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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."

3 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Security is never free by Russ+Nelson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The whole point behind DRM is to restrict copying. That is, the specific intention is to make some uses of the information completely impossible. There is No Way to make this completely transparent. Security is never free. So, really, it's an oxymoron to call any DRM "user-friendly". DRM is inherently user-unfriendly, because it exists to prevent the user from doing some things.
    -russ

    --
    Don't piss off The Angry Economist
  2. Great but broken analogy by MarkusQ · · Score: 5, Insightful
    An analogy we used often during development was that of car door locks. A determined thief would be able to get into any car door through numerous means. All car door locks really do is prevent your average everyday person from violating your car's security and stealing your sunglasses. But it doesn't get in the way of your use of the car.

    I love the analogy he uses, but there's a major flaw in it. On the car-door-lock side you have the owner, the car, the lock, and the thief. On the digital rights management side you have the copyright holder, the document, the DRM, and the consumer. It's easy to see that the car owner maps to the copyright holder, the document maps to the car, and the DRM maps to the lock.

    So, who's the thief? When selling this technology to their customers (the copyright holders) the thief doubtlessly maps to the consumers, or at least some subset of them.

    But when describing it to consumers, there is a tendency for the consumer to project themselves onto the car-owner (making, I suppose, the copyright holder map to the manufacturer), especially since it is their ease-of-use that's being considered. "After all," most consumers would think "I'm not a thief." This leaves them with the totaly false impression that they are somehow the ones being protected.

    So it may not be perfect as an analogy, but it is fantastic> as a sales pitch.

    -- MarkusQ

    1. Re:Great but broken analogy by Stiletto · · Score: 5, Insightful


      A better analogie is: People don't normally steal a pack of gum, since it is pretty cheap and easy to just walk into the store and buy one.

      Today's DRM gum would make you have to sign license documents when buying the gum, agree to pay royalties on the gum if you resell it, and a device physically attached to the gum that reports back to the store every time a piece is removed to chew.

      It's a pain in the butt, thwarts customers, and in the end it's easier to steal than buy.