Tag: DRM
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Grimmelmann on the Berkeley DRM Conference
James Grimmelmann at LawMeme offers a typically insightful and entertaining summary of the recent Berkeley DRM Conference. Here’s my favorite part: And thus, the sixty-four dollar question: Is any of this [DRM technology] really going to work? The question tends to come up about once per panel; most of the panelists do their best to…
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Berkeley DRM Workshop
It’s the second day of the Berkeley DRM Workshop, a wonderful conference. Donna points to live commentary from several bloggers. I was on a panel with David Wagner, Hal Abelson, John Erickson, Joe Liu, and Larry Lessig. My quick presentation (here, in PowerPoint format) was about the (negative) impact of DRM and its companion regulations…
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Standards, or Collusion?
John T. Mitchell at InteractionLaw writes about the potential antitrust implications of backroom deals between copyright owners and technology makers. If a copyright holder were to agree with the manufacturers of the systems for making lawful copies and of the systems for playing them to eliminate all trade in lawful copies unless each transaction (each…
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Are DVDs Copy-Protected?
Maximillian Dornseif at disLEXia wonders why people refer to CSS, the encryption scheme used on DVDs, as “copy protection.” He points out, correctly, that encryption by itself cannot prevent copying, since encrypted bits can be copied just as easily as unencrypted ones. He wonders, then, how CSS can be called an anti-piracy measure. The answer…
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Long DRM Article in Today's NYT
Today’s New York Times offers a long article by Amy Harmon on DRM, or “digital armor” on recorded media. It’s mostly a backgrounder for people less up-to-speed on DRM issues than most of my readers (probably) are, but there are a few new nuggets worth noting. First, Jack Valenti tries yet another analogy: “We need…
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More on Unbreakable DRM
Ernest Miller at LawMeme likes my explanation of why unbreakable codes don’t mean unbreakable DRM. But he takes me to task for writing a posting that ignores fair use and assumes that the customer is the enemy. I guess I should have been more explicit about my assumptions. I agree that fair use is important…
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Why Unbreakable Codes Don't Make Unbreakable DRM
It’s commonly understood among independent security experts that DRM (i.e., copy prevention) technology is fundamentally insecure, at least based on today’s state of the art. Non-experts often misunderstand why this is true. They often ask, “When you say DRM is insecure, isn’t that just another way of saying that any code can be broken?” Actually,…
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DarkNet
Lots of buzz lately about the DarkNet paper written by four Microsoft Research people. The paper makes a three-part argument. First, there is really no way to stop file sharing, as long as people want to share files. Second, in the presence of widespread file sharing, a copy-prevention technology must be perfect, for the presence…
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Report from the ACM DRM Workshop
Yesterday I attended the ACM “Digital Rights Management” Workshop in Washington DC. There were about 100 attendees, most of them computer scientists, with a few lawyers and Washington policy types thrown in. Papers from the workshop are available online. My main impression was that the speakers were more openly skeptical about DRM than at past…
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More Great Stuff From Seth Schoen
If you want to understand what the whole Palladium/LaGrande/”trusted computing” issue is about, you should read Seth Schoen’s recent writing. His analysis is insightful, technically sound, independent, and hype-free. For the latest example, click here, scroll down to “Trusted Computing,” and read the next several sections.