DRM From the Viewpoint of the Electronic Industry

mike449 writes "The cover story of the Oct.16 issue of EDN magazine is about the recent trends in DRM. It is not just a technical article. The author tries to convey what people who are supposed to design and implement access restriction measures think about their feasibility and associated economic, legal and moral issues. 'Of course, you can always try charging a reasonable price and trusting people to be honest. Just think of all the money you'll save not having to implement DRM'."

What I still don't get

[bigjnsa500]

What I still don't get is if companies are hurriedly developing DRM and DRM is being pushed down our throats, then WHY are they still manufacturing digital media players (DVD, CD, etc..) with analog outputs?

Analog totally defeats the purpose/use of DRM.

Re:Just say no!

[sik0fewl]

DRM is precisely as effective for anti-piracy as the Evil Bit is for security.

Wow, you're giving DRM a lot of credit here. It's too bad nobody implemented the Evil Bit so we could do real comparisons.

DRM to prevent virus and worm attacks?

[G4from128k]

I wonder if DRM and trusted computing technologies can be used to prevent virus, worm, and ddos attacks. If only "trusted" executables would run on a computer, then malware would be much harder to perpetrate. DRM for your harddisk could prevent unauthorized executables from reading your e-mail address book, corrupting crucial system files, copyng your files, or logging the keyboard. DRM for personal and system files would prevent them from being copied or modified except by a trusted executable.

I would invision a scheme in which executables must be registered by the creator with a trustworthy third party in a non-anonymous fashion. Code that has not been registered in a publically traceable way would be denied access to system resources or run only within a tightly controlled sandbox. Once a piece of code has been validated, it would be locked in an execute-only state.

Given that most users are too willing to run any old app that comes over the internet, stronger controls on what can and cannot run may be warranted.

Re:I say it time and again...

[IM6100]

Wow. A content-free flame.

Are you a bot?

Punning with Acronyms

[spiritraveller]

Support for TCP should appear in Microsoft's next version of Windows (formerly known by the code name "Palladium").

Microsoft is moving even more slowly than I thought. Only a monopolist could sell an operating system in today's market without support for tcp.

(shakes head in disbelief)

Re:no locks

[Carnildo]

Sure there are always the experts that like the challenge of doing the impossible. Those are not the people DRM is designed for.

On the contrary, these are exactly the people DRM is designed for. DRM protection of content gives them the challenge of breaking the DRM. Who else benefits? Not the average consumer -- if the DRM is properly implemented, they won't notice a difference, and if it isn't, they will be inconvenienced. Pirates won't benefit -- there's always the analog hole. The companies won't benefit -- analog hole again.

Loaded words and phrases

[Stiletto]

WOW.

This article probably uses every single one of GNU's "Confusing or loaded words and phrases" [gnu.org]. Congratulations to the author for showing his utter lack of bias...

My only use for DRM

[titaniam]

The killer DRM application will be when I can create my resume using professional quality open source tools (like this [peter-a-andrews.com]) and make it impossible for the bastards to convert it to Word.