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December 04, 2003
Issue 2: DRM
Posted by Arnold
I walked into the second issue of the New America thingy with less of an open mind. The issue was Digital Rights Management, which is an attempt to embed copy protection capabilities into technology.
Given that I had my mind made up before I walked in, it's not surprising that I took little away from the session.
My view is that of all the solutions to the dilemma of "information wants to be free, but people need to get paid," DRM probably has the highest cost/benefit ratio. If the music industry has fallen behind the technology industry, then I really doubt that the socially optimal outcome is to move the tech industry backwards.
My view is that DRM is a "tail wagging the dog" phenomenon. Across time and space, only a relative handful of artists have lived on royalties. Until the 20th century's mass consumption era, artists lived on patronage. Even today, music and book publishers are like venture capitalists, with lots and lots of failures made up for by the occasional big hit. Very few writers or recording artists make enough royalties to pay the rent.
With the Internet, maybe we'll go back to a patronage model. Or a subscription model. Or a micropyaments model (although I doubt it). But I don't think that DRM will be part of the winning model. DRM is only attractive to people who want to hang on to the existing mass market publishing model. But by imposing design restrictions on hardware, DRM potentially affects consumers who have no desire to participate in that model.
In short, you have this business model which only works for a few artists in one era, and you want to throw lots of technological and legal resources into preserving that model? That has to be wrong.
Comments (2)
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1. Brad Hutchings on December 4, 2003 06:02 PM writes...
The problem with the entire DRM regime of today is that is overpromises and underdelivers. The promise ought to simply be "to keep honest people honest". With that in mind, it should be OK both legally and technically (you don't have to circumvent DRM) to burn a mix CD for yourself or a friend. It should not be OK to "share" music with 50 million of your closest friends. The delivery end is an entirely different story. Content should use "open" standards, so that we don't have arguments over whether Jack Valenti can restrict you from playing T3 on your Linux box.
But technically, akey point that most people miss in DRM discussions is that "code equals data". Pardon the aside, but ponder for a moment... That Word document on your desktop you think of as data. But it is actually code that the Word virtual machine effectively executes to render your document on the screen and in print. Microsoft Word, you think, is code, but in fact it is just data that the computer stores on a disk, loads into memory, and executes with a CPU. The CPU is surely a machine, but in fact, it is a layout of transistors and gates which was likely the output of a program written in a language like VHDL (well, back in the day anyway).
The technical problem for DRM is how to secure anything completely when code equals data. If the DRM is too restrictive for some person's use and that person has enough technical expertise, the DRM will be broken because there a many potential angles of attack, such as holding down the shift key, or a web site that exchanges serial numbers, or DeCSS.
In proportion, DRM ought to be like those big plastic boxes around CDs in the store. That is, a very minor inconvenience that reminds you not to steal, but doesn't get in the way once you've legally purchased.
-Brad
Permalink to Comment2. Douglas Galbi on December 6, 2003 02:06 PM writes...
More generally, copyright law doesn't seem to be a major determinate of value or job creation. Consider the economic history of authors and photographers. See "Authors and Photographers," Appendix C in "Sense in Communication," available at www.galbithink.org
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