[Infowarrior] - DRM Wars: The Next Generation

[Richard Forno]

DRM Wars: The Next Generation
Wednesday August 9, 2006 by Ed Felten
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1051

Last week at the Usenix Security Symposium, I gave an invited talk, with the
same title as this post. The gist of the talk was that the debate about DRM
(copy protection) technologies, which has been stalemated for years now,
will soon enter a new phase. I¹ll spend this post, and one or two more,
explaining this.

Public policy about DRM offers a spectrum of choices. On one end of the
spectrum are policies that bolster DRM, by requiring or subsidizing it, or
by giving legal advantages to companies that use it. On the other end of the
spectrum are policies that hinder DRM, by banning or regulating it. In the
middle is the hands-off policy, where the law doesn¹t mention DRM, companies
are free to develop DRM if they want, and other companies and individuals
are free to work around the DRM for lawful purposes. In the U.S. and most
other developed countries, the move has been toward DRM-bolstering laws,
such as the U.S. DMCA.

The usual argument in favor of bolstering DRM is that DRM retards
peer-to-peer copyright infringement. This argument has always been bunk ‹
every worthwhile song, movie, and TV show is available via P2P, and there is
no convincing practical or theoretical evidence that DRM can stop P2P
infringement. Policymakers have either believed naively that the next
generation of DRM would be different, or accepted vague talk about
speedbumps and keeping honest people honest.

At last, this is starting to change. Policymakers, and music and movie
companies, are starting to realize that DRM won¹t solve their P2P
infringement problems. And so the usual argument for DRM-bolstering laws is
losing its force.

You might expect the response to be a move away from DRM-bolstering laws.
Instead, advocates of DRM-bolstering laws have switched to two new
arguments. First, they argue that DRM enables price discrimination ‹
business models that charge different customers different prices for a
product ‹ and that price discrimination benefits society, at least
sometimes. Second, they argue that DRM helps platform developers lock in
their customers, as Apple has done with its iPod/iTunes products, and that
lock-in increases the incentive to develop platforms. I won¹t address the
merits or limitations of these arguments here ‹ I¹m just observing that
they¹re replacing the P2P piracy bogeyman in the rhetoric of DMCA boosters.

Interestingly, these new arguments have little or nothing to do with
copyright. The maker of almost any product would like to price discriminate,
or to lock customers in to its product. Accordingly, we can expect the
debate over DRM policy to come unmoored from copyright, with people on both
sides making arguments unrelated to copyright and its goals. The
implications of this change are pretty interesting. They¹ll be the topic of
my next post.