DRM for digital, but what about physical?

[Simy]

I actually have an idea for DRM, first problem is physical medium
(which I'm not sure about now), and the other is through digital
delivery. For the second one a unique number in the bios, or elsewhere
on the computer that is not able to be changed can acomplish this!
lshw comes up with a serial number for my mother board, I dont know if
that can be changed or not, but if it cant, we can use that as a box
ID. We may use that as a way to see who is who, and who owns what,
provided they get things via the internet, or other digital means.
Then if a main board breaks, we can setup a way to transfer the
account from one to the other, they could use an online webpage, or
contact customer service.

Now downloading games by nature assumes you are online and have a
connection, but not everybody does! Those who don't would be sure to
buy physical disks for games and such on the system.

Physical mediums present a problem however, as if we have a propritary
code written to keep games safe, and anybody can use that (to release
games) then anybody could use that to burn their own medium, and make
it playable, defeating the idea entirely. If we dictate who gets it,
we still cant be sure it wont be used in that way, and we are also
controlling who can release what. If we have the company do it itself
and somehow sombody with authority gets greedy it will get more and
more expensive to buy games and it may cost the game companies too
much to release anything, espically those who are writing their own
games themselves. (which is one of my fears/problems with most
systems)

Games should be able to be given from one person to another, just like
with all current consoles, assuming it is in some kind of physical
form, medium.

[Per Ekström]

These are just personal opinions from a man living in a country where
illegal filesharing is as common as liquor, so I may be a bit biased,
but... Please. No DRM.

Why? IMO DRM is simply counterproductive. There are two ways to defeat
piracy; either you sell something good at a decent price, making
customers *willing* to pay for it... Or you lock it down with DRM,
*forcing* your customers to buy it. Locking it down with DRM means
quite a few customers will get pissed off at you. And you have to come
up with new DRM schemes all the time in order to defeat the pirates.

Is it really worth spending a whole lot of money inventing new DRM
schemes and pissing off your customers when that same money could be
spent on marketing or hiring a bunch of beta testers to make sure your
games are worth buying instead?

Lastly, XKCD does a very good job of explaining what DRM leads to:
http://xkcd.com/488/

[Simy]

DRM should be there for those companies who refuse to release games
without it. They are the larger companies that can provide the bigger
better games faster then most inde's (I hope this is proper usage, new
term to me...)

It should by no means be required, but just think of a disk based
gaming console (play station series, xbox series, recent nintendo's)
you cant play their disk in a compatable PC drive, or in each other
system, only another conosle, and only with that manufactured disk.We
need a method to secure disks so they feel safe.

Eventually we should be able to drop it as they wise up, but I dont
see that happening anytime soon.

Above all else it should NEVER hinder the customer! My Xbox (when it
decides to work) dosnt hinder my ability to play games, I just play.
Yet they feel that they are safe enough with the whatever DRM...


Maybe an encrypted format for disks that is propritary, or would that
be too easy to break?

[Derick Eisenhardt]

Physical disc DRM is much more complex than direct downloads with DRM I'm pretty sure. Basically what you have to do on the likes of the Xbox and such is all of the data on the physical disc has to be signed with a secret key by (in this case Microsoft) that the system will check against when it tries to load it. There is also another key/hash that is put on the first sector of each disc to have the system determine if it will even bother trying to load the disc I think. Then there may even be other layers on top of that.

For right now, at this point in time... I'm just not gonna worry about DRM on the physical discs as 99.9% off the games sold on these systems will be done thru the online download store. So for the moment, if someone wants to use DRM on their discs, if they even want to bother selling them (which I highly doubt will even happen with our marketshare) they'll have to rely on DVD-CSS or BluRay's BD+ systems....which in turn we will have to support...but to be legal we would have to buy/license them from their encryption authorities, thus making it an unncessary expense for us if we dont' think anyone will hardly ever be using it in the first place and definitely have to use proprietary code.

By the time we have enough market share for any big companies like EA or SquareEnix to even notice we exist, physical media will already be dead ;)

- Derick

[Simy]

Well, if we play our cards right, I wouldnt bet on it taking very
long at all....The need is out there, just not quite the awareness
yet... ;)

On Jan 11, 3:46 pm, "Derick Eisenhardt" <derick.eisenha...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Physical disc DRM is much more complex than direct downloads with DRM I'm
> pretty sure. Basically what you have to do on the likes of the Xbox and such
> is all of the data on the physical disc has to be signed with a secret key
> by (in this case Microsoft) that the system will check against when it tries
> to load it. There is also another key/hash that is put on the first sector
> of each disc to have the system determine if it will even bother trying to
> load the disc I think. Then there may even be other layers on top of that.
>
> For right now, at this point in time... I'm just not gonna worry about DRM
> on the physical discs as 99.9% off the games sold on these systems will be
> done thru the online download store. So for the moment, if someone wants to
> use DRM on their discs, if they even want to bother selling them (which I
> highly doubt will even happen with our marketshare) they'll have to rely on
> DVD-CSS or BluRay's BD+ systems....which in turn we will have to
> support...but to be legal we would have to buy/license them from their
> encryption authorities, thus making it an unncessary expense for us if we
> dont' think anyone will hardly ever be using it in the first place and
> definitely have to use proprietary code.
>
> By the time we have enough market share for any big companies like EA or
> SquareEnix to even notice we exist, physical media will already be dead ;)
>
> - Derick
>