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IETF on DRM, Internet Faxing

Posted by michael on from the building-it-into-the-infrastructure dept.

Rich Salz writes: "The Internet Research Task Force, a sister of the IETF, has a research group on Internet digital rights management. Ebooks, secure content, no-fair-use (sic), etc. According to a presentation at the last IETF, one of the group's work items is to influence other IETF activities to support/architect DRM. IDRM membership is open to anyone, presumably including nay-sayers." Meanwhile, the IETF has put on hold its work toward an internet fax standard, as Adobe and Xerox squabble over a file format.

1 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. real digital rights management by e_lehman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As far as I can tell, technically there *IS* one slim sliver hope for digital rights management on the internet.

    For concreteness, suppose we're talking about an eBook. It is a given that you can't secure an eBook: someone can always run it an emulated environment and dump the text to an ASCII file. And you can't prevent it from being passed around the internet once it is broken. A system like Freenet can be made more or less unbreakable (provided automatic passing of encrypted messages remains legal and permitted by ISPs.)

    The ray of hope is to make every copy of an eBook slightly different. In one book, use "grey" instead of "gray" on page 67. In another, put a comma before a short prepositional phrase on page 123. By using various combinations of these, a publisher could at least identify which copy is being passed around the net and prosecute the hell out of that person. (Copyright holders can probably get the law changed to prescribe a many-year prison sentence.)

    Clearly, this is no panacea. What if someone in Cuba breaks the eBook? What if you steal the book off someone else's computer, break it, and distribute their copy? What if you buy the eBook in a way that conceals your identity? Futhermore, it might be possible to combine several versions of the text to destroy these markers. (But this doesn't look easy to me.) And even if you can identify and prosecute the original copyright violator, that's little solace to the publisher after everyone already has a free copy of Harry Potter V in hand.

    But that's it: the only ray of hope I see for DRM, unless the internet itself is significantly hobbled-- which seems entirely possible.