Making a Cat That Barks

This BusinessWeek column sounds very sensible:

Situations like this, together with the Sony BMG mess, have given the whole concept of DRM a bad name. To win public acceptance, the industries involved–content, information technology, and consumer electronics–are going to have to put maneuvering for advantage aside and stick to clear, consumer-first goals. Above all, users should not have to notice the existence of the particular DRM as long as they abide by clearly stated copying limitations. Digital content should use standard DRM technology built into players such as iTunes and Windows Media Player. And any content should play on any device that can physically display it, without regard to operating system.

The entertainment industry has a great opportunity for new markets, and the PC and consumer-electronics industries have an opening for new products. But realizing this potential will require all of them to show some respect for their customers.

This is an admirable sentiment. There’s just one problem: “standard DRM technology” is a contradiction in terms. There’s never been such a thing, and there never will be. DRM technology is proprietary by necessity.

As I’ve argued in the past, DRM schemes must be proprietary formats, with a single authority (say, Apple or Microsoft) setting the rules and deciding who may participate. Moreover, the security of the format is inversely proportional to the number of devices that adopt it. Every new device is another opportunity for hackers to break it.

I think it’s hard to over-estimate the importance of this point. It’s easy to gloss it over in policy debates, to assume that achieving interoperability is just a technical problem that the geeks are working on and will solve in a few years. But it’s not. Building an interoperable DRM is like making a cat that barks.

The problem is that the vast majority of the people who write about technology policy aren’t programmers. They don’t really have a clear idea of what DRM does, so they don’t have the technical background to evaluate the claims of the DRM snake-oil salesmen. When a big technology company announces an “open” DRM format, the tech press reports on it dutifully, without really pressing the company for details.

If they did, I suspect that they would find that the various “open” and “interoperable” DRM schemes now being developed are vapor-ware: years from completion and with a lot of the implementation details not quite worked out yet. It’s easy to talk about interoperable DRM in the abstract. But so far, no one has succeeded in actually implementing such a system. That’s not a coincidence, because what they’re trying to do is, as Ed Felten puts it, a “logical impossibility.”

SHARE: 4 comments