Big Music, DRM and cash machines
p2pnet.net news view:- My long article analysing Steve Jobs open letter (here and here) included a contrast between DRM and the security that banks use.
I’ve also tried to clarify the usage of terms such as DRM. For any technical person who wasn’t sure why I included this obvious fact, please read the following in The Independent from John Kennedy, head of the music industry body IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry).
It should be neither impossible, nor unreasonably burdensome, to implement interoperability whilst maintaining the security of DRM,” he said. He noted that banks have interoperable cash machine systems that use DRM, while mobile phones use DRM for voice and billing services without compromising the security of services.
Mr. Kennedy isn’t alone in his confusion, with the article also quoting William Cook, a lawyer falsely claiming it’s possible to have interoperable “copy protection”.
While it’s true the same file formats can be used, at the end of the day, there needs to be secret keys whose purpose is to restrict interoperability between content and devices to those who have made specific business arrangements. DRM requires a restriction on interoperability, and there’s absolutely no other way to create a DRM system.
And cash machines don’t, of course, use DRM or anything remotely similar.
Cash machines use cryptography to ensure third parties aren’t able to intercept and interpret communications, but are not using cryptography to limit interoperability. In both the bank and mobile phone situation, third parties are the threat the technology is protecting against, not the owner of the device.
It’s critically important that we challenge this comparison as DRM and legitimate uses of cryptography are not at all related, and the controversy with DRM is based on an illegitimate use of technology.
Cryptography isn’t the problem: the attempt to abuse cryptography to treat the destination of the message, the owner of the technology, as the threat is the problem.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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February 13th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Thanks for pointing this out Russell.