Jeremy Allison On Why DRM Will Never Work

eldavojohn writes "At the ZDNet site, Jeremy Allison (a well-known employee of the Google corporation) goes on a hilarious rant against Digital Rights Management. He compares the access restriction technology with underwear gnomes & Star Trek while ending with: 'Believing in a DRM business model is like joining Star Fleet security, putting on your red shirt, and volunteering to beam down to the new unexplored planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Someone will be coming back from that mission, it's just not likely to be the security guard. Always a true engineer, Scotty had the good sense to stay safely on board the ship.'"

Comments

Re:deja vu?

[hydraulos]

Found it. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/27/19 6247/

Actualy if you search for "DRM" on /. you get Manny simular results.

Tag it 'oldnews' ?

Simple math

[Bullfish]

Really, the answer as to why DRM (and such things) are doomed to failure lie in the hacker to security programmer ratio, which is probably something like 1000:1. Simple attrition overwhelms the code eventually. Not to discount either that some of the hackers are very good.

Correction

[geekoid]

If it wasn't for money, you wouldn'tbe able to download TV shows.

DRM does nothing to prevent someone from copying the content.

This issue is about society and the rights of citizens, not about one person.

It has become very clear, that people will pay for content, even when that content can be had for free.
iTune has sold over 2.5Billion tracks, all of which can be found for free.
The people selling to the market ned to provide it convienantly, and at the price the MARKET is willing to pay, not what they want the market to pay.

Re:Correction

[MightyYar]

The big problem is that there is an entire generation of college kids that think everything digital is free for the taking unless it is properly secured, and if it is not properly secured then it is basically an invitation to take it. The big media companies have only themselves to blame for this. If they had been a little more savvy, they would have started selling online a long time ago. Instead, they let the ad hoc P2P services pave the way and they lost control of their own product. I have no sympathy for them at all. Restricting your paying customers is a bad idea when no-cost alternatives exist, especially when most of your income comes from people with more time than money.

Not that you need an example, but here I go anyway. I have been downloading Southpark for years (I don't have cable, and Southpark isn't worth $100/month). iTunes started offering it, which is great because I value my time and think that $2 is money well spent. HOWEVER, I can't watch the episodes on my stinking TV! With P2P I could just burn them to a CD and watch the AVI on my $25 DVD player. So now I'm left with the situation where I can buy the episode for $2 and watch it on my monitor, or download it for free and watch it anywhere I like. Not to mention that the free version is higher-quality!

Tell me how restricting the paying customer is a sound business strategy?

Re:Correction

[stjobe]

/* Anecdote warning: Anecdote follows this line */

I visited a friend of mine a few days back, and he'd just bought a song off iTunes while simultaneously downloading it through a bittorrent network. He was slightly upset, to say the least, when he not only got the song faster over P2P, but it was also better quality (192 kbps vs 128 kbps from iTunes - the difference was clearly noticeable just by listening to the songs). He played the two songs back to back over and over again, getting angrier and angrier, saying "Why do I pay for an inferior product? Where's the incentive for me to pay to download instead of just downloading for free if the quality is worse?"

He then proceeded to check the bitrates on a fair portion of his music collection and was not pleased with the fact that the songs with the worst bitrates were the ones he actually paid to download.

This is a not-so-technical guy (an english teacher) who in my eyes is a regular guy who wants to do "the right thing" but has no real incentive apart from vague moral arguments about stealing and intellectual property. He doesn't mind paying for the songs he wants, but he does mind not getting the best quality product when he pays for it.

I couldn't give him a reason, and he couldn't come up with one either. I'm sure he's going to continue buying songs from iTunes, but he'll probably also going to continue downloading them off P2P.

/* End anecdote. */

So I agree - the paid version needs to be equally functional (or better) to the ones available for free. If they are, I see no reason for anybody not to pay for them. Maybe that's what the music industry needs to understand.

"Engineers should refuse to create DRM systems..."

[dpbsmith]

And if software engineers were true professionals with a professional code of ethics, they probably would. At the very least, it is their ethical responsibility to attempt to the very best of their ability to make management understand the futility of DRM.

For example, consider the ICCP code of ethics:

"2.5: Integrity: One will not knowingly lay claims to competence one does not demonstrably possess."

It seems to me that an engineer who, knowing that it is impossible to create a DRM system that does what it is supposed to do, nevertheless accepts an assignment to create one, is implicitly claiming competence he or she does not possess and is in violation of this point.

"2.7: Accountability: ...The personal accountability of consultants and technical experts is especially important because of the positions of unique trust inherent in their advisory roles. Consequently, they are accountable for seeing to it that known limitations of their work are fully disclosed, documented and explained."

"3.4: Statements: One shall not make false or exaggerated statements as to the state of affairs existing or expected regarding any aspect of information technology or the use of computers."

Re:This is going to get all kinds of responses, bu

[Anonymous Coward]

and a fantastic rebuttal, as usual.

but what should i expect out of a fucktard who quotes himself in his sig?

Re:Yes, I know

[edraven]

Very, very simply, here is the premise behind DRM.

1. I know a secret
2. I want to tell you the secret
3. I don't want you to tell anyone else the secret
4. I don't trust you

Perhaps you can see now why there's no solution to that scenario.

Re:The analog hole

[cdrguru]

Yes, people will put up with incredibily bad content in order to get something for free. And part of the attraction is that it is illegal or just somehow wrong to do it. In many ways, this is probably more than half the motivation in the first place.

Also correct in that it has to be stopped at the distribution level. Nobody really cares if you buy a DVD and make a copy of it for yourself. What they care about is you make a copy for the rest of the Internet-using folks on the planet. What scares content producers is the "Apple II scenario" - you sell one copy in the US (English), one copy in Madrid (Spanish) and one copy in Frankfurt (German) and never, ever another copy. This is certainly where things are going. It will happen with music and could happen with movies.

There is no doubt that content owners and their investors are going to want to stop mass distribution of their content without their permission. And it is also true that a substantial fraction of the population is going to fight them every step of the way. The content owners are going to win in the end, one way or another because they can always take their marbles and go home. The investors put their money into something else and everyone wins - except the content that fills the vacuum is very very different. Better? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly different.

DRM isn't the final solution, but merely a step along the way. No, I don't think it will take 20 years to resolve this because as broadband Internet access reaches more and more people the easy availability of free pirated material will increase. Fewer people will buy when faced with the decision of a perfect digital rip for free vs. higher and higher priced content serving an ever-shrinking buying public. I see pirate copies getting better, not worse, and with faster download speeds (and faster upload sharing speeds) it taking less and less time to get free content rather than paying for it. The end result will be drastically shrinking sales leading to a self-destructive pricing spiral. As the price of a music CD increases, more and more people will just download rather than paying.

So unless they can block mass redistribution, the content owners are pretty much doomed. The investors will walk away leaving them with no capital and no possibility of promoting anything. The music promotion business falls first, probably followed shortly by movies. I think we've pretty much convinced the book publishers to stay away from electronic formats for anything that might really sell, so they are immune. Software might have a chance, but most industry people think "Software As A Service" is the only way to stay financially afloat.

DRM isn't a solution. Maybe splitting the Internet into "luser service" which is just the web and email and a much higher-priced "geek service" that allows other protocols to be used. Maybe gradually replacing general-purpose computers with "web appliances" that would be incapable of sharing or downloading P2P content would work. Probably not. I think mass redistribution is pretty much unstoppable because the ISPs sell pirated content as a feature of their broadband service and turning it off would shrink market share. And we will soon have an entire generation that believes free content is their birthright.

Re:This is going to get all kinds of responses, bu

[Opportunist]

The failure of DRM (and the content industry altogether) is that they didn't realize how the market works. You cannot force someone to buy. You can only encourage.

When I buy a TV set, I have additional value compared to a stolen one or one that "fell off a truck". When the TV fails, I can claim warranty. I can go to the dealer or to the manufacturer and trade my faulty product against a good one. With other "hardware", you get other benefits. Often you have access to various services (support, installation, in case of computerhardware drivers...) or other added goodies that you simply would not have when you steal it.

With content it is exactly reverse. The stolen content has a bigger "value" than one bought. The value of content is determined by its usefulness. And you can't argue that content is worth more when it is restricted to one medium, impossible to shift and bound to malfunction when used with certain display devices that the manufacturer of the content doesn't approve. It doesn't even have the same "value" as content that allows me to shift freely and display in any way I deem appropriate.

So stolen content is "worth more" than content bought.

And that's the big fallacy of the industry. Not only do people save money by stealing it (which would be the same for stolen "hardware"), they actually get content that is more valuable than when they went and bought it.

And here's the big problem. It's not that people wouldn't buy content, despite it being overpriced IMO. What makes them copyers is that copying increases content value. Not in terms of its price, but its usefulness is vastly increased by removing restrictions.