Thread: Digital Rights Management

The term Digital Rights Management makes it sound like users are being assured of a lot of cool features and functions when they buy any new content or hardware. But the reality in many cases is that DRM only resfricts the ways in which you can use the media you've already paid for. High-quality digital file formats and high-speed Internet connections have led to ahuge amount of file sharing and piracy
of music, movies, games, books and software. The corporations that produce them have put various mechanisms into place to protect their copyrights; however DRM is much more involved than just preventing users from making copies of files.

There are various forms of DRM that are designed to prevent users from copying legitimately purchased media onto multiple computers or portable players. Some companies prefer to let you copy your files only to certain pre-approved devices, or to allow only a certain number of copies to be made. Unfortunately, there is no one standard for DRM, meaning that users are often locked into convoluted schemes by multiple content providers. DRM has caused countless headaches to people who pay for legitimate copies of their music and movies:

- Songs purchased from Apple's iTunes Music Store can't be copied to portable players that aren't iPods.

- Sony sold audio CDs that surreptitiously installed the equivalent of a Trojan on users' computers, compromising their security.

- Yahoo and MSN music have both decided to shut down, and once their authentication servers are offline, users won't be able to authenticate and play any music they've paid for.



- Some digital TV broadcasts can be flagged so that video recording devices are disabled, preventing users from watching shows at a convenient time.

- Even a decade ago, DVDs shipped with CSS (Content Scrambling System), a short-lived attempt to prevent illegal ripping, which actually only prevented the discs frDm working on Linux and other legitimate playback environments.

Fortunately or unfortunately, most of these methods can be cracked quite easily. Software to make perfect copies of DVDs has been widely available for years, and some "protected" audio CDs can be ripped be "'simply holding down the [Shift] key while inserting them into a PC, i.e. preventing the autorun function. And anyone can burn iTunes or Yahoo music onto regular audio CDs and then re-rip them, or route their soundcard's output back to its line in jack and record the incoming stream as a new file.

Pirates and anti-DRM software vendors in many countries are being prosecuted anyway under DRM laws such as the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or are being scared into abandoning their illegal activities. But it's ordinary, non-technically-inclined users who are suffering the most, by paying for content in formats that they simply can't use wherever and whenever they need to.