DRM in Action

by on February 21, 2006 · 2 comments

I’ve just finished reading Felten and Halderman’s excellent paper on the XCP and MediaMax copy-protection schemes adopted by Sony BMG. It’s well worth the read if you’re interested in getting a glimpse at the real-world implementation details faced by DRM designers.

What I found most striking was how unsophisticated most of the security mechanisms in these programs were. Felten and Halderman found several ways that a moderately technically sophisticated user could defeat the controls (that’s not counting “hold down the shift key” and “get a Mac”). It’s not clear to me what Sony BMG was trying to accomplish with this software, but it clearly wasn’t to keep determined users from getting unscrambled copies of their music.

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About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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  • http://www.blindmindseye.com MikeT

    And therein lays the secret to successful DRM. Defeat the casual users, do not pose a serious barrier to the hardcore ones. The latter don’t really trade much with the former. Most DVD piracy for example, was an inside job, not the result of hacker groups trying to help out Joe Schmo user.

  • http://www.blindmindseye.com MikeT

    And therein lays the secret to successful DRM. Defeat the casual users, do not pose a serious barrier to the hardcore ones. The latter don’t really trade much with the former. Most DVD piracy for example, was an inside job, not the result of hacker groups trying to help out Joe Schmo user.

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