My Take on DRM

OK, DRM is the ugly duckling of technology. No one likes it. And the reason is that it comes between us and our media.

Now I don’t mean coming between you and sharing your library over the Internet. That’s clearly a violation of copyright, among rather a lot else.  For the uninitiated in this argument, Scott Adams explains:

But obviously there has to be a limit. After I published my first best-selling book, The Dilbert Principle, within days it had been illegally scanned and was widely available on the Internet for free. Technically speaking, it wasn’t theft. But I still lost something. I (and my publisher) lost the ability to decide if, when, and how to publish as an e-book. You can’t compete with “free and immediate.”

From a legal standpoint, taking a creator’s right to control distribution of his art is not “theft.” It’s just “taking something that used to legally belong to someone else and making it your own.”

 

Fair enough? Ok.

However when media is bought (DVD’s, CD’s) its ours to watch in any way we see fit. usually this means popping a DVD into the drive to watch, either on your PC or HDTV.

For music I generally rip all my CD’s the moment I get them and keep them on my server. that way I can listen to my tracks from any TV within my house. I don’t do sharing (Scott Adams and his theory of cognitive dissonance to the contrary).

My point is that we should be able to do the same with DVD’s. Let me rip my collection to my server and watch them on any network PC.

Ahh, I hear you say, there is no guarantee that said DVD’s and music won’t find their way on to the Internet. True. This gets to the meat of my argument ,err, post.

DRM is too restrictive in the sense that it prevents even legitimate use of DVD’s. Lets change DRM from a content-oriented perspective to a network- oriented perspective. DRM should be focused on ensuring that content that has been ripped for legitimate use does not find its way out the home network.

Content owners fail to distinguish between ripping for legitimate use and ripping with malicious intent.

To implement such a network-oriented DRM, an arbitrary standard is required. The standard cannot be biased to  individual Studio’s or Record Labels.

The standard should define

• a technical means of ensuring that copyrighted data is identified as it travels through the network
• a technical means of determining the ultimate destination of packets of copyrighted data as they are requested over a network
• a technical means of ensuring that copyrighted data is stopped either at the gateway or at its source (see above)
• a technical means of identifying data across the various formats in general use

As far as an actual implementation of such a system, the technology is already there. Microsoft’s WMA format already supports allowing media to play only when there is a license installed. The licensing system simply has to be extended to cover the whole network.

How about a licensing server, then? The receiving media player simply checks the the packets of data and queries the server to ensure that its allowed to play the file/packet.

I’m sure Linksys and the rest of the router manufacturers will get in on the game and build checking routines into their gateways and routers.

As far as determining the destination at the beginning of a file copy operation, its up to Microsoft and Apple to implement this at the OS level.

Once the means to ensure that the spirit of the law is enforced is in place, then we can think about a law change (even here in the UK DVD ripping is a bit of a gray area).