DRM

Thoughts on Sun's open DRM

My albino-samoan brother Todd asked about Open DRM -- I wasn't inclined to comment on this, but since there was a request I'll give it a few thoughts.

Slashdot introduced this project with this comment:

If DRM is the future of controlling our media files, then perhaps the open source community can at the very least ensure that the dominant delivery system is an open standard.

DRM may be here, but I've yet to come across an example where DRM is working and benefitting the people/company that deployed it. Lots of DRM follies abound! I look at this new open DRM scheme in a similar light to cryptography. Crypto that is not vetted by the public tends to be broken quickly because it missed crucial portions of the review process to ensure that its worth anything. Open DRM might be a little harder to crack after the public has had its say in it, but then again, I doubt that many hackers will line up to make it better. Unlike crypto, there is no inherent value in DRM.

That is the only difference I see between open and closed DRM. All of my points about why DRM sucks and why it will ultimately fail still stand. DRM is an attempt to fix a social 'problem' with technology and that never works on everyone -- it merely inconveniences everyone and a few will hack it to let the content leak out into the open. Remember, in order to crack DRM, you only need one person to crack it -- and DVD Jon is still very much on our side. And I'll point out again that all the copy protection schemes that were employed in the late 80s and 90s have gone away -- DRM has we know it today will follow copy protection into irrelevancy before too long.

Can anyone show me a good example of a piece of content that was released on DRM only and was not found on a P2P system hours after its release? Can anyone give me an example of a DRM system that actually works and doesn't piss off the users?

Posted by Mayhem at August 22, 2005 02:00 PM