Media Reports
Content Protectionism Continues
By Barry Fox
If you aren’t already doing so, spare a moment to give thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco and the spunky new breed of University Computer Science Departments
around the world. They are doing more to protect our listening and viewing rights than all the industry trade bodies put together.
The EFF recently blew the whistle on plans to build Digital Rights Management “broadcast flags” into the DVB digital TV system used throughout Europe (and most other countries
except the US and Japan). Flagging gives music and movie studios the chance to make us pay to enjoy supposedly free broadcasts.
The broadcast flag idea was born in Hollywood, taken up by the FCC, and temporarily rejected for use in the US. If Hollywood can get flagging adopted by DVB, it will be easier to try again
for the US. EFF discovered that the DVB team in Switzerland has been meeting secretly with the US flag lobby.
“DVB members’ active indifference, even hostility, to user rights is shameful,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. “When American studios ask for regulatory
support for restrictions pushed through the DVB Project, public officials must stand up for consumer rights, sustain competition and innovation, and tell Hollywood to back off.”
I tried to ask the European Broadcasting Union, which controls DVB, for comment. My e-mail, to the contact address given on the EBU’s website, was returned as undeliverable.
Which does not say much for the EBU’s policy on open access and transparency.
It was Professor Edward Felten’s Computer Science Department at Princeton, N.J., that blew the Secure Digital Music Initiative copy protection system out of the water by showing that
all the supposedly secure SDMI watermarks could be detected and hacked. Princeton then stood firm against clumsy legal threats from the US record industry. The power of the Internet left
everyone aware of the Recording Industry Association of America’s bully boy tactics. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of people.
More recently Felten’s Freedom to Tinker blog has been exposing the weaknesses of the AACS system used by both Blu-ray and HD-DVD to protect their work. However, the Internet is already
awash with the supposedly secret keys used to protect HDTV movies.
“There are economies of scale in key extraction,” says Felten. “Having extracted the keys for a few discs, the engineer will learn how and where the keys can be found and
will have a much easier time extracting keys from other discs. Eventually, the extraction might be automated.”
Suddenly, after a year of refusing to answer questions, the AACS Licensing Authority has wheeled out spokesmen to assure that AACS is “renewable” so any hack hole can be plugged
by changing the way players work. This is done by burying update codes on movie discs that people buy or rent.
Whether this has any nasty side effects on un-hacked players and discs remains to be seen.
The hackers are already one step ahead.
“Once he (the engineer hacker) has device keys,” says Felten, “he could in principle publish a program containing them, thereby allowing everybody to decrypt discs. The
AACS central authority will then learn which device keys he is using and blacklist those keys” so the engineer, if he is clever, won’t necessarily publish everything he knows. “This
leads to an interesting strategic game.”
A DIFFERENT VIEW
In New Zealand Peter Gutmann of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland has been looking at Microsoft’s new Vista Windows system, which is supposed to turn
a PC into an all-round HDTV and super hi-fi music center.
Gutmann balanced Vista’s claimed user-benefits against the collateral damage done by DRM, HDTV content protection, HDMI/HDCP connectivity, revocation of insecure drivers, invalidation
of Windows if hardware is changed to cope with revoked drivers, and the drain on CPU performance that comes from handling all the new content protection complexity.
“The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history,” he concludes.
HDMI is coming, whether we like it or not. As the name tells, the High Definition Multimedia Interface started life as a connecting lead for computer video, or a sort of “Digital Scart,” but
is fast becoming the next standard for high quality AV.
On the face of things the idea of a single cable carrying digital audio and video sounds like a winner. The downside is that HDMI is now tied to HDCP, the High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection
system which Hollywood uses to stop people copying HD pictures and sound on their way from a player to screen and speakers. It’s only a question of time before some bright spark in
a record company comes up with the idea of using HDCP to protect music.
HDCP relies on digital handshakes between the equipment at each end of the wire, essentially reassuring a player that it is not sending signals to a digital recorder or Internet device. If
the HDCP handshakes do not complete successfully, or fast enough, the HDMI connection shuts down completely.
This is what happened with Pioneer screens and Sky HDTV receivers made by Thomson. Pioneer has had to offer free modifications to its HD screens. There can also be problems if the cable is
of poor quality, or damaged, or carrying too fast a bitstream over too long a distance. The possibilities for cockup are endless.
HDMI was developed by Hitachi, Matsushita/Panasonic, Philips, Sony, Thomson, Toshiba, and a chipmaker called Silicon Image in which Intel originally invested. The first Version 1.0 specification
for HDMI was set in December 2002 and current Version 1.3 in June 2006. HDMI is licensed by a company called HDMI Licensing.
HDCP is an encryption system for use with HDMI which was developed by Intel with support from Hollywood. The specification for HDCP was set in June 2003. HDCP must be separately licensed
from Intel. Most HDMI connections now use HDCP.
But although Silicon Image set up a company called Simplay Labs to test HDMI equipment to the HDMI standard, there has been no clear strategy on testing equipment for end to end compatibility.
In the US things got so bad that retail chain Best Buy said it would stop stocking HDMI/HDCP products unless they come with a guarantee of compatibility. In January 2007 this finally kicked
HDMI Licensing into making HDCP testing mandatory. The Simplay HD Testing Program is administered from Sunnyvale, with additional test sites in Shenzhen and Shanghai, China. Allegedly there
is also a facility in London but Simplay neglects to say where.
With more and more AV equipment now using HDMI, it sounds like good sense to buy equipment with as many HDMI sockets as possible.
But when I asked Meridian about the absence of HDMI sockets on a new AV product, the answer I got was interesting.
“There are no HDMI inputs for external sources, such as a Sky HD box . . . we want to keep as much HDMI stuff as possible well away from the audio circuits (because) we’re obsessive
about sound quality!”
Instead, Meridian sells an external HDMI switcher, the HDMax 421, which has four HDMI inputs and one HDMI output, and connects to Meridian equipment via a dedicated “Meridian Comms” socket.
When inputs are switched on the product the external HDMI switcher works seamlessly alongside it.
Meridian then clammed up and refused to say more.
So I asked the HDMI Licensing Organisation if it had any comment to make on the risk of interference to audio from HDMI switching.
Says Joseph Lee, HDMI Evangelist: “That is a partially valid comment, but HDMI uses a very low voltage, differential signal method. The combination of these characteristics will tend
to significantly minimize the amount of signal noise that HDMI electronics will impart on high-end audio electronics, such as an audio DAC. When not used, the HDMI signal is completely nonexistent,
and all the associated electronics can be fully powered off to fully eliminate any possible interference.”
So if you thought that the migration from analog cable to digital HDMI would put an end to the debate on whether there really are chalk-and-cheese differences to be heard from high-priced
wires, think again.
It’s true that if an HDMI cable does not handshake the effect is plain as a pikestaff; no sound and no pictures. But HDMI evangelist talk of “tending to significantly minimize” analog
artifacts hands the cable companies a golden opportunity to generate a whole new vocabulary of vague claims for high-end audio interconnection.
How long, I wonder, before we have high-cost unidirectional HDMI cables?
NO THANKS
It was a brave move for Scottish hi-fi and record company Linn to put its music catalog online, with no Digital Rights Management. If you go online to the Linn music store and pay to download
an SACD quality PCM recording, you can in theory listen on the move from an SD card. Because there is no DRM you can freely shunt the music between home PCs and portables.
Whether there is any benefit in listening to SACD on a pocket player is beside the point. Once it is possible to do something, someone will find a reason to do it.
You can thank Microsoft and Apple for Linn’s decision to say No to DRM. The two computer giants control the only two DRM standards on offer, now that Sony’s SonicStage MagicGate
is little more than a very unhappy memory.
Apple won’t offer iTunes Fairplay DRM to third-party users such as Linn; if a third party uses Microsoft Windows Media DRM the third party is supposed to ensure that customers’ computers
are compliant.
UK satellite service BSkyB uses Microsoft DRM for its movie download service and had to shut down for a month when hackers broke the Microsoft system. When the Sky service started up again
users had to download updated software from Microsoft. This generated an error message Code 5 on my PC saying the entire DRM folder was corrupted, and gave a Sky Help Line number. Sky Help
said it was “a Microsoft problem” and gave a link to the Microsoft website, which gave gobbledygook instructions.
With the help of Sky’s backroom experts I got it working again, but only by deleting the entire DRM folder, with no chance to make a backup. So I would have lost any music or movie
downloads made using Microsoft DRM. Luckily I have never bought anything that is protected with Microsoft DRM and very wisely Sky gives downloads away for free to anyone who has a satellite
subscription. So nobody can complain and ask for his/her money back.
My bet is that Sky is buying time to learn from Microsoft’s mistakes, before launching a real consumer system using its own DRM.
But it’s all cuckoo anyway. However tough and clever the DRM may be, it is by definition “digital” and cannot stop people backing up DRM’d music to CD-R and then ripping
it back into the PC, or copying from an analog audio output, or copying the unprotected analog video connection for a computer screen.
Some PCs come with the necessary connectors already built-in; others need only an inexpensive PC-to-TV converter which can be bought off-the-shelf. Sale of these converters cannot be stopped
because they have legitimate uses.
The latest version of Roxio’s Easy Creator software is designed to copy streaming radio direct to PC hard disc. Software to defeat Fairplay in the same way is readily available.
Significantly, music giant EMI has now followed Linn’s lead and made all its music on iTunes available without DRM. M3
Barry Fox reports on the audio industry as columnist for the British publication Hi-Fi News. His commentary appears in every issue of Multi Media Manufacturer.