RE: Digital Rights Management
> > It seems to me that our community must create its own digital rights
> > management system that is an integral part of the GNU operating
> > system.
>
> The weapons industries are not forced to integrate any
> facilities into theyer products that would stop people from
> murdering others "illegally".
>
Bruce Schneier gave an interesting interview on NPR a week or
two ago on a closely-related subject.
In his view, it is a waste of time and effort to attempt to
create any sort of content control system on today's general
purpose computers, because the programmer has access to too
much of the system.
I.e., binary data is inherently copyable, and there are many
places on a general purpose computer that can be examined and
monitored to "retrieve" the data for later use.
He then talked a bit about how industry is attempting to create
special-purpose equipment, which would be closed to external
meddling. This would prevent the data from being accessed in
a "useful" fashion, and supposedly prevent some copying.
Unfortunately, the NPR interviewer didn't know enough to
let Bruce proceed down this path. As most of you know, the
hard disk industry was talking about working within this
paradigm (though they seem to have backed off somewhat due
to angry public reaction), as are certain video card and monitor
manufacturers.
Bruce's opinion seemed to be that in the context of these
special proprietary systems, it would be more feasible to
create "copy protected" media for viewing. However, as long
as there are general purpose computers we are not likely to
be able to prevent all bootlegging.
I don't know that there is much that any of us can do to limit
the spread of bootlegged music or video. Even if we encrypt the
stored format, and we encrypt the line between the graphics card
and the monitor, there still will be unencrypted versions being
manipulated to regulate alpha values, etc., which could be
copied someplace.
And even if that didn't work, it would probably be possible to
create identical copies of the encrypted media -- meaning that
a "licensed" player would play the "bootleg" media without
even realizing it wasn't kosher.
I just don't see how we can be of much help. But I'm not
opposed to trying. I would rather work within a copy protection
framework that we have a hand in designing, rather than one that
is shoved down my throat by the (questionable) motives of the
Music Recording industry.
-Brent
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