[Matroska-cvs] [www] r1055 - in trunk/www.matroska.org/data/technical: . drm

Tue Apr 4 11:44:02 CEST 2006

Author: robux4
Date: 2006-04-04 13:43:53 +0400 (Tue, 04 Apr 2006)
New Revision: 1055

Added:
   trunk/www.matroska.org/data/technical/drm/
   trunk/www.matroska.org/data/technical/drm/index.html
Log:
add initial DRM manifesto

Added: trunk/www.matroska.org/data/technical/drm/index.html
===================================================================

--- trunk/www.matroska.org/data/technical/drm/index.html	2006-04-01 06:04:45 UTC (rev 1054)
+++ trunk/www.matroska.org/data/technical/drm/index.html	2006-04-04 09:43:53 UTC (rev 1055)
@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
+<!--#set var="docroot" value="../../" --><!--#set var="xhtml" value="valid" -->
+<html>
+<head>
+<title>Matroska - DRM manifesto</title>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
+<meta name="Description" content="Matroska DRM manifesto"/>
+<meta name="Keywords" content="Matroska, DRM, manifesto, CoreCodec, Janus, FairPlay, open source"/>
+<!--#include virtual="/include/stylesheet-main.html" -->
+</head>
+<body>
+
+<div id="displayedpage">
+
+<!--#include virtual="/include/page-head.html" -->
+
+<h2 id="pagetitle">Matroska DRM Manifesto</h2>
+
+
+<div id="content">
+<h3>Introduction to Digital Rights Management</h3>
+<p>For a lot of people DRM means that big companies want to take control of what/when/how they watch copyrighted content. DRM is associated with spyware, restrictions and even rootkits.</p>
+<p>Most of the time, the restrictions put on the user are considered as unfair and strongly limitating the use of this legally aquired content.</p>
+<p>The most common implementations of DRM are FairPlay (Apple iTunes/iPod) and Microsoft Janus (PlayForSure). The CSS protection of DVDs is also a DRM. DivX, RealNetworks and others also offer some kind of DRM.</p>
+<p>On the exception of Apple FairPlay, all of them can be licensed for use in a product. But for some reason, there is no way to transfer content from one format to the other. And that's what is the most frustrating with DRMs. Although they apply on digital content, moving/copying/selling/lending content is impossible.</p>
+<p>AACS, a new guideline for DRMs, will change that in the future with the introduction of Managed Copy. As the name suggest, that means that you'll be able to copy DRMed content to another device as long as it doesn't alter the DRM rights given to the user.</p>
+<p>While this initiative is a very good idea, there is no guarantee that technology companies and distributors will enable this feature any time soon. They probably prefer to lock the market as much as possible and fight for the biggest share, as they have proved so far. Meanwhile, users will still struggle to get the freedom promised by digital technology.</p>
+<p>On the other corner there is open source development that, by its nature, can't provide guarantees to copyright holders that their creation cannot be un-DRM-ed and copied a zillion times with a minimal change in the code.</p>
+<p><a href="http://www.corecodec.com/">CoreCodec</a> and the <a href="http://www.matroska.org/">Matroska</a> team have decided that there should be an (more) open alternative to the existing solutions. Opening as much as possible the specifications and the code. Hopefully, only the keys to authenticate the content and the user won't be public. This is also the solution proposed by Linus Torvalds to enable DRM in the Linux kernel, the keys being provided by the Linux distribution (Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, etc). That means that recompiled code by a user wouldn't contain these keys and so wouldn't be able to play protected content.</p>
+<p>While we could debate for days, months, years if the content should be free or not, it seems that the general consensus is that digital content should:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>be easy to copy/move</li>
+<li>be cheap (distribution and physical cost are considerably reduced)</li>
+<li>make it hard (if not impossible) to have large scale piracy (by removing the DRM)</li>
+</ul>
+<p>So our goal is basically to meet all these critera.</p>
+</div>
+<!--#include virtual="/include/page-tail.html" -->
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>

