DRM snippets
Digital rights management and technology
Interesting series of blog posts around the traps recently on DRM technology and the seemingly in-built wrongness of the enterprise.
First up over the weekend, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, told an interesting little story on his blog. He was visiting a media company and its executives were asking him to support their watermarking initiative. His response was illustrative;
Rather than provide a response in the room, I turned a question back to him. First, the network you're supposing will deliver a movie to a theater or a camera to a file server is the same network I'm presuming will run throughout your datacenter. On the internet, it's tough to distinguish a feature length movie from a data warehouse application (bits is bits) - so would your datacenter folks support the tech industry certifying content behind your firewalls with a digital watermark? In running business systems?
But even more illustrative was the response the media company gave to him;
On the former question, related to DRM in the datacenter, he said he'd run it up the flagpole with his IT folks and get back to me.
After a few days, I got a response. He'd spoken with their CIO, who dismissed the relevance of my proposal to manage all digital assets under the same scheme. "You'd have to start by proving I've stolen something."
Well, duh. Media companies are crapping in their own nest in one. They can't even see what their own executives can tell them. People hate being treated as criminals when they are not.
On that very note, Tim Bray of Ongoing fame (and also of Sun Micro) wrote an entry today about DRM. He mentions the Schwartz article, but more importantly links to a Cory Doctorow talk to the Microsoft research unit. Full of interesting ideas, I found it hugely enjoyable and I can only urge you to read all of it now. I certainly hope someone at Microsoft was listening to him.