Paper Reviews - Is HD a Natural DRM?

Venue: New Security Paradigms Workshop 2008

Submitted Paper: See page attachments

Reviews

Responses TBA in the near future

Response Letter

From: NSPW2008 <pc-chair@nspw.org>
Date: June 5, 2008 2:08:54 PM EDT
To: ablaich@nd.edu
Subject: [NSPW2008] Paper 6 declined
Reply-To: pc-chair@nspw.org

Dear Author,

On behalf of the New Security Paradigms Workshop 2008 Program Committee, I am sorry to inform you that your paper, titled 

Is High Defintion a natural DRM

has not been accepted.  We received many excellent papers this year, and were limited in the number we could accept.

At the end of this email you will find a set of comments from the paper reviewers.  If you have questions about the comments, please contact the Program Chairs.

Sincerely,
 Program Committee, NSPW2008
 pc-chair@nspw.org

Review 1

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In essence, this paper argues that the size of the content being distributed is a natural DRM scheme in that it inhibits the exchange of pirated content. The content is just too big to exchange freely.

The paper outlines the goals of a DRM scheme in the abstract: "DRM controls how, when, where, and by whom the content gets used".

My main problem with this thesis is that it extends *only* to HD. Lower-quality rips of the content can still be distributed easily. The authors state essentially this, in section 3.1, when they discuss that services like iTunes will still be able to download content because it is "sup-par when comparing the quality and size of the content to that of the physical medium". So, while the point that DRM is (basically) unnecessary to prevent the illegitimate downloading of HD content is reasonable, this does not show that natural DRM will work in other environments.

The author should make clear also that his thesis is confined to network-based piracy. One can still copy a HD based content from a DVD onto a computer and from there make additional DVDs. So the idea, while good, seems to have very limited application. To be a good position paper, it needs more thought in other environments, or needs to be focused explicitly on networks. If the latter, then the authors should explore the future in more detail, as bandwidth will increase if not in the U.S., then in other parts of the world where piracy is more common.

Reviewer 2

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This paper presents the position that the increasing size of high definition video will provide a natural limit on the sharing/pirating of movies as network bandwidth is not increasing to the same extent.

I think that this is an interesting idea.  However, I would like to see it more fully developed.  In particular, there is an implicit assumption that users will want to move to high def video, or that only high def versions will be available online.  Is there some way that these assumptions could be addressed?  Will users be satisfied with lower-quality video in return for having free access?

Also, I am not sure how to interpret table 2.  The sixth most popular movie - Donnie Brasco - had 0 seeders and 0 leechers.  How does it therefore appear in the top 10 movies?

Can you please provide some more detailed analysis of bandwidth requirements versus file size?  For example, given typical DSL upload speeds, how many hosts will a user need to download from to saturate his download link?  How long will the downloads take?  Now, is it possible to compare these speeds against what is typically achieved (versus the theoretical maximums)?  Can we then extrapolate from historical network bandwidth increases to determine what we can expect over the next couple of years?

Reviewer 3

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I think the basic idea could use development. For example, if file size or time to download were to become the norm for DRM, what behavior patterns could be predicted on the part of all parties? Would content providers intentionally pump up the size of files, claiming some form of superiority for the larger files? Would file sharing sites change their delivery architecture to provide more incentives to seeders, automatically compress, or do other things to speed the file transfer?