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Don't forget about this abomination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia

"Why has my playback gone silent?"

Film Industry => in about half the time, Sony Entertainment, by far the most aggressive company when it comes to copyrights.

I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world? Ideally I'd like to see reform of copyright law to favour corporate giants a bit less, but given how much of a hand those same giants seem to have in the laws that get written I'm not hopeful of that any time soon.

I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. I'm still a believer at heart that the internet can be a great democratiser of content, that it can bring down the barriers and middlemen between artists and their audience. Art on the internet should be a participatory thing too in my opinion, not the mindless content consumption that the media companies of yesteryear see it as.

> I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged.

In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising).

Which also explains why the studios insist on ridiculously bullshit in terms of DRM - the banks backing these enormous loans want their money back.

With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low and so there is no incentive for studios to invest in DRM, it's simply not worth it any more. The real money for musicians is tour tickets and merch... CD/vinyl sales and streaming income isn't much.

>In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising).

I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time, I've taken far more interest in long-form 'television' (ie streaming series) and independent content creators on YouTube. I know YouTube has deep issues in itself but that's a problem with the platform rather than the medium I think, a much more solvable issue.

>With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low

Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. It's interesting to compare the sitution for film to that of music, the last few years have genuinely been some of my favourite for music as a whole because of exactly this: the low barrier to entry means a lot of truly talented artists can rise organically to prominence and streaming services can tailor their recommendations to the point discoverability is much easier. In comparison a lot of more traditional music offerings sound stale and risk-averse because they have to be in order for the labels to recoup their enormous investments in artist promotion.

>> In the end, people want high quality entertainment

> I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time

I wouldn’t read that as the quality of the movie itself, but the technical quality of the production. You can have movies that are technically great, but that lack a story. But I don’t think we’ll see many more movies that have a good story with low video quality. When you can get a good 4K video from an iPhone, something like “Clerks” isn’t going to work nearly as well as when we had to use physical film and you could only afford to use so much of it.

> Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents.

Meh. Similar to music production, filmmaking itself has become ever more affordable on the technical and on the software side, DaVinci Resolve is available for free (and the Adobe suite for ~60€ a month), and thanks to digitalization distribution is relatively painless too (since you don't have to produce and copy literal reels of physical film, but can ship around Blu-rays or SSDs).

A feature-length film however will always need many hundreds to thousands of hours worth of work for everything from planning over shoots to post-production, there isn't much that can be cut there.

I would say most indie movies should be shot like theatre plays. Focus on acting and telling the story, rather than physically recreating every detail. Thinking about it, they already do that sort of...

Animated video is probably a good middle-ground, where crowdfunded content (e.g. the Blender-funded movies) has been successful. Live-action film is incredibly expensive to create if you're expecting any real quality, and doesn't get much traction when all the costs are made transparent, as with crowdfunding.

> I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world?

It's worth considering there's one tech company that makes its own chips, integrated hardware, operating system, software, and is now also a media studio.

As owners of the content, and the entire tech stack, they don't appear to be opposed to DRM.

Are you talking about Sony or Apple?

increased vertical integration should be taken into account together with market share

because ultimately it destroys competition by holding vantage points to suffocate competition

in this instance, producers of distribution should not be content holders let creative be creative, let supply chains be supply chains etc etc

i guess one can always add a clause, exemption applies below a certain size etc.

And to think that Sony was once on the good side, even going to the Supreme Court to defend the VCR. But once they bought a studio, the Hollywood goons took over.

They were always on their own side, not the "good" one. They defended VCRs because they were a major producer of VHS home equipment, and the ability to record TV shows helped selling said equipment. The fact that they also held the moral high ground is little more than a happy accident.

In general, for corporations of then & now, "being good" only matters as long as it aligns, or at least does not interfere with, their sources of income.

Here's a friendly reminder that Sony put a rootkit on their audio CDs to enforce copyright. They brought the term "rootkit" into public awareness.

Strongly disagree with the quote.

The owner should still have full control and be able to disable DRM support. If that means you can't play certain movies afterwards that is fine, but the control should be there.

Having full control means that you could also partially disable DRM support. Say, perhaps, by enabling the part that determines an encryption key and decrypts the video, but disabling the part that checks whether the video is being sent to a compliant display rather than to an unencrypted file.

You cannot have effective DRM without taking away full control from the user.

Being willing and able to lie for the owner is the ultimate test of ownership.

Of course it would be possible for the application to verify that and disable decryption.

What source of information could the application possibly use to check that? Everything the application does is solely by the will of the system's owner. If the application checks a hardware parameter, the result it receives may have been altered by the system's owner. If the application checks its binary for validity, that binary could have been altered since the program started. If the application computes a checksum of its own memory state, the system's owner can alter that checksum after it has been computed. If the application tries to compute 2+2, it will only receive 4 if the system's owner allows it.

This is the true definition of the system's owner. The system's owner is whoever must be trusted in order to trust computations on that system. If the application doesn't trust the person who bought the computer, but still wishes to trust computations done on the system, the only solution is to change the system's owner. That is why DRM must either be utterly useless, because I still own my computer and can do as I will on it, or utterly tyrannical, because it asserts ownership over something that I have purchased.

Easy, the check that requires it to be sent to a compliant display is dependent on the decrypt functionality (or the other way around).

This is only hard if you try to make it hard.

It's only hard if an adversarial relationship is making it hard, which is exactly the case for DRM implementations. If you're writing code that runs in a trusted environment, then it is as simple as enabling decryption conditional on checking the display. That's only appears because trusted environments are nice simple places where code, file checks, system calls, CPU instructions, and all the other niceties work as intended.

If you're interested, the original forum post (2018) is here: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-me...

I totally agree with you, for what it is worth.

That quote is amazing. An AMD engineer publicly stating that our machines are owned.

It doesn't make sense though, unless Intel is replacing its SGX feature by a similar one (that new Microsoft chip ??).

Also I don't think that this has an effect on Intel's Management Engine ?

BTW, older AMD CPUs (of the Bulldozer line) are still performant enough, and don't come with a likely backdoor in the form of IME / AMD PSP.

P.S.: It does really suck the effect that this has on GPU's openness... (and so performance for very specific use cases)

IMHO blaming the film industry is a bit much. Intel has the ME since some time and coupled with secure boot is a MPAA or RIAA manager's wet dream.

"Film industry" stands here for "Hollywood" ?

And isn't the IME only a few decades old ?

(Of course Microsoft with its "trusted computing" and the NSA with its job to backdoor everything that can be likely had a hand in that too...)