DRM Take II — Digital Personal Property

Diabolus Advocatus writes "Ars Technica has an article on a new form of DRM being considered by the IEEE. It's called Digital Personal Property and although it removes some of the drawbacks of conventional DRM it introduces new drawbacks of its own. From the article: 'Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects. For instance, you might loan your car to a friend, a family member, or a neighbor. You might do so on many different occasions and for different lengths of time. But you are unlikely to leave the car out front of your house with the keys in it and a sign on it saying, "Take me!" If you did, you might never see the vehicle again. It's that ability to lose control over property that is central to the DPP system. DPP files are encrypted. They can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here's the trick: anyone who can view your content can also "steal" it irrevocably. The simple addition of a way to lose content instantly leads consumers to set up a "circle of trust" that can be as wide as they like but will not extend to total strangers on the Internet.'"

Comments

So, let me get this straight...

[natehoy]

I head out of the house and want to listen to the latest Lolcats album, "I cn haz Whyt Album?", which I've paid my $22 for ($1 to the artist, $6 to the studio, $15 to the Centralized Playkey Authority). Because I want to listen to it at the beach, I take my playkey for each song in the album and transfer it to my music player. Let's assume the transfer process is always perfect and you never get a "sent but never received" issue.

So I'm sitting on the beach, and decide to take a swim. Forgetting, in the process, that my MP3 player is in my swimtrunks. Instant flash memory destruction, and the playkeys are no more.

Now I have to go buy the White Album all over again. Or somehow recover those playkeys.

Thanks, but unless they make CDs illegal, I'll stick with those, and rip them as unencumbered MP3. And if they make CDs illegal, I'll just stop buying music. If I started playing the collection I've already legally purchased on CD, I could play it continuously and not hear the same song again for a couple of weeks...

I can imagine a black market in playkeys, except of course that in reality anyone who wants to bypass the system will simply have their neighbor's 12-year-old kid hack the playkey nonsense off the songs.