Zack Rippy

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Basically, it is the copy protection of intellectual property in the digital realm. The purpose of DRM is simple. It is intended to allow copyright holders to protect their content from unauthorized copying and distribution. That sounds simple enough. However, the nature of the technology has inherent flaws that must be addressed.

First of all, when I purchase video or music, in my mind, I have the right to view or listen to that material on any device and in any format I choose. If I buy a song on iTunes, I want to be able to listen to it on my PC, on my iPod, in my car or on another portable music player. However, the DRM on songs purchased through iTunes attempts to limit this. It restricts how many copies I can make and to which devices I can copy it. I have a big problem with this.

Secondly, what happens when DRM technologies become obsolete and are replaced? Will future software and players provide backwards-compatibility for all previous DRM technology? I doubt it. Mark Cuban offers some good thoughts on this particular problem in his blog. Cuban suggests immediately cracking any protected media that you own so that you will have access to it regardless of future protection schemes. An excellent suggestion.

Finally, DRM is really a futile effort on the part of the entertainment industry. It will always be circumvented. Always. The reason is simple. If a file is encrypted with DRM technology, the end user must have the ability to watch or listen to it. That means that the information needed to decrypt the file must be present in the playback device, whether hardware or software. Therefore, an intelligent “hacker” has everything he needs to reverse engineer the encryption. It will only be a matter of time before he succeeds. No matter how tough the encryption is, the protection will be broken. Just look at recent successes: running Linux on an iPod and running Windows XP on Mac Mini (direct video download).

I completely understand people’s desire to protect their content from piracy. That is a legitimate desire. However, I do question the extent to which piracy is a problem. iTunes just reached its one billionth downloaded song. People are obviously willing to buy individual tracks and albums legally online. One of the main reasons that networks such as Napster and Kazaa attracted so much attention was that they allowed people to download just the songs they wanted. They did not have to pay $17.99 for a CD of tracks they did not want to buy. Now that people can legally purchase songs individually, they are doing so in large numbers. Piracy is definitely a real problem, but I am not convinced that restricting consumers’ ability to use what they legally purchase is the answer.

In case you have not picked up on the obvious, I do not like DRM. It accomplishes nothing except hindering me from enjoying material that I have purchased. I have never purchased a song through iTunes, even though the encryption can be removed. If I buy music, I buy the CD and rip it myself so that I can have it in any format I want. I can burn compilation CDs, move it to my iPod, play it on my PC, or basically do what I want with it. I have complete flexibility that way. The encryption is merely a nuisance. Just to be clear, I am referring to material that I have legally purchased.

The entertainment industry should rethink its position and its objectives. There will always be piracy. There always has been. People used to record songs off the radio to cassette tapes. Sure, the quality wasn’t the best, but neither is the quality on a lot of the 128kbps encoded mp3 files floating around the peer-to-peer networks. Is anything really being accomplished by DRM and encryption? Is there less piracy now as a result? One has to wonder if the time and money committed to creating and updating DRM technology by the industry is really worth the effort.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 9:27 am and is filed under Commentary, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.