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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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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