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Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

Would this stop me from screenshotting the image, saving it as a .png, and distributing that?

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.

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> Would this stop me from screenshotting the image, saving it as a .png, and distributing that? Because I and many people would do just that.

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.

stuff like intel SGX goes a long way to making something like this possible.

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2013/08/thoughts-on-i...

Ah, but the JPEG displayer would only run on a Trusted system, whose screenshot function honors DRM. You could try to snap a picture of your screen with your digital camera, but the camera manufacturer also embedded DRM inside the camera.

I'm not convinced he analogue hole won't ever be plugged.

> 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.

"Until" being the operative word here. Electronic implants are an active area of development, and it's only a matter of time before media companies see them as a way to further advance DRM protections.

You just reminded me of a properly funny UnNews story from back in the days:

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/UnNews:RIAA_CEO_discusses...

(Probably needs a trigger warning in this day and age.)

Film cameras to the rescue. DRM that, buddy!

Sure, you can use your film camera. Then what do you do with the picture? Scan it? Your new scanner has DRM preventing you to do that. Circumvent the scanner's DRM with a mod chip? The software refuses to display it. Use unofficial software that shows you the image? Your screen refuses to display it. Mod your screen, encrypt the image, share it on a darknet using steganography to disguise your traffic as web surfing. Congrats, dozens of cypherpunks are now able to see the image.

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.

Snail mail prints to my friends. I'm joking of course, but what a horrible future - imagine if a 1984-like government used this tech to completely censor anything deemed against the "Party"?

Perhaps it will use some form of code/time division so that the image is never displayed in full but is displayed in such a way as to exploit human vision idiosyncrasies (persistence of vision, inversion, colour saturation). You flash a couple of different saturated images over a small time period in order to give the impression of the image required, simple screencaps would fail [like how CRT uses the phosphor and the speed of the electron beam scanning to give the impression of a single image; and like rasterisation builds an image in two parts - but instead building it in many parts].

Not undefeatable, of course.

/spitballing

My grandparents take pictures of their monitor and sends them to me. Right click save as is about as foreign as screenshots to them.

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