[A2k] Kiss goodbye to your DRM-protected Google Video clips

[Michelle Childs]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/16/
guardianweeklytechnologysection.it

Kiss goodbye to your DRM-protected Google Video clips

Closure of service leaves a cloud over the future of copy-protected
video files and leaves users with unplayable content

     * Charles Arthur
     * The Guardian
     * Thursday August 16 2007

CSI Miami

People who bought shows such as CSI: Miami from Google Video will not
be able to watch them any more.

Google handed opponents of digital rights management (DRM) a huge
weapon this week when it announced that DRM-protected videos bought
from its online video store will no longer work, and that customers
will not be reimbursed.

"After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your
purchased or rented videos," the company said in an email sent to
customers who had bought items such as NBA basketball games or TV
shows such as CSI.


The decision follows the resignation in May of the head of Google's
video division, which seems to indicate that the company is
consolidating its previously separate Google Video and YouTube
divisions. Increasingly, internal company videos are being posted to
YouTube, bought just nine months ago, rather than the
video.google.com part of the site, launched in January last year.

But that is no help to those who bought or rented content and who now
find it unplayable. Google is giving them a $2 (=A31) credit for
digital goods - though it stipulates that they must be bought through
services which use its own Google Checkout payment system, and must
be claimed within 60 days.

Analysts agreed that the move could only harm DRM's never-shining
reputation. "We've seen a physical format device combo go out of
manufacture before - wax cylinders, eight-tracks. But can you think
of any consumer-purchased medium that actually becomes unusable while
there are players that still work? Ouch," notes David Card of Jupiter
Research. With that in mind, it would be wise to take precautions, he
suggests: "Everybody, take a deep breath and go out and burn MP3 CDs
of your purchased music."

Michael Gartenberg, another Jupiter analyst, comments that the Google
Video service "wasn't likely to succeed" because the company has no
relationship with companies making video viewers - Google used a
proprietary video DRM which was not compatible with Apple's video
iPod or other portable players. And, he notes, "the choice of content
was all over the place in terms of selection and price".

But the fact that thousands of purchased files will cease working
will give pause to organisations charged with creating public
archives of published information - such as the British Library and,
in the US, the Library of Congress. The latter in particular was
anyway considering whether any redrafting is needed on the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): the idea of offering a loophole to
circumvent DRM on products that no longer work properly was rejected
in its last consideration. Google's decision might lead to a reversal
in thinking.

Obsolete content

Writing on the Guardian Unlimited website, the activist Cory Doctorow
said this week that the DRM business model "is the urinary tract
infection of media experiences: all of the uses that used to come in
an easy gush now come in a mingy, painful dribble - a few pennies out
of your pocket every time you want to watch a show again, hit the
pause button, or rewind"http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/aug/
14/comment.drm

The closure of the service is one of the first examples where bought
content has become obsolete through DRM protection. But many other
video services also use DRM to protect their content - including
Apple's iTunes Store, BitTorrent and Amazon Unbox.

The closure of Google's Video service, even while the company itself
is going from strength to strength, leaves a cloud over the future of
DRM-protected video which can be downloaded but which cannot be
permanently unlocked: if a company shuts that service, will those
films or shows also stop working too? The Google example suggests
they will.

Doctorow is scathing about the implications of this, made possible by
the shift to digital distribution: "These movies can only be watched
where and when they say. This might be 'purchased digital content',
but don't ever mistake it for your property. Like feudal times: lords
get to own property, and everything we serfs have belongs to the lord."

=B7

Michelle Childs
Head of European Affairs
Knowledge Ecology International
michelle.childs@cptech.org