Daedelus on Social and Legal Aspects of DRM

Vanishing Content - does DRM bring 1984 here at last?

Coming soon - does DRM allow 'reality changes'.

In George Orwell's novel 1984 (written in post-war England in 1948), the author postulates a police state in which  a covert role of the government's Ministry of Information is to destroy or better still re-write any document or book which conflicts with the politically correct, media supported view of the time - in such a way as to change citizens perception of history and to un-write unfavorable history. Some pundits claim that digital rights management is exactly the tool to make this nightmare become reality.

• The role of central repositories.
• The credibility of sources.
• Electronic vs. Hardcopy data stores.
• Closed vs. Open systems.

Future articles

• Why disintermediation failed.
• Crackers and Hackers - Rebels or Counter Revolutionaries? How  DRM Cracking put power back into the hands of the Big Guys and put  the Indies back where they always were.
  • Here are some thoughts exchanged with Steve Rowat on his interesting observations on DRM at www.rowatworks.com/Overview_Indexes/DRM_Micropayment_ODRL_XrML.html . Steve postulates a low cost universal DRM system allowing individuals to control the sales of their own IP.

    "One of the problems about developing low cost DRM for individual is that the cost of hacking pushes up the base cost of solutions to the 'enterprise' type costs that you outline.
    
    Thus if it takes several man-years to develop a useful, transparent DRM system (as it does in general experience - that's why the world is not flooded with shareware/freeware DRM) then a corporate sale to say a banking customer for internal use will just about pay off the  programmer's expenses and a salary sized support contract might allow him to keep up with ongoing 'hacking' (in the true sense). If the same people sell the software for $99 per publisher then within a couple of sales hundreds of crackers will have attacked the system. As public DRM systems cannot obey Kerckhoffs's axiom of the primacy of keys (or at least the keys have in some way to get to the public users PC sometime in the process) and there are many intensely anti-DRM people with weeks of months to spare the reverse engineer the products- then DRM for the individual or independent just isn't going to happen - the crackers have forced the control of IP back into the hands of the giants who control the less vulnerable channels of distribution and exploitation."
    
    Interesting observations. Thanks for sending your comments.
    
    >- then DRM for the individual just isn't going to happen - the crackers
    >have forced the control of IP back into the hands of the giants who
    >control the less vulnerable channels of distribution and exploitation.
    
    Your last line is, well, tragic as far as I'm concerned. I hope in the
    long term something will develop that won't be as easily hackable. Perhaps,
    for instance, if each individual creative-seller has their own system
    subsisting within ODRL, it won't be worth the hackers time to break that
    subsystem? Yet, would be cheap to set up because most of the security
    would be in place for the larger system (ODRL/browsers) and maintained
    regularly by them? I'm out of my depth here, but hopeful.... :-)
    
     

• Protect and Survive

Coming soon DRM Follies

"If you start me up, If you start me up I’ll never stop
If you start me up, If you start me up I’ll never stop
I’ve been running hot, You got me ticking gonna blow my top
If you start me up, If you start me up I’ll never stop
(Chorus) You make a grown man cry"

Microsoft Windows 95 Theme tune.

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to
learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for
their apparent disinclination to do so."

Douglas Adams

• Investor Follies
  • Coming soon - Investor Follies - the Investors who didn't get it"
  • The British Clearing Bank who did not believe that Internet selling would ever catch on - believing the the Internet was the CB radio of the 21st century.
  • The major UK venture capitalist who passed up an early key investment believed that no one would ever download music from the Internet.
  • DRM investors who sunk money into companies with no IP or ability to develop IP - companies who were resellers of third party technology where the third party retained control of the basic IP and value.
• Vendor Follies
  • Coming soon - Vendor Follies - the Vendors who didn't get it"
• Client Follies
  • Coming soon - Client Follies - what happened to the clients who thought their data was safe and found that it wasn't due to lack of DRM type technologies?"

  "Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that
  I wasn't previously aware of."

  Douglas Adams

Technical aspects of Digital Rights Management