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DRM is a colosally bad idea. Think of it like this: today you alone have a piece of content (which you spent lots of time/money creating), the end state is that it's in the public domain, and how did you make money going from here to there? The fairest way to do it is the Ransom model. A similar but more formal arrangement is the Street Performer Protocol.

An idea I like is an incremental ransom model. You spend $100 million making a movie, say 7200 seconds (two hours) long. You chop it into pieces a half-second long, encrypt each with a separate 128-bit key, and publish the 14,400 encrypted tarballs with bittorrent. Now your problem is to make back a few hundred million dollars by selling the 14,400 secret keys. You can ransom them, just as Stephen King did with chapters of The Plant (but without his unnecessary condition that some minimum fraction of consumers be non-defectors). You can auction off others on eBay. You can donate some keys to charity. You can sell some keys to sponsors, e.g. Hershey might want to buy the keys for the sequence where somebody is eating Reese's pieces because Mars/M&M didn't want to invest in your movie.

Of course some keys will represent more interesting parts of the movie than others, and you'll want to think about how to reflect those differences in the prices you try to get for them. A few exciting bits, released for cheap, might make good teasers.

I would be really curious to see how it would work out if a major movie were released this way. It would be really interesting to see how the economics of that would play out.

And despite the fact that people routinely say "everything gets cracked," there is evidence to contradict that. DRM is going to get "Good Enough" that for all practical purposes it will not be crackable.

But there's the rub. Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the Caribbean from her. Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if he can descramble the CSS-encrypted VOB -- video object -- on his DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is only useful to Bob as a drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob -- the attacker -- with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext.

Hilarity ensues.

I think the submitter wasn't seriously suggesting DRM, but rather trying to say that this was some sort of DRM. You're right, of course, that it isn't. Neither is an armored truck, nor a safe. They're all just plain security.

"This technology is a speed bump. It's trying to dissuade the average consumer from making as many copies as they like," said First4Internet Chief Executive Mathew Gilliat-Smith.

This is a fallacy for two reasons: one technical, and one social. They're both bad for society, though.

Here's the technical reason: I don't need to be a cracker to break your DRM. I only need to know how to search Google, or Kazaa, or any of the other general-purpose search tools for the cleartext that someone smarter than me has extracted.
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Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that their technology is meant to be proof against average users, not organized criminal gangs like the Ukranian pirates who stamp out millions of high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to be proof against sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof against anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down the shift key at the right moment, or use a search engine. At the end of the day, the user DRM is meant to defend against is the most unsophisticated and least capable among us.

Netscape is horrid with standards compliance, as earlier posters have stated. IE 5, and to a lesser extent 4, are quite good with supporting HTML 4.0 and the CSS1 (Cascading Style Sheets) specifications. Most of the sites I've seen with "IE only-looks bad in Netscape" only post that because their style sheets are CSS1-correct but Netscape has lots and lots of problems with some of the features in the style sheets. You may want to check out The Little Shop of CSS Horrors for a great demonstration of cross-browser compatibility.

uhh, it sez right at the top, Matthew Haughey