Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Designing a More User-Friendly DRM

Posted by michael on from the oxymorons dept.

onethumb writes: "As one of the core engineers on MightyWords' (now-defunct) DRM for digital documents, I was impressed by Dmitry Skylarov's great analysis of our work the other day. Planet eBook is now running my reply as their feature article explaining our design goals and decisions for our decidedly user-friendly DRM solution."

1 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. DRM Balance by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 2, Interesting
    As with most problems with complex issues, there is a balance which must be struck.

    I think that with 'friendly' DRM, that balance is between Privacy and Weak Protection.

    If the DRM is supposed to be very effective, there will be privacy concerns because the authorison to the rights for certain media will have to be attached to static identifiers, this allowing the unique identification or people or computers. Of course many of us would not want that.

    On the other hand, if we avoided the privacy issues, the DRM would become too weak because it would be more difficult to attach the right to play music or watch a movie to any one person and no other, allowing people to create hacked 'identities' and such.

    Judging from the article, it seems these guys are taking the strongerp protection route (which makes sense if they want to make a product that will satisfy industry) since they talk about forcing a user to unlock the content once and only once, and they want a cross platform uid/passwd which is unique to your identity.