DragonBackMedia Blog

Good DRM

June 28, 2006 at 1:00 pm · Filed under Read all articles, Technology

Indeed, Sony BMG’s mistakes in the rootkit case provide some insights into what good digital rights management would, by contrast, look like.
First, say computer security professionals, good DRM should be transparent. To these professionals. The rootkit episode carried secrecy too far.

If a rootkit provides a hiding place for viruses, worms, and trojans, it make the job faced by computer’s virus-scanning software much more difficult.
And if more legitimate companies start to design their software to mimic malware, that job becomes nearly impossible.
“Now all of your security software has to distinguish between ‘good’ malicious code and ‘bad’ malicious code,” chief technical officer of Counterpane Internet Security, Bruce Schneier, says.

To be consumer friendly, therefore, DRM software must be computer friendly.
It should not hide itself from the computer’s operating system, nor take up more than its share of processing or memory.
And the terms of use and functions of the software should be spelled out in a way that is clear to the user, not buried in a 20-page EULA.
“People should understand the bargain they are making and the restrictions they may be subjected to,” says David Sohn, a staff counsel specialising in intellectual-property law at the Center of Democracy and Technology in Washington, DC.
Second, DRM technology should respect user’s privacy and security. It should collect only that personal information needed for authentication, and only after obtaining the user’s consent.
And content protection measures cannot overrides at the expense of a computer system’s security against real malware.
Third, good DRM should be user serviceable. If a DRM system breaks, consumers should still be able to access the content they purchased, and if it become a security threat, they should be able to turn it off.

Adding flexibility
Fourth, and perhaps most important, good DRM technology should be flexible.
The proposition Sony BMG made to customer with XCP was rather stiff with USD12(RM51) and you can make three copies, in Windows Media Audio format only.
The copies can’t be copied- and they won’t play on other people’s computers.
Reasonable DRM, by contrast, would give consumers the freedom to use the content they’ve purchase in non-infringing ways, such as ripping it to their computers and uploading it to their mobile players, or perhaps let them choose exactly how they would like to use the content and charge accordingly.
Ripping,(audio feeds for consumption later), place-shifting(streaming music over the Internet from a home computer to a remote location), or even sampling and remixing might all come with different price tags.
“The marketplace should reward or punish product based on whether they are providing the flexibility people want,” Sohn says.
Some DRM technologies offer increasing flexibility. Sohn points to FairPlay, the DRM system behind Apple’s iTunes, as one example other content distributors might do well to imitate: Customers can listen to FairPlay content on a computer, make playlists, burn those playlists to CDs, and move the songs to portable device.(Sohn is not a fan of FairPlay’s inability to operate with non-Apple products, however.)
The success of the iTunes music store, Sohn says, suggest that this combination of features is “meeting consumer demand.”
TiVo to Go is another example: Owners of TiVo digital video recorders can transfer recorded shows to DVDs, desktop PCs, laptop, and mobile devices such as the video iPod and Sony’s Playstation Portable.
But for every iTunes and TiVo, there are still numerous examples of restrictive DRM schemes that treat customers like criminals.
Until there is consensus what rights consumers deserve and which restriction are necessary to protect the income of artists and their studios, buying digital content will probably continue to be a thorny business.
“There is absolutely a right for the holders of intellectual property to protect that property,” says Stephen Toulouse, security program manager at the Microsoft Security response Center, where researchers spent weeks last fall helping Windows users respond to the rootkit epidemic.
“But as consumer myself, I’d like to see software vendors and studios getting feedback from consumers and creating technologies that reflected it.”
In the end, then, the record lables’ best response to falling music revenues may be to exercise more imagination, not more control.