If you've followed tech news lately, you may have noticed quite a buzz over DRM. DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is a name for any technology used to "protect" the copyrights of content creators - filmmakers, musicians, artists, and the like. The idea is nice - preserve people's rights while allowing the public to access the content.
But so far, the various implementations of DRM have been less than friendly to consumers. In
one notorious example, Sony put out a set of CDs containing DRM that essentially contained a Windows "rootkit" - a software package that hides itself from Windows and forcibly inserts itself into the low-level system functions. Sony's DRM technology, named XCP, manipulated the Windows kernel in such a way that unintentionally opened up its host system to a wide variety of nigh untraceable attacks. Apart from this nice little feature, the software was designed to confine your ability play the CD on a PC and limit the number of times the CD could be copied.
Such DRM software has raised several legal red flags. First, it could potentially violate copyright laws, the GPL and even the U.S. Constitution. For example, a DRM-protected CD or DVD will not suddenly become un-protected just because the copyright on the content it contains has lapsed. Thus the software extends the copyright protection without the need for following actual copyright law!
Anyways, to get to the meat of the problem: Sony appears to have plans to bring DRM to the PSP. According to an article at
BetaNews:
Quote:
Starting in August, the company will ship 1GB and 2GB sticks that come with a DVD copying application that would be able to transfer select movies from DVD to the PSP.
To use the application, the installer would be loaded onto a PC. From there, the user would enter an unlock code that would permit them to transfer one movie from the DVD over to the device.
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Videos that require an unlock code? Yes, that's DRM. And judging from Sony's record thus far, we can only assume that you'll be forced to update your firmware to the latest version to be able to watch the videos.
Recent developments in PSP homebrew have allowed us to decrypt firmware 2.71, and an examination of the file
flash0:/vsh/module/mcore.prx reveals some interesting details. Most notably, there are several references to the
Marlin Developer Community web site. According to the Marlin Developer Community's executive summary:
Quote:
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Marlin is a DRM-based content sharing platform for consumer devices and multimedia services that is based on open standards.
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Firmware 2.71 even refers to several different video folders and formats that are currently unused, such as the
/MPE_ROOT and
/MLE_ROOT folders and the
MGV file format.
So let's review:
- Sony has a history of using DRM.
- Sony released a special "movie installer" DVD that requires you to enter unlock codes to transfer the video to your PSP.
- Firmware 2.71, and 2.60 in fact, contain references to a Sony/Samsung Phillips/Panasonic/Intertrust DRM project.
Is Sony planning to lock down the PSP with DRM technology? We can't say for sure. But the signs seem to be pointing that way.