Posts by Paul Campbell
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Yeah I was going to make the same point - it's a "no fault" scheme - that means you get ACC no matter who was at fault and no matter whether they have money or not - in the US you only get it if the other guy actually has money, and after your lawyer has taken his cut - it used to be that way here too - I can remember when as a kid people would think twice about giving friends a ride in their car
What AFCO have done is a deal with ACC saying "we think it can be done cheaper" and offered to provide what ACC would provide at what they thought would be a lower cost to them - like all insurance it's a risk, a bet against the world - and they lost - they were possibly stupid to make the bet and unlucky
It could as easily have been a runaway car slamming into the parking lot - being a drive by shooting, a deliberate act, just muddies theissue - ACC pays out no matter what the cause
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I actually implement DRM for a living - I don't design it though - largely because the people who do that are VERY secretive - it does mean I know where a lot of the bodies are buried. I build US cable TV settop boxes (kind of like the Sky box that sits under your TV) - I know how all this stuff works - all the secrets - but I honestly don't know how to steal cable without paying
The basic problems with the sort of stuff you want to deal with in your DRM don't have to do with the crypto - how you securely pass stuff from one place to the other (that little lock in the bottom corner of your browser) or how do you validate your identity or that of the person you're doing business with - you can easily assign devices unique ids and reliably pass them around and verify them - that stuff is easy, safe and reliable
The real problem is one of keeping secrets - more importantly you need to be able to have one person to be able force another person to keep a secret - that's hard ....
In your DRM's world the music manufacturer needs to be able to force their customer to not share their unique ID that enables their music with their friends - that ID is just a bunch of bits - it can be shared just like music - the obvious solution is to put the secret in a box - but you have to take the secret out of the box to use it - it's vulnerable then - you could hide the secret (that's how DVDs work) but people who look hard enough will find it - you could keep the key to the box somewhere safe - but it would just be another box, or a chain of boxes and keys -
In the case of your Sky box the key is embedded in that card you plug in and Sky depends on the fact that you can't get inside it to read it out because it's silicon - they can do that because they own both the box/card and the place that makes them - it's also why Sky wont let you buy your own (better!) decoder from a 3rd party (like the company I work for) or build your own (like MythTV)
In the PC world a 'trusted boot chain' means that the key to the first box is hidden somewhere in the hardware and all the software loaded from that point is validated by the software above it
The results tend to be difficult to use and unwieldly (these days we call that 'Vista' - and this is one reason it's sometimes painfully slow) - it also means that people who want to make their own software (who like me use Linux for example) are frozen out of the first key won't unlock anything other than a MS OS, of if when it does it locks the rest of the keys away - it means I can buy hardware that belongs to me - but be locked out of part of it by some 3rd party who wants to force me to keep secrets
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yeah but that's not true competition - Universal or whoever are allowed to choose the wholesale price of a particular CD - JB, RG et al all have to pay that same price in NZ - there's no way a lower priced wholesaler can come in and undercut them because they have a legal monopoly
On the other hand they can charge a different price in another wholesale market (like the US) - that sort of setup gives us $9 CDs in the US and $30 ones in NZ - it's the same thing that leads to other evils like DVD region coding so you can protect those market differentials against gray marketting
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well I don't think a universal fabber is that close - I've been around the industry long enough to both appreciate the growth curve and to understand the potential issues - but I do think it's going to be real and about a generation or so away
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then I suggest you come up with a scheme that penalizes the people who steal stuff but which doesn't crap on those who don't - remember most of us are honest law-abiding people who want to pay for and use music sensibly (I spent 1/2 an hour yesterday explaining to my daughter why we weren't going to have limewire in our house) - spend your energy catching the people who are breaking the law
however this is just the first battle in something much much bigger - something that may result in the eventual downfall of capitalism - for the moment forget about music being bits - things are just stuff and bits - atoms and information about how to put them together 9a design). You can see the beginning of it - local guys Ponoko are an example - you send them the bits, they send you back wood (sort of the first step to an instant Ikea) - DIY fabbers mean you can take bits and some raw plastic feed stock and you can make arbitrary plastic stuff - at work we use a commercial fabber (basically a 3D inkjet printer) to create models of TV remotes to see how they feel in your hand - you can buy one for 50-100k - the local Polytech has one and rents it out - it can actually make stuff you can't make any other way
I've worked designing chips on and off for the past 20 years and watched the technology curve - these days we're building stuff in the order of 100s of atoms in width in 2D - I think we're at the start of a similar curve for 3D stuff - we'll be using this generation of fabbers to build the next one that can make smaller stuff
50-100 odd years from now we'll all have a box in our house that makes stuff, we'll feed in raw material in the top, some energy, download a design from the 'net and things will come out - arbitrary things, anything - the cost of things will depend on the cost of the atoms, the cost to move them around and (maybe) the cost of the design - want a cool couch - down load it and next day it will come out of the household fabber - or milk or a plant or the Mona Lisa - or stuff you can't make today - diamond windows from coal? don't like it? feed it back in the box, pulling something apart is really just the same problem (keep the kids away!)
people who make and sell things will be going the way the music industry is today - people who design things will be in the situation musicians are today ..... what will money mean? certainly physical notes will be meaningless/useless - if things don't have value how will the economy work? will it need to work - if no one has to work anyway does it need to?
I think people who make bits (musicians, artists, designers, etc etc) will be the people we look up to and that currency of fame may be all we have left
the world's going to change in big ways and the issues we're talking about here today are just the beginning of issues that will echo all through our society
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one thing to remember is that the current system is one of monopoly, a monopoly protected by the entrenched music industry and copyright law - there's no price competition at the basest level - you don't see multiple versions of the Stone's latest CD from different vendors all competing on price at the record store in the same way you might see paint at the hardware store - it leaves us (the consumers) open to abuse - it's the real reason I can buy CDs for $9 in the US and $30 here
On the other hand we now have iTunes and Amazon (and others) facing each other down for online sales - that can only be good for us the consumer.
I would argue that DRM is not a global issue, it's largely an American issue because the US (and maybe Japanese) based parts of the music companies have thought they could make a deal with the hardware manufacturers(mainly M$) to build hardware that would plug up all the gaps and make perfect DRM - consumers weren't part of this loop - there are enough geeks around now that reliably plugging all those holes just isn't likely (we'll see about blu-ray/HD maybe they'll pull that one off)
The real problem is that any genuine DRM is subvertable by pirates who want to spend enough money - and it just takes one guy to take one copy - people spend all this time closing the "analog hole" - for example on the video side we now have encrypted data all the way thru the cable to the LCD screen - but I'm an electronic engineer - I know I can choose the highest quality TV I can find, take the back off the LCD, drop some hardware on those wires that drive the LCD panel and record some nice HD in the clear and recompress it into as good a stream as it caame from - tomorrow it will be on Pirate Bay or selling on $1 DVDs in Bangkok and Mumbai (with carefull analog design I can do the same on a high-end audio system)
So if you can't stop the guy you really want to stop with ANY crypto system (notice I didn't mention crypto here at all) but you're going to go out of your way to shit on your normal customer - it's not good business, you don't get any money from the pirate, you do from me
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But that's where many of the bands you just quoted came from - part time musicians playing in noisy run-down pubs - I lived in Dunedin in the late 70s to mid 80's - I remember where those bands started playing - I even remember Chris Knox in a booze barn (maybe the Gardens?) watching some led zep wannabe proclaim "even I can do better than this" - The Enemy and Toy Love were IMHO 100 times better live at the Cook than anything that was ever recorded.
In the day every pub that wanted to get people under 30 in had to have live music - but bands only played 3 nights a week, not enough to make a living - unless you went on the road and did the nation-wide pub circuit - and no one could do that for too long without burning out
remember that much of that wonderfull spurt in the NZ music industry was supposedly created by the acquisition of a single 4-track tape and avoiding the existing music industry - hardware primitive in comparison to what my friend carries around the world
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BTW one thing I think that may go away is the industry made mega-star - Britney isn't going to happen (but Hannah Montana or the Monkees might because of the TV tie-in) - instead we're going to see lots of great little bands - fewer big stadium tours, more pubs/raves/etc
Personally I don't think this will be a bad thing - musicians with dreams of making millions might feel otherwise
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well whenever I visit my musician friend's home I see him using some small box with a hard drive and a CD burner in it - he records into it and overdubs to his heart's content (well actually he complains about running out of disk space and some 64 channel limitation or something) - he even carried it to Mali and recorded stuff playing with people there - mixed some of it on the plane on the way home
The first stuff he made was crap, now he's turning out what to me (probably untutored) ear sounds as good as anything I've heard elsewhere
It's also turned him for just being a musician into also being a composer - he's written 100+ songs since he bought it
That sort of stuff that used to be recording studio you had to spend 1000s of dollars to use now sits in his living room perched on top of the stereo. Sure sometimes he has to do retakes because the neighbour's dog is barking but his production costs for great sounding music is an order of magnitude less
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well many years ago (in the US and Oz) the radio stations thought they'd figured this out - they would sell people radio sets that only received 1 station - no tuning knob .... it didn't last - people like to control the things the own and choose to use them their own ways - I don't want a player for Sony with their crypto keys in it, another from Apple, another from Microsoft
I do think the music biz has to change - there's an awefull lot of fat in it (how come I pay NZ$30 for a CD in Real Groovy in NZ and US$9 for the same CD in Rasputins in the US - the NZ$ is running at 1.25 the US$ - it ought to be close to NZ$11.25 it doesn't cost $19 to ship it from the US)
These days you can make a great recording in your living room if you know how, and more and more people do - the recording engineer priesthood is going the way of the people who used to look after mainframes - and as a musician you are going to be competing against the guy down the road who does has close to 0 distribution cost (his customers pay for the half the cost of the downloads themselves) - he may not have your advertising budget but he doesn't have to pay for your recording company either, nor the stores nor the warehouses, pressing plants, etc etc - as I said the economics are changing
What I do worry about is movies - you can't make them cheaply in your garage - they are different beasts - I think that M$'s DRM is more focused on this (and in fact this is the crypto end of the biz that I sort of work in) - really widespread piracy can gut the 2nd/3rd tier parts of this biz - the answer I think will eventually be more focus on getting money out of the theatrical releases and PPV/VOD (when the movie companies still have control of the bits) - we'll see more public theatres rather than fewer