Mixing open and closed source

[Svartalf]

WHQL... So that's the problem here... WHQL certification does not come without DRM. Bingo!



So it is not the movie industry, Microsoft is the Blocker! and OEMs just do what Mr Gates wants.

Heh... All they did was sell the media industry on DRM like a few other players (looks Sony's way...), making them think they could control all the content, make things more pay for play, and keep people from copying things so that they'll be forced to buy and buy even though the law allows making copies for personal use under many circumstances.

It's not just Bill and Co. It's all the execs at the RIAA member labels and all the execs at the MPAA member studios doing this stuff more than the rest. They're the ones clamoring for it. DRM wouldn't be a big deal if you didn't have them with the pull they seem to have all over the place. DMCA wouldn't be law either.

[bridgman]

Alright then can we just have Crossfire and XvMC support on either of the 3 drivers for now?(And the bugfixes for fglrx AGP HD problems and the rest)

And after that we can discuss DRM stuff with cleaner minds...

That sure seems like the highest priority to me

[djdoo]

@Svartalf:
Hm... So these guys found their saviour for PC industry at Microsoft and Mr Bill... I see no light for now unfortunately.

@bridgman:
I forgot to tell at the previous post about simple XV for my IGP X1250...I really hate to boot into windoze env in order to watch a movie correctly whereas in linux we have a much better and newer video playback architecture than WinXP has. I used to use XvMC with my old GF FX 5200 card for DVDs and quality and performance was truly excellent, although nvidia driver has problems with XvMC if Xine didn't crash you could see big difference between Xv and XvMC.
Much, much lower CPU usage, precise audio-video synchro and even better colours!
And with my new X1250 I cannot even use XV overlay! It's a pity for the hardware man!

Jim

[djdoo]

That sure seems like the highest priority to me

But I am truly happy that you(and I hope AMD too) see the situation from this point of view for present speaking!

[Jake]

Okay, I'll bite. Let's break this down a bit.

DRM is a form of content protection - but for digital, it is no different than Macrovision, CGMSA and so on. Content protection is a technical mean to enforce copyright rights. Hopefully we can all agree on that. Let me repeat. It is a technical means to enforce copyright rights. I will continue to use Content Protection (CP) instead of DRM for clarity.

As a human, we don't like being told that we aren't trusted. We are fundametnally talking about a technical means to enforce copyright rights because the copyright owner doesn't trust us.

Now let's play a game of swap the players nouns and pronouns.

• DRM allows the MPAA to ensure you don't copy movies.
• Technical means of copyright protection allows the copyright owner to ensure you don't violate the copyright owners protected (copyright wise) works.
• The GPL_ONLY flag allows the Kernel Developers to ensure you don't derive from their kernel code.

Now I know people will claim but it's different, both are interpretations from the copyright holders point of view, not the users. Interpretation is just that.

This view is not just mine, here is a good link from LKML.

When we try to dictate what people are doing in the privacy in their home, we're no better than the MPAA or the RIAA.

http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/12/16/131

Play the swap the nouns and pronouns a bit in a lot of the posts in this article, and a surprisingly large number would look quite bad from the kernel developers point of view.

I am not saying DRM is right, but I am saying that it is just as right as the GPL_ONLY flag in the kernel.

Regards!

[Zooko]

OEMs and board vendors want Windows drivers. Without WHQL certification the drivers won't install. You don't get WHQL certification without the DRM support, whether you are AMD, Intel, NVidia, or anyone else.

Hello bridgman: the following is not picking on you, but an "honest question", meaning that I don't know the answer but I assume there must be one. The question is: how is Intel able to have fully open sourced drivers and fully documented hardware and still get WHQL certification? Do their drivers include open source DRM?

Regards,

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

[agd5f]

Hello bridgman: the following is not picking on you, but an "honest question", meaning that I don't know the answer but I assume there must be one. The question is: how is Intel able to have fully open sourced drivers and fully documented hardware and still get WHQL certification? Do their drivers include open source DRM?

Intel has DRM too. Everyone has to if they want to be WHQL certified. They just don't implement SW support for the HW drm "features" in their open source driver and they don't provide any documentation for it. AMD is providing open drivers and documentation for our chips as well, however, like Intel, we are also not able to release any information on the HW drm implementation.

Alex

[glisse]

The encryption is separate from the actual data stream in pretty much all aspects- otherwise you wouldn't have MPEG1/2/4 or h.264 software decoders on Linux in the first place. The reason I've been able to ascertain that they don't have them as separate components is that the media companies are so damned paranoid someone will dip into the decrypted stream that they have to prevent a separation of the two functionalities so that you "can't" do it. Unfortunately, they've not quite twigged onto the reality that at some point you HAVE to break it apart to show it to a human being, especially if you want to get PAID for producing it.

Heh... Most of what they're worried about is like locking excrement in a safe and then locking the safe inside a safe, really.

I'd be looking elsewhere for hardware boost of operations, really- you're not going to get ANY traction out of companies like AMD for some time yet. Probably until either the media companies wise up, or the computer industry as a whole wakes up from the delusion that they actually "need" the media industry to keep themselves going at the levels they're at. Sure, they are helping it along- but they're not needed by the other.

Well, i likely didn't explain properly here is what i mean, you got the idct register:
MMIO offset 0xDEADBEEF IDCT_SETUP
bit 0 enable IDCT
bit 1 enable MACROVISION
bit 2 ....

Now here what AMD could make public:
MMIO offset 0xDEADBEEF IDCT_SETUP
bit 0 enable IDCT
bit 1 unused have to been set to 1
bit 2 ....

You see if you expose bit 0 and all others bits in this register there will be people wondering what the hell this bit is for and they will try to see and find out quickly that by clearing it you can disable macrovision. I have debileratly taken an easy example but i hope you get the idea why they can't expose decoding possibilities and what they mean by tightly bind together with DRM well at least this is my understanding of their problem.

Of course people can RE things but you won't see me and likely not many others people starting doing RE on windows, i haven't installed one in more than 8 years and i would have to learn many things to know how to RE on that crap.

[Redeeman]

OK, let me try again.

OEMs and board vendors want Windows drivers. Without WHQL certification the drivers won't install. You don't get WHQL certification without the DRM support, whether you are AMD, Intel, NVidia, or anyone else.

ATI has always been the most outspoken company in the industry about DRM. You are having this discussion with an AMD/ATI employee, not someone from another graphics vendor even though everyone implements the same DRM capabilities and everyone has the same challenges in the Linux market. Do you think we are the only ones who implement DRM ?

I honestly don't understand why you are picking on us rather than other graphics vendors. I hate to think it's because we are the only ones willing to actually talk about it.

well obviously i dont think its okay for other vendors either. I am picking on you(AMD/ATI) because you have made a graphics card design where even though you seem to be opening up most of the docs, you are leaving out key features, because of DRM. i can only hope that changes on newer hardware. I have nothing against you making DRM for all sorts of OEMS or even my neighbor, i just dont want some big OEMs drm shit to ruin my ability to use a feature of my graphics card, thats all.

[Redeeman]

Okay, I'll bite. Let's break this down a bit.

DRM is a form of content protection - but for digital, it is no different than Macrovision, CGMSA and so on. Content protection is a technical mean to enforce copyright rights. Hopefully we can all agree on that. Let me repeat. It is a technical means to enforce copyright rights. I will continue to use Content Protection (CP) instead of DRM for clarity.

As a human, we don't like being told that we aren't trusted. We are fundametnally talking about a technical means to enforce copyright rights because the copyright owner doesn't trust us.

Now let's play a game of swap the players nouns and pronouns.

• DRM allows the MPAA to ensure you don't copy movies.
• Technical means of copyright protection allows the copyright owner to ensure you don't violate the copyright owners protected (copyright wise) works.
• The GPL_ONLY flag allows the Kernel Developers to ensure you don't derive from their kernel code.

Now I know people will claim but it's different, both are interpretations from the copyright holders point of view, not the users. Interpretation is just that.

This view is not just mine, here is a good link from LKML.



Play the swap the nouns and pronouns a bit in a lot of the posts in this article, and a surprisingly large number would look quite bad from the kernel developers point of view.

I am not saying DRM is right, but I am saying that it is just as right as the GPL_ONLY flag in the kernel.

Regards!

quite wrong.

the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL is there to guide people, it doesent prevent anyone from doing stuff.. and it most certainly does not prevent people from removing it, or doing whatever. its made as a tool to help people know if what they are doing is a derived copy or not.

that is, it doesent stop people from using their FAIR USE rights.