Tim O'Reilly Interview

s4 news machine writes "The UK webcaster stage4 has published a lengthy interview with Tim O'Reilly in which he talks about why DRM will fail, Macromedia Central and the rise of webservices, and that Microsoft should have been broken up."

Comments

DRM viability

[Anonymous Cowdog]

He thinks the experience of software protection in the 1980's shows DRM will fail.

Not so. In the 80's, software publishers were attempting to do DRM on open systems. Not open in the sense of open source, but open in the sense of being hackable.

The work underway now is to make systems closed, so that DRM *will* be technically doable. It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of. It just has to be good enough to keep consumer behavior in check.

If DRM fails, it will be because of consumer rejection, not for technical reasons.

Re:DRM viability

[rgmoore]

The work underway now is to make systems closed, so that DRM *will* be technically doable. It doesn't have to resist every attach Bruce Schnier can conceive of. It just has to be good enough to keep consumer behavior in check.

OTOH, the software protection schemes of the 1980's were dealing with comparatively primitive approaches to distributing the deprotected software. Today it's not enough to prevent most people from being able to bypass the DRM. You have to do that and make the system so that the few people who can bypass the DRM can't pass it out to the rest of the world using a system like Napster. That means either locking down systems to the point that they can't run anything that isn't signed (which kills backward compatibility among other problems) or playing whack-a-mole with file "sharing" systems. The first is unlikely to happen because of consumer resistence, and the second is technically very, very difficult.