Missing the point about DRM
Most whinging about DRM is sour grapes from people that are losing out from the way technology advances.
I think it’s a shame that the open source world hasn’t embraced the possibilities of DRM type technologies. I see the possibilities as quite far reaching, yet the only implementations are tied to commercial interests – no surprise then, that they favour those commercial interests.
Imagine the world before the introduction of locks. We take locks for granted but imagine a corporation introducing them and offering to hold the keys for us. I think that is what is happening with DRM today.
Many people complain about greedy corporations, trying to fit their business models to new media, and limiting the potential of the new media in the process. I think that there is also greed on the part of people who would happily make limitless copies of copyrighted media, which is clearly not sustainable. We have a reasonably good system of copyright. We have common sense and (hopefully) a sense of morality.
I think there could be a technological solution. Imagine a bunch of geeks getting together and making a free DRM that ordinary people could use to assert their ownership of things. Maybe a website, peer-to-peer network or something that allowed people to securely trade things like reputation or a virtual currency usable for bartering. This group could retain the moral high ground, and enable a new generation of independent content producers to publish and be rewarded for their efforts. They could enable free software to be distributed and used (trusting that it’s from the author) in return for feedback about performance.
DRM really is only a small and limited application of cryptography, which is something that open source software has excelled at. So why hasn’t the open source world solved this problem? Maybe it’s because the dot com boom got people excited about pretty things rather than solid building blocks for business. There are plenty of commercial offerings in the field of DRM, either limited by expensive licensing or black box proprietary architecture. But recently there have been a few articles (the Register) about the Higgins project Maybe they will do something to fill the gap. If they get it right I’m convinced the world is ready for an open source trust framework.
Too many otherwise knowledgeable people assume that DRM is evil. What do you think?