Why 2024 will be like 1984
I bet the pic caught your attention! It's very controversial indeed! With the imminent infiltration of technology into everyone's everyday lives, the entertainment and media industries came up with an answer to the problem of piracy called digital rights management. Sounds OK at the first glance... the only problem is, the only rights protected (or managed) are theirs, not yours. You, the end user, have virtually no rights (including the ones you enjoyed previously, like the ability to tape a TV show legally).
DRM is becoming quite scary. Buy anything off iTunes? Well, you're not allowed to make a copy of the media you bought on as many computers as you want. To give credit where due, Apple managed to wrestle the DRM requirement out of their iTunes store system recently, but to remove DRM restrictions from your music collection you have to pay extra, because the changes aren't retroactive. Feels like paying for something twice, but at least iPod users now have that option where many others don't. For example certain BluRay players will refuse to play BluRay discs, unless they have an active Internet connection. Why? To phone BigBrother back home and make sure that your BluRay disc is legit.
Some of you are thinking "it's a necessary evil", and perhaps you are right... and believe me it's evil allright. Remember the Sony rootkit/spyware fiasco? I'm just glad the class-action lawsuit was successful.
Now it's Amazon that's under the spotlight. In a nutshell, eBooks purchased through the web site can be deleted remotely by Amazon, without your knowledge or permission. Check out the full story here: http://www.slate.com/id/2223214/
Here comes 1984!
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DRM is awesome...if you are a secret agent maybe
I can understand the music business wanting to cut down in piracy especially when it comes to electronic media. I agree that you have a right to copy the music as a backup to play on any device you please as long as you don't give it to someone else it which is of course no different from playing your CD in any player. Perhaps a different type of scheme is needed like your own decryption key which will only let you duplicate the media if you use a globally unique key which can be used to identify the buyer (the song is embedded and encrypted with the signature at the time of purchase and somehow uses the signature embedded in the file to decrypt and play the song in a device in realtime - note that most current devices would need to be blasted with new firmware/software of course) but otherwise you can play it as much as you want, anywhere you want.
In the event that the buyer wants to copy the media you could use both the users public and private encryption key to verify that the content can be moved to another storage device (which would have to be supported by the host OS that is doing the transfer otherwise all bets are off). This method could easily be hacked of course (i.e. using a program that captures the unencrypted bit stream when the media is being played and re-encoding that to a non-encrypted MP3) but it is better than using DRM - which by the way blows in my opinion (i.e. why do monitors have to contain DRM support in Vista in order to achieve Vista's full approval to show HD content?). Sorry Eminem, but I hate DRM!
To DRM or not to DRM
It all boils down to the simple fact that DRM is a catch 22 by definition. It's like eating a cake and keeping it at the same time. It just doesn't work that way. How can you give someone a copy of something, let them read it, but at the same time prevent them from making copies of it?! Reading (processing, playback, etc) is synonymous with copying. As simple as that. If something can be "read" it can also be "written out".
Think of it this way: how would you prevent someone from photocopying a sheet of paper that they are holding in their hand? Photocopiers work by reflecting light beams off the paper to detect where the light reflects and where it is absorbed by the ink on the paper. Our eyes happen to work using the same principle. So how do you create a sheet of paper that will reflect light for our eyes, but not for the photocopier? It's the same light... the same photon particles!
DRM is a black box of convolution that is a non-viable technology and an utter waste of developer resources. Those efforts should be directed to something more productive, like perhaps better software for the medical sector. The sooner the media companies recognize that the better. It's time for them to leverage the Internet and offer their customers valuable and innovative methods to enjoy content. By using DRM, they're pushing more and more people into pirating the content instead, because DRM technology can be a major hindrance. There's a reason why PC gaming is on the decline, and I think a big reason for that (aside from the console explosion) is DRM. Have you ever tried playing a modern PC game? Take GTA4, for example, the DRM/copy protection technology on it is so invasive and unreliable (due t its convolutedness, I bet), that the publisher had no choice but to release a patch that removes the DRM from the game (one layer of it anyway).
Oh the irony!!!!
Oh the juicy irony!!! Apparently Amazon ended up deleting what they deemed to be "illegal" copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm". Oh man, I just wish that it would have been copies of "Fahrenheit 451", because that would have been priceless. MasterCard priceless. :)