This Ain't No Party
Is the music you buy online going to be worth less down the road?
A new study by the Electronic Frontier Foundation says digital-rights management (aka copy protection) limits what you can do with the songs you're bought in ways that aren't immediately evident:
In other words, in this brave new world of "authorized music services," law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too). Unfortunately, in an effort to attract customers, these music services try to obscure the restrictions they impose on you with clever marketing.
The study looks at iTunes, Microsoft, Napster 2.0, RealNetworks, examing how different software restrict the number of copies or mix CDs one can make.
no, that's a great comment.
Thanks! There's so much more though :p These presenters make a couple of great points: http://www.w3.org/2000/12/drm-ws/pp/cloakware.html It's part of a workshop of DRM: http://www.w3.org/2000/12/drm-ws/Overview.html Lots of techno-babble but they cover some points that I did in the "Hardware Solutions" section, and instead suggest Tamper Resistant Software (TRS). I agree that a software only solution is a much better solution, since hardware can be cracked as well (the article uses an example of smartcards used to decrypt satellite TV signals that were cracked months after they were introduced). Software can be updated much easier, and at practically no extra cost to the consumer, if it is cracked. However, I disagree that TRS is even achievable. The architecture of the CPU is still the same. It will be harder to figure out if they put millions of dollars of research into a technology they claim to be tamper resistant, but it won't be tamper resistant. The article also says Cryptography is part of the solution. It is, no doubt. "RSA" and "DES" are good algorithms. Public key for encryption, private key for decryption. This makes a perfect model for secure internet connections. You connect to a server, get its public key for encrypting the data, send the data encrypted, then the server uses its private key to decrypt it. However, on a single computer, there is no locked down server with the private key. Everything is on that computer! Finding the key is just a matter of searching the right places. One-way encryption is obviously not a solution (like MD5), since they're usually just hash algorithms or just plain old irreversible! Most two way algorithms require a key, one that will be located somewhere in the vicinity. So, it gets me thinking that its not even possible. I'm glad I read that, I feel much better now about the whole thing :) Although, Intel already has DRM built into its latest chip. I don't know much about it, like if it uses an open-standard DRM or an in-house solution. http://www.digitmag.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=4915 Another good article. http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050830_142112.html