Rant

The BIG DRM Mistake coming zoon

I’ve just been browsing around on the subject of DRM (some of you will have already gathered my take on it) and came across a brilliant article by Scott Granneman of SecurityFocus titled The big DRM mistake .
It underlines my own belief that DRM is neither working today nor will it work tomorrow. The fact that your iTunes Mp3 collection plays fine today on some devices doesn’t mean they will do so tomorrow - unless you remove the DRM infection which is usually pretty easy (so easy in fact that it’s laughable). FLV would be no different had it the ability to have a DRM mechanism attached to it - so why add it?
There’s a lot of whining and moaning going on about the lack of DRM in FLV and it is even cited as a negative point of the format. Please wake up, the lack of DRM features in FLV should be welcomed and I’d like to shake Adobe’s hand for resisting unfunded pressure to providing it. Normal access control features are largely sufficient anyway and a good token based authentication system takes a lot more effort to circumvent than some half hearted attempt at DRM.
I still find the analog to digital conversion argument the strongest one. One can always copy something that can be played back, even it means a loss of quality. But who cares about ‘high’ quality anyway? Camcorded Screeners are a big hit on P2P networks and YouTube’s videos aren’t exactly hight quality either. And I’ve been told they’re proving fairly popular… And have you ever counted the copies of so called protected files on any P2P network (not that you’d ever use one of course)?

So next time you buy a song on iTunes (I don’t want to single Apple out, others are equally nasty) remember that you are handing them your musical future. They are locking you in and so is any other DRM infected product. I don’t know about you but I personally don’t like being locked in.

2008 Gareth Murran.