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2.07.04

DRM is bad

... according to Cory Doctorow. In his article, he writes witty and meaningful about DRM and its impact on business and society. I paged through the entire speech and want to make the following reminders:
-) Schneier’s Law: any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he cannot think of how to break it. (however, Cory argues that DRM will fail technologically, since the customer receives the key, the ciper and the ciphertext; it is not so straight-foward, but the the key is more or less publicly known, at least to hardware suppliers).

-) Anticircumvention: this is really a critical flaw in recent legislation. Ok, the one side is, that it is illegal to break the copyrighted work, the make a tool that breaks it etc (-> see Ed Felton, Dimitry Skylarow, John Johansen cases). The other side is, that anticircumvention is used as a tool (a business model) to exclude competitors. There is this example with Lexmark who said that their ink-software saying "I am empty" is protected and any cheaper ink-supplier is excluded since they may not ignore this tag.

-) Extension of the copyright: DRM prohibits consuming a legally required product (DVD) watching at another continent. That was never part of the copyright agreement.

-) Innovation barriers: since content companies dictate hardware suppliers how to specify their products, the innovative creative is likely to be undermined. Infering from there the consequences for the customer, it becomes obvious that it is inconvenient if you cannot play mp3s or whatever with different appliances. You are technologically locked it (Mako Analysis proclaimed according to Cory that Symbian phones should not be supported since they allow to copy mp3s on the phone, what would put ringtone sellers out of the business!). In general, software and hardware companies are proposing open standards to allow more flexibility and improve customer satsifaction. Here, exactly the opposite happens.

-) New business models (or also social movements) always embrace the medium they live in. The key is convenience for consumers, to do something extra what they couldn’t do before (scalability for instance, reproducing the Bible, using piano rolls, distributing mp3s, ebooks etc). Mostly, they were worse at what the old medium was best at, but the new models offered new advantages for customers/consumers.

Matching with the above, the following links might be useful:
- EDRi: "European Digital Rights was founded in June 2002. Currently 14 privacy and civil rights organisations from 11 different countries in Europe have EDRI membership."
- Information about Trusted Computing.
- INDICARE: "The overall goal of INDICARE is to raise awareness, help to reconcile heterogeneous interests of multiple players, and to support the emergence of a common European position with regard to consumer and user issues of Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions."

You may wish to leave a from your own site.