Adobe Blasts Nikon's Closed File Format 347
Joe Decker writes "Thomas Knoll, creator of Adobe Photoshop,
blasts Nikon's use of encryption to limit access to white-balance information contained in D2X RAW images files. Fearing the DMCA, Adobe won't reverse-engineer the file, slightly reducing Photoshop's support for those files.
Nikon responds. Is Adobe whining? Is Nikon shooting itself in the foot?" We've covered this previously.
No one is screwed.Unless they've been so all along (Score:5, Insightful)
The Nikon SDK that permits decoding of the format is still available to 3rd parties.
In short, it's the same as it ever was.
If the licensing is so heinous that an open source project can't accept it, then perhaps the problem isn't on the Nikon side, but in the perception and conception of how licensing should work on the part of the project team.
Re:Here is a solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
Double strandards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nikon shooting itself in the foot. (Score:3, Insightful)
from encryption to the court (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:because (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Here is a solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hooray for the DMCA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No one is screwed.Unless they've been so all al (Score:5, Insightful)
The Good News, As i see it: (Score:5, Insightful)
For this, they should be praised. IMHO.
Re:Nikon shooting itself in the foot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, at the G5/Powershot/etc level, changing brands is a matter of picking a new camera up. When you get into DSLRs, changing brands is orders of magnitude more expensive than simply buy a new camera body.
Re:Double strandards? (Score:1, Insightful)
My thoughts. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hooray for the DMCA (Score:3, Insightful)
>anyone can access Nikon's encrypted data with a
Considering it is NOT Nikon's data, I don't see the problem to start with.
How ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
Adobe CREATED this and now wants protection from it. That's kinda funny. I don't care so much about white balance. The other issue in this matter is much more interesting.
Re:The Good News, As i see it: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, they might. And I would be praising the other company for standing up to them.
If all goes right for Adobe, the world in general will have a RFC (or similar) of Nikon's format, and we will all have the right to use the info.
We need more companies to refuse to comply with this kind of information hiding. That way, it can be cracked
Oh, by the way, if Adobe complied, they would get the SDK from Nikon gratis. They could then use it to provide support. Adobe doesn't think they should have to do it that way, so are saying no. Good on them, IMHO
Re:Recent Nikon experience (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the crap I hate. You buy some nice piece of hardware that seems like it _should_ work just spiffy on its own, but the truth is you have to use someone's proprietary software or go searching for a hack to make it work. It's maddening.
Other things in this category: My daughters' iPod. Yeah, I know y'all love iTunes and I know that it doesn't suck, but maybe you can cut me some slack in the fact that I happened to choose a different package for my MP3 library before getting her the iPod. Now I have this incompatible mess. I could just switch to iTunes throughout the house, but why should I have to make that choice just to put a stupid MP3 file on her player?
My cell phone has this nice memory card that I need synch software in order to access. Yeah, I can store and use a gig of data, including MP3s, software, books, etc, but I can't access it on any computer that doesn't have ActiveSync. Why?
I'm sick of it. Maybe these folks think they're helping me out by including their crappys software or maybe they're just doing it to lock me in. Either way, it makes me, the consumer, wary of buying their products. That can't be something they actually like.
TW
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
PDF - It Just Works.
Re:Hooray for the DMCA (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sue Nikon under the DMCA! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:because (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not a photography buff. Perhaps somone who uses this stuff can explain.
For $600 dollars... (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue is - Encrypting files for no reason (Score:5, Insightful)
There should be no fear of decrypting this data. Didn't I create that file? Isn't the data even though encrypted mine?
I can't even think of an analogy. Even MS with its word file format, won't document how it works but isn't so evil as to encrypt it.
This is bad form and is another strike against Nikon.
Re:Here is a solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Both (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Double strandards? (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all, what we are talking about is not reverse engineering, it's cracking the encryption scheme used in a format that is well documented (in the case of PDF; don't know about Nikon's raw format). Second of all, Adobe is choosing not to do this, IIRC, so you can't say they are being inconsistent from a legal standpoint.
The essential difference between these situations is that Nikon's format prevents a work's owner from doing certain things with it, whereas Adobe's format enables owners of a work to prevent users of that work doing certain things with it. You may disagree with both actions, but they are not the same thing at all.
Huh? PDFs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, they've managed to make most people think you need horribly expensive "Distiller" software, when they could just use GhostScript and PDFCreator. What a racket...
--grendel drago
If Adobe wasn't so wedded to the DMCA... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's unlikely white balance information is copyrightable at all. Which means decrypting it isn't bypassing a technological measure protecting a copyrighted work, which means the DMCA doesn't apply. In any case, the white balance information in a photo isn't copyrighted _by Nikon_ (unless a Nikon employee took the picture), so Adobe could probably get any case dismissed for lack of standing.
It's amusing to see Adobe hoist by its own petard. And even more amusing to see that the format (including encryption) has been reverse-engineered, and will be supported by open-source tools.
Re:Both (Score:5, Insightful)
> take my business to Canon.
Well YOU can, but the huge pool of pros and serious amateur photographers won't, because they're already too heavily invested in Nikon gear. The D2X and its brethren aren't point-and-shoot cameras that can simply be swapped for Canon gear: people often have thousands of dollars worth of lenses that would also have to be replaced. I'm not a pro, but even my Nikon optics+camera are worth more than my car.
Nikon knows this.
I don't see the 'blast' (Score:3, Insightful)
Nikon might want to consider publishing their format. But it it truly just image information? I thought there was some internal state information included. This might be simply a way to protect their complete 'system,' whose borders reach beyond the physical camera, to the export of jpeg and tiff. It really is their format, after all. Positive persuasion is more appropriate here, not demonization.
Re:Don't confuse encryption with undocumented RAW! (Score:5, Insightful)
I just looked at dcraw.c [cybercom.net] and the parts pertaining to parsing Canon's white balance info simply use the camera model name to determine where in the RAW file Canon put the WB. Hardly "encryption", it's just an offset that varies by format.
Canon appears to develop a unique RAW file format by camera model. That makes a "tiny" bit of sense in that each file can accurately describe precisely the data the camera is capable of producing. It makes it harder in the long run to support dozens of file formats, but that's a trade-off Canon appears to be willing to live with. Keep in mind that Canon has to eat their own dogfood, too -- every format they produce means a new software release to parse the RAW files. And Canon doesn't charge for these downloads -- once you've bought their camera, it comes with software and upgrades (so far) have been free. So there's no real economic incentive for them to continue this, but they do.
What I think is most important regarding this issue is that it's simply a tempest in a teapot, being stirred by Adobe for their own political reasons. First, it's only on a single high-end pro camera -- affecting only a select set of professional photographers, most of whom have never heard of Open Source. Second, it's only white balance information. It's what the photographer told the camera about "white" or "gray" at the time of the shot, but it doesn't change the underlying image data. It's nothing that can't be recovered in the digital darkroom during processing. Finally, the encryption is trivial to break -- Adobe is raising a ruckus claiming the DMCA is preventing reverse engineering. In reality, most Open Source developers would simply ignore the DMCA and perform the decoding anyway.
In the camera world Nikon stands alone in this stupidity, but it's really too small of a matter to concern any of us, (unless you're looking for a DMCA poster child to nail to the wall.)
Re:Don't confuse encryption with undocumented RAW! (Score:3, Insightful)
Somebody who can, say, afford to buy Macromedia is much more likely to get slapped with a giant lawsuit.
Re:because (Score:3, Insightful)
You still own the copyright, even if you need to make agreements to use the photographs commercially.
It's called reality.
Re:Don't confuse encryption with undocumented RAW! (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought it was Nikon that raised the ruckus by threatening Adobe with it.
Either way, it being trivial to break isn't going to be a winning arguement in court. Indeed, trivial encryption is exactly what the DMCA was made for. Strong encryption doesn't need to be protected by law.
Honestly, I hope Adobe is successful in stirring things up around this. If it actually goes to court there stands a very good chance of a bit of the DMCA being chipped away, since it's actually the end user who owns copyright on the data being encrypted.
Trivial or not, Nikon needs to be kicked in the head.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:1, Insightful)
And if the reason the best tool is Nikon's tool is not that Nikon's tool is any good, but that Nikon are using legal threats to prevent anyone writing a better tool than theirs - so be it?
Whether it's Adobe that writes it, or Nikon - doesn't matter.
No. What matters is that anyone who can write a better one has the right to do so. Nikon have written a mediocre tool, and are preventing anyone writing a better one by threatening them with the DMCA - and that does matter.
The copyright and patent systems were supposed to ensure that if you invent a better mousetrap, you won't instantly be crushed by a big mousetrap maker stealing your idea. They weren't supposed to ensure that the big mousetrap makers could get away with selling crap mousetraps by suing anyone who invented a better one for violating their patents on the anatomy of the mouse itself...
Purpose of white balance (Score:4, Insightful)
Even just for "pro-sumer" cameras, this feature is great when working with ambient light.
Re:Let's get some FACTS down! (Score:3, Insightful)
Nikon has not asserted any ownership of your images. This outcry has come from the general bitching that everyone has with the encryption issue. Everyone's falsely concluding that just because something is encrypted in the file that that means that Nikon owns your image. How absurd is that! My guess is that there's more than just white balance that is encrypted in the file.
Yes, let's get the facts straight:
1. Nikon has obfusticated some of the data I produce with their camera.
2. Nikon tells me this is for my own good.
3. Nikon has restrictions on it's SDK such that despite your assertations it is not for the asking, otherwise Bibble and Capture One would have licensed them. And as an end user, even in Japanese-English I am not a "bona fide" developer. I am a person who diddles with writing their own software for their own purposes.
4. Under DMCA provisions, it is illegal for to reverse engineer the data I produce with the camera.
5. Nikon sells a product called Capture, that performs extremely poorly and essentially cripples a computer from doing anything but run Capture while it is in batch operation.
I never said Nikon owns my image per se, but instead they own the key to my white balance data, which is carefully set by me when I am out shooting. Since I use the Preset WB, why would I want anything but "as shot" -- after all, using an ExpoDisc, I set it correctly in the field.
In other words, MY DATA is the white balance information. It is as integral to the photograph as the image itself. Nikon is telling me that I cannot easily or freely access my data. They say that they have the key and I cannot have it.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you even looked at the PDF specification [adobe.com]? If not, how can you make comments about the format?
What's clumsy and bloated is Acrobat Reader. My guess is that more free *nix users like PDF because the PDF tools available on *nix aren't bloated and crappy like Acrobat Reader is.