The last week and the next have been (and will be) filled with end-of-quarter hell, but the good news is that the summer is on the horizon. Over in a couple places today, I saw the mostly verbatim article about Sony's new DRM tech that allows one copy per CD. It was surprising to see just this directed message with little to no commentary by the news outlets.

Under the new solution, tracks ripped and burned from a copy-protected disc are copied to a blank CD in Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format. The DRM embedded on the discs bars the burned CD from being copied.

My, what consumer wouldn't want this? Gee, better yet I get my only copy in a Windows only format. This great line then followed:

Secure burning means that iPod users do not have any means of transferring tracks to their device, because Apple Computer has yet to license its FairPlay DRM for use on copy-protected discs.

So not only is the new DRM not compatible with old DRM, but Sony gets to get in a nice dig into Apple, Apple's licensing and their inability to play "fair". The irony is quite thick. If consumers weren't getting such a short end of this stick, it might actually be comical to watch these two MegaMediaCorps battle it out for who gets to tell you what to do with your stuff.

Meanwhile, today, I also had the pleasure of seeing a talk by Paul Kocher as the final lecture for my computer security class. It was a fast moving and engaging fly-through of the need to approach security problems by looking at entire systems instead of relying on layers of abstractions. One of the most interesting parts was where he characterized the emergent stalemate behavior of many computer security issues-- the back and forth of virus writers and anti-virus solutions, of crypto makers and crypto breakers, of spammers and spam filters that happen again and again.

This reminded me of an earlier lecture in the class where we learned that an impossibility result had been proven wherein it is simply not possible to write a virus detector that can detect all viruses. Seeing as how this was the first of the stalement examples above, it left we wondering if such a similar result can be proven for DRM systems. If music and video must at some point be decrypted so that we can enjoy it, how will any perfectly uncopyable system ever be created?

And of course, the goal of DRM is just to make it a nuisance for copiers to do their thing, but seeing the spin of these articles trying to sell their version of reality ("the sensible way forward") can make you cough a bit. If every computer stalemate has a good guy and a bad guy, who is who on this one?

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:57 AM in general | Comments (0)