Is DRM dying?
Posted by Ken Y-N on May 14th, 2008 at 11:37am
This is the proposition of Gary Richmond, a Free Software Magazine columnist, and not surprisingly he concludes, yes, Digital Rights Management (DRM) is in its death throws, but presents little evidence to back up this claim, and indeed in the rather poorly-written article spreads some FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) of his own while claiming (quite rightly) that Microsoft is guilty of it.
First, he says:
This has even involved computer manufacturers selling machines with the Trusted Module Chip installed. I am sorry to have to tell you that Dell is one of the culprits. Yes, that Dell, the same Dell that is selling laptops with GNU/Linux pre-installed! I wonder if these machines are using this chip, or is it confined to Windows users?
First, there is no such thing as a Trusted Module Chip; it’s a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip. Second, could the writer not do a bit of research to find out if Linux Dells have TPMs? I wonder how he would react to find out that there is already open source Linux drivers and libraries for supporting TPMs?
By now, you are beginning to understand that you bought the hardware and software but you don’t really own it – if by ownership we mean the right to do with it what you want.
Almost all commercial software is not purchased but licenced.
Ross Anderson wrote a very detailed analysis of the political. economic and technical implications of DRM.
Unfortunately, the referenced article is nearly five years old and the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has evolved into something quite, quite different from merely The Copyright Police. That whole article deserves a point-by-point rebuttal, but that’s a task for another day.
It’s rather like what Heisenberg said about Quantum Mechanics: if you aren’t shocked by it, you just haven’t understood it.
The quote is by Niels Bohr, and is “Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.” It’s a bit of a trivial point, but I think it’s indicative of the poor research that went into this article.
Here’s good news spun as bad:
Microsoft’s motives may have more to do with killing off the anti-virus industry with claims of “trusted computing”
Don’t many Linux users gloat about the superior strength of their chosen operating system and how it doesn’t need virus protection? Each new Linux desktop is one more sale lost to virus scanners, so why is Microsoft stengthening virus protection a bad thing?
They never learn: Canute, canal owners, Gemstar and DVD Jon
Wasn’t DVD Jon was on the side of the “good guys”? Why lump him in with the “bad guys”?
enjoy the spectacle of the canal owners (the superhighway of the day) trying to persuade the British Parliament to pass a law banning the new-fangled railways.
Can I get a reference for that? I can’t find anything that even hints at this sort of legislative issue.
Gemstar’s video recording system was a clever algorithm which could only remain secure provided it was not used. Once the genie was out of the bottle, the simple codes were freely available in newspapers and VCR owners only needed to key in a series of digits to record a programme.
Is this true? Gemstar used and uses patents and other legal processes to block unlicensed printing of codes. Despite the encoding and decoding algorithms being freely available, I’d like to see evidence of how reverse engineering resulted in them losing their monopoly.
The purveyors of DRM are now beginning finally to realise that there is simply no such thing as one hundred per cent security
Has any of the DRM providers ever seriously claimed 100% security? This looks like a strawman to me.
As you can see, I am completely unconvinced by many of the arguments in the article, but by writing this for Free Software Magazine he is preaching to the choir, so I worry that all his claims will be taken at face value by the average reader and propogated as gospel.
Read the full story at Free Software Magazine here.
Tags: microsoft
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