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Microsoft Awarded Patent For Peer-To-Peer DRM

Posted by kdawson on from the in-it-for-the-royalties dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Music DRM might not be as dead as previously thought. InformationWeek reports that Microsoft has been awarded a digital-rights management patent for a distributed DRM system that works over peer-to-peer networks and uses encrypted public and private keys as the licensing mechanism. The author claims that patent number 7,594,275, entitled simply 'Digital rights management system,' is significant because, while centralized music stores like iTunes don't use DRM anymore, the Microsoft patent makes it possible that peer-to-peer networks could reemerge in the future as a viable, albeit protected, source of content."

6 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. idiots by Tom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "embrace" and all that?

    Look:

    it possible that peer-to-peer networks could reemerge in the future as a viable, albeit protected, source of content."

    re-emerge? they're already here, and not going away
    viable? check, they are today
    source of content? check, massively

    protected? who wants that? There's no demand on the customer side. Unprotected will always win. Heck, I've downloaded cracks for games that I bought and I'm sure if I were to ask for a show of hands, it would be huge.

    How about making content more convenient instead of more troublesome? Maybe then you'd stand a chance, you know?

    --
    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
    1. Re:idiots by Tynin · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Maybe this is what you were getting at with your

      "embrace" and all that?

      but perhaps they are getting a patent on this in order for them to bring suit against any other bittorrent client that uses encryption, effectively making them to remove the encryption "feature" or face imminent pestering by a small horde of MS lawyers. Sure, they couldn't do much, at first to developers in other countries. But as the Pirate Bay trial has shown us, other(and more over time) countries tend to be making pro-IP choices. Thankfully, MS hasn't gone all RIAA on the world of software on a grandma by grandma basis... yet. But who knows, maybe they have a serious, long term, view(war) on the nature of how bittorrent and other p2p software will no doubt develop. So perhaps they are seriously going the road of the 3 E's yet again.

      Getting the traffic your client makes to be encrypted, especially now p2p is so prevalent, simply will become a good idea if net neutrality doesn't come about. Or even just to finally flood the internet with so much encrypted traffic to give a big middle finger to all the intelligence (and no doubt ad) agencies of the world trying to read what we do and profile us on our own tax dollars.

      I am kind of concerned with this development, but I guess it is just one concern on a pile of many. We really need to do something about software patents...

      OK, no more to drink tonight... to paranoid ;-)

      ::refits tin foil hat::

  2. filed years ago by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Are blog drooling morons not aware that patents take YEARS to go from filing to accept to grant? You can't tell anything about a company's strategic direction from their patent portfolio. Engineers get bribes for filing, and lawyers get paychecks, and that's about all the motivation needed to file a patent - any old shit will do.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  3. Re:DRM Keys by Tom · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Didn't RTFA either, but there are several distributed key systems where you can send a key to X people and if Y of them (with Y=X, and it can be a specific number) come together, they can decrypt. Something like that could work in a P2P system where you could have several distributed points of authority instead of one, none of them holds "the key", and some of them can go down and you can still assemble the key from the remaining ones.

    --
    Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
  4. iPlayer by mccalli · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Re-emerge? BBC iPlayer, in its desktop not Flash-streaming form, is already a DRM'd p2p distribution system. Has been very successful though not as much as the straight Flash-based service from what I can tell.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  5. Re:Simple question by IBBoard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's no place for DRM in the world. It's fundamentally flawed at its principles.

    Just to play devil's advocate, there is a place for DRM in the world, just not in the consumer space. While I hate DRM on my music/games (especially since I use Linux and other alternate devices) it could be suitably applied on corporate documents to enforce access controls. In that situation it could still be cracked, but you've then got a very obvious and often quite large legal entity to point the finger at and sue for breach of confidence or contract or whatever, which means that they're far less likely to crack it (plus you're likely to trust them to some degree anyway, since you have a business relationship with them). For "B2B" situations it would provide extra protection on top of a contract that would stop accidental leaks (or at least make the leaked document less usable)