In a previous life, I developed Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. With the rise (and decline) of Napster and other forms of P2P file sharing, DRM has suddenly become in vogue again. It seems that DRM, along with its cousin copy protection, is on a five year cycle. About every five years digital information copying becomes a real industry worry, companies implement a DRM or copy protection solution, that solution fails, and then DRM goes away for another five years.

This issue first became important while the PC was a new idea on the market. I recall purchasing software that had some form of copy protection included. One mechanism required a hardware “dongle” to be plugged into the serial or parallel port of the computer. Others required the original disk (with hidden files) to be inserted to start the software. Yet another scheme used a laser hole in the distribution medium to assure that a particular sector of the floppy couldn’t be written to or read from. Overall, these schemes generally failed. Why? Because five minutes after the scheme was invented, someone developed a means to bypass it. Again, these schemes ranged from the obvious to the sublime — I even recall traipsing through the assembly code of some application to remove the calls to the routine which talked to the laser hole on a diskette.

Later, copy protection schemes required answering some question from the installation guide (these even exist today). I’m not sure that anyone could develop a more perverse mechanism than that. I actually learned all of the capitals of the republics of the then-Soviet Union so that I could play my copy of Welltris without having to drag the book around.

Today this sort of thing has become fashionable again as the recording industry seeks to protect its profits by preventing people from copying music files. This was a big enough issue that it took down the king of MP3 sharing systems — Napster. (Sometime in the future I’ll post a retrospective on the legal defense of Napster.) Napster was easy with their big central database that was used for searching, but other tools based on completely decentralized searches (Gnutella, LimeWire, etc.) will be harder to take down.

And so we come upon the latest installment of Digital Rights Management. The recording industry, seeking to ensure that music doesn’t get shared, is going to put anti-copying alterations on CDs and is attempting to release music to the net by selling licenses to it. Even Windows Media Player includes license management to protect the redistribution of music and videos.

There’s a real problem with all of this however. First of all it’s a losing battle. The minute one scheme comes out, someone comes up with a way to break it. Generally speaking, it’s not that complicated to attack DRM because ultimately the unprotected goods have to be sent to your computer. From there, it’s only a matter of capturing the unprotected data. The five year cycle of DRM occurs because of this.

Second, it’s a bad thing in general. Today most content is protected by copyright. The beauty of copyright is that after a certain period of time, the content passes into the public domain. The founding fathers of the US did this (both for copyright as well as for patents) so that our culture would be enriched over time. However, DRM could actually undo virtually all of that.

DRM offers the opportunity to specify the terms and conditions for use of the content — a license. This is how software is distributed today — under license. If music and books were distributed this way, the works would never pass into the public domain. The terms and conditions would be spelled out and the buyer would have to agree. Only those who agreed to the license would ever be able to use those works. Imagine if the license also included a prohibition on criticizing the content (for example, you would never see a bad movie review). That may seem unrealistic to you now, but it’s wholly possible.

While the debate rages over MP3 and music sharing, the momentum is still against DRM schemes. Recently the recording industry was criticized for attempting to copy protect a recently released CD. In fact, I believe that we are at the point where the recording industry, represented by the RIAA, needs to recognize that a certain amount of music is going to be shared. To account for this, the RIAA membership should lower the price of music CDs. I believe that the high price of CDs will continue to drive the music lovers away from the record stores and onto the Internet. While bandwidth is still at a premium for many people, this is the time to get people used to paying 10 to 25 cents for a song that they can download. For a quarter, it’s hardly worth waiting hours to download via LimeWire, yet high quality audio could be made available via high performance servers that would counter the low performance and unpredictable quality of the peer networks