Wired News: Reasons to Love Open-Source DRM talks about Sun's idea of an open source, interoperable DRM.

I must be missing something here.

Alice gives the encrypted text, keys and algorithm to Bob with the source to the algorithm implementation. Doesn't this make it even easier for Bob to give the plain text to Carol? And surely giving the algorithm to Bob makes it possible for Bob to write a program to give to David so that when Alice gives David the encrypted text and the keys, David can easily produce plain text directly rather than having to re-record (or whatever) the plain text output of the original algorithm.

As Ed Felter wrote, DRM inevitably converges on Spyware because the only way to make it work is to obfuscate the process. If you hand out the algorithm and program, you encourage the production of hacked works that simply bypass it.


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[ 03-Apr-06 8:04am ] [ ]