Dangers of Digital Rights Management

Over the past few days, I’ve been writ­ing about the Microsoft/AOL deal and why I think that it is a dan­ger­ous one to all of us. My core fear about the deal is that it will increase lock-up in the Inter­net space due to a new con­cept called Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ment. When using such a sys­tem, con­tent is encrypted based on a num­ber of cri­te­ria. My fear is not that the con­tent will be encrypted (after all, it should be OK for ven­dors to pro­tect their intel­lec­tual prop­erty if they want to) but the fact that there is no DRM stan­dard that can be shared across the indus­try as a whole. As a result, we could end up in what I fear will be a lock-up sit­u­a­tion. In a recent Secu­rity Focus col­umn, Scott Granne­man high­lights some of the issues sur­round­ing that lock-up sit­u­a­tion. Imple­ment­ing a com­plete solu­tion means giv­ing more con­trol to one par­tic­u­lar soft­ware com­pany. In Scott’s exam­ple, it is Microsoft. In the case of the Apple music store, that con­trol is in the hands of Apple. Two dif­fer­ent solu­tions, two dif­fer­ent ways to han­dle things. As a result, there will be more frag­men­ta­tion again, as con­tent that works on one DRM sys­tem will not work on the other and vice-versa.

Granted, the inter­op­er­abil­ity issue will be resolved by the trusted com­put­ing plat­form alliance but that will also ensure that only a few large play­ers will get to play. Ulti­mately, what this means is that we may be liv­ing in a world where we are more and more at the mercy of a few sys­tem providers. Basi­cally, the deal is “play with us or don’t play at all”. Few of us believed they could actu­ally man­age it but it’s been a long term goal for Microsoft to win on the Inter­net and DRM may just gives it a chance to do so. Note to read­ers: If any reader hap­pens to have a copy of Bill Gates’ speech on Decem­ber 7, 1995 (Microsoft Inter­net Strat­egy Day), I would very much receiv­ing a copy. It seems to have com­pletely dis­ap­peared from the Internet