New Sony "rootkit" RF DRM ???

jrazz wrote on 8/24/2006, 10:44 AM
Sony filed for a patent to yet again aide in their ever-ongoing battle to protect their rights and infringe on their paying customer's rights. This time it includes a radio frequency device that is to be embedded in their media- such as cd's, dvd's and/or BluRay etc. This device, according to the patent, would interact with the player/burner to keep track of how many times the disc has been copied. Once the quota has been reached, the RF device will no longer allow for any more copies to be made. I read this last night in New Scientist Magazine. Again, this is a patent they filed for and not something that they are putting in products now and they might not ever, but they did file for rights to the technology.

Why bother? Why invest the money and time and deal with the bad publicity? If someone wants to copy their disc, all they have to do is burn it to another disc that is not outfitted with the implanted RF device and make copies from that one, or save it to hard drive and make copies from that. Those who want legitimate back up copies will be the ones who are made to put up with the hassle, while the ones who are purposely trying to circumvent copy protection for ilicit purposes will succeed yet again.

I wonder who is on the panel for Sony that comes up with this stuff?

j razz

Comments

richard-courtney wrote on 8/24/2006, 12:07 PM
The manufacturers of the drive or player also have to go along
with reading an rf device. One way to boost your sale of a product
is not to include the reader.

I guess they could provide an encryption key in the disc and by
not reading the chip you don't know the correct key. But then that
would require all content providers to use the same method and
pay the patent fee to Sony. To avoid the cost the content provider
could use the fact they don't use the technology and boost the sale
of their content.

Why bother? It makes your product unattractive to the general
public. Put the retail price so it is more attractive to purchase than
the hassle of duplicating it.
Jay-Hancock wrote on 8/24/2006, 12:16 PM
Microsoft is doing a scheme of their own with their "GenuineCheck.exe" program that denies access to various downloads and add-ons (like the WindowsDefender and the Windows Media Player 11 programs). If it thinks you have a legitimate copy of WIndows it lets the product installation happen.

Speculation: maybe they'll work with software vendors to hook into this technology by offering some sort of API. That way software vendors can reduce piracy of their wares in exchange for not letting their software install on unvalidated Windows devices.

This technology could be good in principal, as long as it really works. But if it causes problems it can backfire. I have a Windows XP x64 system at home and the GenuineCheck.exe crashes and won't let me install their Windows Defender app. I called Microsoft and they put me through some time-consuming hurdles which I haven't bothered to finish with.

They are planning to really make this big in Windows Vista. Hopefully it won't become an impediment to applying security patches, otherwise their could be more worm and virus infected machines on the Internet.
GlennChan wrote on 8/24/2006, 6:02 PM
Filing the patent helps protects them against patent lawsuits ("submarine patents"). Blackberry is an example of patent lawsuits being very, very expensive for the company being sued (they paid hundreds of millions in a settlement).

And the company suing them isn't even using their patents or selling products, which IMO defeats the point of the patent system (to encourage innovation).