brainchips, I'm willing to bet MAFIAA will be one of the biggest investors, in order to sneak in a DRM processor directly into your head and then force you to consume content only through legal and paid-for MAFIAA-certified brain chips.
Humanity is going to learn some very hard lessons if that class of technologies ever pans out.
Struggling to make sure you get paid is nothing new, either.
The only worse thing is people who notice something is cool and decide to come in and monetize it.
EDIT: also, happy 2^11-day :).
(INB4 you reflexively downvote me for saying bad things about Respectable Newspapers, take a moment to think about the last time they wrote something in your area of expertise and note how big a mix of lies, bullshit and misunderstanding the article was. There is no reason to assume that everything else they cover is true.)
Journalism has a much bigger problem than just their business model being ruined by digitization. They need to figure out a business model that incentivizes actual, honest reporting.
I'd very much like that we could abolish fines for copying but keep fines for stripping author signature from work, or not propagating original author signature to works that are derived.
This way you could have a trail to reach actual author of the part of work that you find awesome to commission some new work from him.
This could be much more valuable for way more people than current copyright schemes that only seem to benefit fatcats.
But I still want copyright. If there were none, someone else could take my work, attribute it, put it on some SEO'd site and outrank me.
What recourse would I have? Very few people are going to find the original source, search it, get past the SEO and find my site.
And zero readers have commissioned a work. I make money, but not that way.
Trust me, copyright isn't just for fatcats. Though I suspect it's mostly fatcats who propose unreasonable applications of copyright.
In Russia where illegal book sharing is widespread most popular piracy libraries now are non-profits like Flibusta and Library Genesis.
If I can't monetize works, I won't make them, I'll do something else. Are their Russian authors making money with working business models under their system of non-enforced copyright?
Copyright is enforced here, sites are banned and people go to jail for installing unlicensed software. Piracy is widespread because of many cultural, historical and economical reasons. There are 3 main business models Russian authors use: crowdfunding (there are few platforms specialised on books), appealing to audience without internet access, and receiving support from the government.
Writing programs in hopes of selling them in the future is like trying to strike gold. Even if you are not horribly wrong and someone will buy copy of your stuff and not immediately request a refund it will most likely be insanely cheap (from your point of view) and expensive for the people who can get that copy for free because it is almost as easy (often easier) than paying for it.
I want copyright too, and for pretty much the same reasons as you. But right now supporting "copyright" means you're taking the same side as assholes who insists on a term of 70 years after the death of the author, or more. Some people even at HN think copyright ought to have infinite duration. It means you're on the same side as those who want to send people to prison or put them in the poorhouse for putting a video on Youtube. The same side as jerks who want to deploy bots all across the web to indiscriminately take down content whether it infringes or not, and who wheel and deal with distribution channels when the draconian laws they bribe governments to pass aren't enough. Seriously, fuck these people.
The political climate in much of the world eschews nuance on basically any issue you can name, and copyright is no exception. I want reasonable copyright terms of ten to twenty years from publication and to wipe my ass with the DMCA. If I can't have that, and if the choice is between copyright maximalists and those who would abolish copyright completely, I'll support shit-canning the idea altogether. It might not be the most fiscally or culturally sound solution, but it at least shows a basic understanding of how human culture even works, which I can't say for the maximalists.
"If that happens, the web as we know it would cease to exist. Without a legal recourse to stop plagiarism and stolen content, people who are actually creating new content stop completely and move into other areas of work. Websites that produce original and unique content close up shop. Instead you're left with a bunch of low-quality rip off sites that have nothing original of their own. Then it the entire web stagnates over the years as very few new things get added to the net as a whole. And that's just the effect on the internet, that doesn't take into account real world publishing.
I wish people would consider all of the consequences of these things before making statements like that. I haven't even begun to consider the consequences of eliminating copyright completely and just from what I can come up with off the top of my head makes it a non-starter."
It also ignores what we're missing out on now because of our copyright regime. Anyone should be able to make a Star Wars movie by now, or a Spiderman open-world RPG, or an epic poem detailing the later exploits of Meriadoc Brandybuck, or whatever the hell else. There is a shitload of derivative works we're missing out on because of onerous copyright restrictions, even on works where everyone involved with their creation has been dead for fifty years.
Anyway, the main point of my previous post was not to support eliminating copyright. Mainly, it was to point out that if you support dramatically reforming copyright - twenty years and no DMCA would get nearly as much opposition from special interests as would eliminating copyright altogether - you've got a real uphill battle and no clear allies, despite having more in common, probably, with people who what to eliminate copyright rather than the maximalists. So I'm sympathetic to the view of "fuck it, let's just get rid of it, then" even if there would be some negative consequences to that.
Finally, there is something to be said for taking an extreme opposite position even if it goes further than you would prefer. I think I'm more likely to see reasonable copyright happen in my lifetime if I support people who want to abolish copyright, than by trying to reason with people who want it to be limitless in scope and duration.
That's a good point. As a practical matter opposing all copyright is probably the most realistic way to get it back to a reasonable level.
It's strange how as a culture we started to believe creating is just an instrument to make money. Adults are insane; they lose understanding they had as kids, that creating something and/or solving a problem can, and should be, a terminal value in itself.
This approach does not apply to most artists. Nobody is going to pay an author a full-time salary to write new books just for them, or a musician to make new music just for them. The better option for most artists is to invest in creating the best work they can and sell it for commodity prices to a lot of people.
Is this too far fetched?
That's what it is now, and the reason it happened was because Github was full of projects created out of a sense of altruism and fun, and it got respected this way. Yes, the respect and popularity Github has stems not from code-resume-builders, but from the altruists and people doing fun shit for fun that came before.
You see, this is a pattern that repeats all over software industry, the whole Internet included. First you start with people doing something to actually do it (i.e. as a terminal goal). Then whatever useful and/or fun they made gets recognized, popularized, and some people smell a money making opportunity (i.e. doing stuff as an instrumental goal, to get money). The business comes and the whole environment turns to shit.
That's exactly how it worked before invention of phonograph.
> The better option for most artists is to invest in creating the best work they can and sell it for commodity prices to a lot of people.
That's absolutely absurd. For one person that strikes gold and makes comfy living, five will make some living and hundreds will have no money from their creative bets. Create something in hope someone will buy it is most of the time very inefficient way to attempt to make money. It's way easier to find people who will buy your stuff and make it for them.
Are you honestly saying that fashion, choreography, dance and cooking is void of original unique things? That they lack creativity? Are you saying that nobody produces automobiles because they don't have a greater incentive of protections?
I think you have a homo-economicus way of looking at the world. The reality actually seem to be something quite different.
The premise for what copyright is supposed to do is based upon a view of the world that really doesn't seem to actually exist. It's a theory based on an elaborate fiction. That's a terrible way to run a society.
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying text is different. It's far simpler to replicate text than a dance.
I'm not saying no text works will get produced without copyright. Just that a lot of things we take for granted or even things that are free now actually depend on copyright as part of their creation.
No good stuff is created for fun? And the stuff that's created for fun is crap? Like that thing that Andy Weir wrote and self published for free on his website and only made 99cents Kindle version because people were bothering him about it?
Attribution should be made in the way you want it to be made. Your domain name or email or unique random string one could google, could be part of your signature that would be obligatory for others to include if they want to share or build upon your work.
> Very few people are going to find the original source, search it
If I like something that somebody made I usually look him up to find out if he has other cool stuff. I do it with musicians, I do it with authors, with actors, with directors ... less so with graphic designers because they are way harder to find because information about authorship is almost never carefully retained for images.
Same way as with code. If I find cool project I'm looking for original repo and most prominent forks.
The number of people that intentionally add their info to EXIF and want it to stay there is dwarfed by the people that would view that as a privacy violation.
If that happens, the web as we know it would cease to exist. Without a legal recourse to stop plagiarism and stolen content, people who are actually creating new content stop completely and move into other areas of work. Websites that produce original and unique content close up shop. Instead you're left with a bunch of low-quality rip off sites that have nothing original of their own. Then it the entire web stagnates over the years as very few new things get added to the net as a whole. And that's just the effect on the internet, that doesn't take into account real world publishing.
I wish people would consider all of the consequences of these things before making statements like that. I haven't even begun to consider the consequences of eliminating copyright completely and just from what I can come up with off the top of my head makes it a non-starter.
Copyright doesn't prevent plagiarism; plagiarism can exist without copyright violation and vice versa.
Without it, anyone could get away with pretending to have done anyone else's creative work.
To illustrate with a recent example, Andy Weir wrote "The Martian," and distributed it online for free, originally. Without copyright, Crown books could have copied the text, put a different author name on it, sold thousands of copies and kept every dime. Same with the movie--they could have just copied the story and made a movie without paying Andy anything.
Also, sadly, publishers have many different tricks to rob authors out of the money from book sales. Bigger ones probably don't care, but there are a lot of smaller "entrepreneurs" willing to lie and cheat, so one has to be careful (as my physics professor learned in a painful way).
Well yeah. Murder laws don't stop people from murdering but that doesn't mean we should do away with the laws since people still get murdered. It's a punishment & massive deterrent. Especially when used in conjunction with the DMCA.
No, it wouldn't. Because if copyright vanished, I'd be one of the people trying to take advantage of it. It would be open season. A lot of my buddies would do the same.
I think you underestimate just how greedy people are.
While true to some extent, if we want these people to keep making more of this "best content", we should also enable them to "make a buck out of it". Else they will (and do) go do something else to make a buck and we'll be worse off for it.
> Open source code is not an exception, it's the rule.
How often do people get paid for open source projects? How often do people get paid for writing custom, proprietary code? If your answers to these questions don't make obvious the fallacy of your statement above, all I can say is you're living in a bubble.
I agree, but there is a subtle difference in mindset here I think a lot of people miss - creating something to make money is a different thing from creating something and making money on it. Instrumental vs. terminal values. We want to have more people building things so that those things exist (i.e. making fun movies so that they're fun, or building tools to solve a problem), support them by e.g. making sure they aren't bothered by stuff like food and shelter - paying them. What we want to have less is people making things in order to make money off it, because their incentives are to create worst possible thing that still sells.
> How often do people get paid for open source projects? How often do people get paid for writing custom, proprietary code? If your answers to these questions don't make obvious the fallacy of your statement above, all I can say is you're living in a bubble.
Of course people are paid more for writing propertiary code, and I'm also aware of the trend to pay people for making open-source code which will be then monetized by e.g. charging for support. But this is irrelevant to the topic. Even most of the tools you use for your daily work as a programmer would still exist if suddenly no one got paid for code anymore.
My point is - code and art is something better if done by someone who cares primarily about them than by someone who cares primarily about the paycheck for them.
Isn't that what we mostly have now? Before the net was commercialized, it was mostly people sharing things they had created or discovered and talking about things that interested them - original content. People would also post interesting scientific papers, books, etc. and discuss them.
Once people decided to monetize the net it filled with spam and duplicated content alongside payperclick ads. People started cranking out 'original content' that isn't very original and doesn't have much content either just to make a few bucks on the ads. Those papers and books that used to be shared became imprisoned behind paywalls. The volume increased a lot, but signal-to-noise ratio dropped significantly.
That's not really an argument to eliminate copyright, but vigilant legions of lawyers were never been needed to produce content, suing people doesn't increase its quality, and the net wouldn't necessarily be a worse place if a lot of that was gone. At least some places are opening up and starting to share educational content.
You have it backwards friend. Once people decided you could make money off the internet, innovations came at a breakneck pace. It was the money that fueled web growth. See: the previous internet bubble. As long as you can make money from the internet, there will always be innovation & content. Once that money disappears, so does the innovation since there's no need to innovate since there's nothing in it for people.
Sure, an image might be watermarked, but if someone plays a song without a license do you expect each recording to include a copyright statement before the music?
If you remove penalties for copying then what would stop a private gallery from showing your photography and charging admission? All you get is attribution note, not a cut. Likewise, anyone could use your music on any commercial, radio station, movie without royalties.
What's the damage?
> if someone plays a song without a license do you expect each recording to include a copyright statement before the music
Even if you play live on the street you can have flyers that state who composed music, who wrote text, who are you trying to imitate.
> If you remove penalties for copying then what would stop a private gallery from showing your photography and charging admission?
Nothing. And that's bad because...?
> All you get is attribution note, not a cut.
Great. That means if somebody likes my work he comes to me for more.
> Likewise, anyone could use your music on any commercial, radio station, movie without royalties.
Sure. Again. I'd very much liked my music or whatever used in Hollywood movie or commercial or whatever without even if I can't get a penny for that if they will display or say my name and website address each time it's seen or heard by people.
What needs changing isn't abolishing copyright, but making it less draconian and returning to the original principle: a monopoly for a limited time (not an infinite one), perhaps ten or twenty years, or varying by field.
And technical solutions to actual political problems have worked great. The recent revamping of government websites has made information more accessible to the public than ever. I can't imagine Obamacare holding much value if it wasn't possible to make healthcare.gov so people could actually navigate through the complexities.
wait...what?
politics are everywhere: at home, at the office, in your local bowling league. it doesn't apply exclusively to government.
I guess my point is - there is a pretty big demand to protect images online. I suspect DRM will end up being implement in some form or another.
Because I and many people would do just that. Sure, the DRM might work for my grandparents and a few other non-techies but over time I can teach my grandparents how to screenshot an image and others would catch on. People would even make chrome apps to "click a picture and resave it in a shareable format".
I'm not sure what this DRM would solve, if anything, other than pissing off users and giving photographers and other digital-sharing artists a false sense of security.
I'm not convinced he analogue hole won't ever be plugged.
The analogue holes for visual media are the two holes in your skull where your eyeballs sit. The analogue hole won't be plugged until you can implement a secure path into the human brain.
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/UnNews:RIAA_CEO_discusses...
(Probably needs a trigger warning in this day and age.)
I don't think such a scenario is likely, because it requires far too much cooperation between hardware manufacturers, but it is possible. The move to mobile makes this scenario much more plausible than it was a year ago.
The "fix" for this with video was mandating a new "secure path* signal protocol which rendered all existing HDTVs and receivers and related equipment obsolete.
This is happening again right now with 4k for those who wonder. Yay.
Oh. And the OS would need to enforce the secure signal path thing at kernel level, with GPU drivers having to support this.
Pretty much a crazy amount of work to prevent piracy for everyone involved, except those who want their content "protected". And it still doesn't work. So all that effort was utterly wasted.
But yay, let's repeat it!
> I'm not sure what this DRM would solve, if anything, other than pissing off users and giving photographers and other digital-sharing artists a false sense of security
You pretty much just described all DRM. I don't see how this is different on any philosophical level.
http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2013/08/thoughts-on-i...
Not undefeatable, of course.
/spitballing
In fact, for it to work at all, it'll have to be implemented in hardware or hardware-equivalent software (i.e. not in Firefox or anything where you can dump RAM or modify the software).
Some will call it undemocratic and thus bad, but I say it sometimes is the only way to restore sanity.
To quote one of my favourite lines of Nick Fury, "I recognize that the Council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid ass decision, I have elected to ignore it."
With file formats however, it's only software. Add supports to mainstream browers and operating systems and you've got a fully functional new format. Look how quickly webm came into existence.
JPEG is an oldy, but support for a new format that does all JPEG does is certainly possible, and it would slowly win out. Much like how png killed gif (until social media brought it roaring back... egh).
If the standard is kept secret, by maybe charging a tidy sum for it, and getting all buyers to sign an NDA in blood, we'll all have fewer implementations of FJPEG viewers. There would probably be no "open source" implementations of FJPEG. We would all loose, as the market for FJPEG viewers has barriers to entry, and therefore would serve buyers poorly. That's standard, Free Market economics.
If FJPEG viewers have to contain some secret (an algorithm or a key both come to mind as things that have happened in the past) the same sorts of things happen - barriers to entry to sell in the market, higher costs, fewer options to consumers.
Of course the 3rd option is to legally mandate some kind of overall DRM at the operating system level, which would have much the same effects, except that we'd have a narrow choice of Windows or Mac OS, with maybe a larger choice of FJPEG viewers.
All of these options should be repugnant to Free Market believers such as myself. I predict the Republican Congress will laugh this out the door.
But yeah, basically no one is going to use this ever.
Otherwise, as an example, Firefox wouldn't be able to decode these images without some plugin. And that plugin would be just as subject to key-dumping.
However, several other options exist:
* Needing to contact an external server to view an image (of course, you could always take the opportunity to save the now-viewable image then share it)
* Charging a large fee / legal contracts for the information on how to decode (security through obscurity)
* Making circumvention illegal and enforcing this with fines or jail time. This is probably the only option that "actually works" as you've turned the technical problem into a social problem. People would still break it, but you could simply arrest them if they try to help others do the same.
Not if you are running a skylake CPU with the new SGX instructions that encrypt RAM.
https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/09/26/protecting...
6, Enable software vendors to deliver trusted applications and updates
8. Enable applications to define secure regions of code and data that
maintain confidentiality even when an attacker has physical control
of the platform and can conduct direct attacks on memory.
Firefox already caved and ships the EME plugin, so obviously they would cave to an image-DRM plugin as well.
/* this is why it's so incre4dibly important to take a hard-line stance against DRM; it's a lot harder to reverse course once you cave and start accepting some DRM */
I agree that they may expand it (MS's waste of engineers during the Vista period in their rush to provide Protected Media Path comes to mind.)
But I'm also saying that web comics could do this today. But I'm guessing that they don't want to sacrifice the UI of just loading images.
http://www.jpeg.org/items/20150910_privacy_security_summary....
Drm is not going to help after buyer redistribute the purchased work in any way, especially if there is a medium conversion involved - i.e. printed issue.