Re: DRM-two approaches

[Edward Barrow <edward@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chuck Hamaker suggested that there were two approaches to DRM, and asked 
what organisations were jockeying to control the web if the second, 
distributed approach were to prevail.

This is an important question. In the early 1990s I was involved in a 
project which developed a prototype DRM system. We didn't take it further 
because the project partners had different visions, and it was clear that 
we were going to need a lot more money than we had if we were to 
commercialise the system.

It was not dissimilar to the Intertrust system, mentioned later in the same 
digest, and "Intertrust" might be one of the answers to Chuck's question.

An alternative possibility to control by Intertrust (or Microsoft or Adobe) 
might be control by non-profit organisations owned by authors and 
publishers. There are many of these collecting societies around the world, 
mostly however fragmented by territory and by medium (music, literature 
etc) - two boundaries which the digital environment doesn't recognise. 
 Even if they could act collectively, being non-profit, these societies 
don't have access to the sort of capital which might be needed to develop 
the necessary system, although they do turn over very large sums of money 
every year.

Authors and publishers are equally wary of handing control of the 
distribution network to a single monopoly provider.

On another list, I have considered the possibility of open-source DRM. (It 
might sound a contradiction in terms - it is certainly ripe for conflicting 
philosophies about intellectual property - I am not sure what Richard 
Stallman would think of the idea!).  Security software should in any case 
be open-source if it is to be trusted, but the DRM problem is quite 
different to the privacy problem addressed by most cryptographic software.

There are in fact several versions of 'the DRM problem.' The one that has 
attracted commercial attention is "how to stop people getting hold of my 
stuff without paying". Less commercially-important is "how to stop people 
changing my stuff" - the moral rights question -  and this can 
relatively-trivially be resolved using digital signature technology.


Edward Barrow
New Media Copyright Consultant
http://www.copyweb.co.uk/
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