Quote:
Originally Posted by acidzebra
I agree companies will keep trying to look for ways to "protect" "their" electronic content against threats that may or may not exist.
Postulate perfect DRM: unbreakable, "future-proof", owned by a single or consortium of companies, the majority of electronic content produced burdened with it.
The losses to all of us are hard to oversee: I do not for one moment believe that corporate entities like that are EVER going to be willing to release content to the public domain, we'll see what is happening now: companies will just "sit" on the content (who knows, it might become profitable again someday), try to extend copyright terms indefinitely (not a new thing), and if they go belly-up, the content goes down in flames with them.
Bleak? Very. And of course, even if we do find an acceptable alternative to DRM, there is no guarantee that some bean-counter in a corporation won't think the whole DRM-deal is more profitable and go ahead with implementation anyway. That is the problem with corporations: you are not dealing with reasonable people, you are dealing with soulless entities aimed solely at making a profit.
That said, I do not believe this "perfect" DRM exists: it is only feasible if you give them control over the content, the hardware, and all the steps in between. Which would be terminally stupid, from both the consumer's as the content creator's point of view.
And in the case of books, unless we go to a 100% ebook world which I don't see happening anytime soon, there will always be the paper book, a band saw, a high-throughput scanner, OCR, and dedicated pirate proofreaders. The quality of these pirated products will only rise over time as scanning/OCR technology gets better and people stuck in this bleak future get 'behind the cause'.
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In reference to the myth of the perfect DRM system for books:
Any digital security can be broken. The goal is to make it more expensive to break the security then the rewards for breaking it.
The fundamental problem with any technical solution for DRM on books is that the interface between the written words and the human has to be unencrypted so it will always be possible to exploit this interface. It's also not a lot of data and it is very easy to remove any analog noise and get a perfect digital copy. (Note: Even if someone can encrypt the neural network between the eyes and the brain you would also have to disable all motor function so the person couldn't type out what they are reading. I doubt people would accept that solution so I still maintain that it can always be exploited
).
Consider the following as a worst case method of inefficiently exploiting this interface. You hire two people who can type at 50 words per minute at $20 per hour. Take the resultant text and compare it and manually resolve differences. If an average book is 200,000 words it's 134 hours of typing labour and 30 hours of editing. Adding $40 for the two copies of the books we're talking $3,300 maximum per book to circumvent. I'm purposely using an inefficient method that nobody would actually use.
It's obviously much more rewarding to exploit the DRM directly because you only have to do that once.
My point is it doesn't matter what wonderful new method of DRM technology companies come up with the unit value of the book it's protecting can't be worth more then $3.3K or someone will likely exploit it. If people are angry enough at the DRM they will volunteer their time so the $3,300 become $40.
If you tell an author that "this wonderful DRM technology will protect your book from evil pirates" you should also have to tell them that their book can't be worth more then $3,300. Also note that the example works on paper books as well.
Yes companies will always make promises of wonderful new DRM technologies that can't be broken because their business model is based on illusion and spreading FUD.
Bruce Schneier's book "Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World" is an excellent book on the subject.