willyhoops;198878 Wrote: 
> anyone with the vast skills required to build a real sophisticated drm
> that makes everyone happy would make a fortune.

You don't understand. DRM can not work in the way that you think it
can, and it's not a matter of someone not having enough "skills" to
have done it yet.

The ENTIRE BASIS of DRM is to hide the key from the user. You are
giving them the encrypted thing and the key to decode it, and hoping
that they can't find the key because you have obfuscated it. Any
sufficiently determined programmer can find it, no matter how hard you
try to hide it.

So the only thing that makes DRM "work" is to hide its mechanism by
trade secret, or to make it illegal to "traffic" in a "circumvention
device" which is already what the DMCA does. As a matter of fact, a
russian programmer visiting the US was JAILED for revealing that Adobe
had defrauded the customers of its eBook software. Adobe claimed that
it contained sophisticated, secure encryption when in fact is was a
trivial XOR function against a repeating string. So if that's already
illegal under current law, how much more legal support do you suggest
DRM needs? Should we behead the programmers?

Given that DRM works by hiding the key from the user, what exactly
makes you think that a "platform independent" DRM scheme could ever
work? Any standard would be "cracked" instantly - indeed, if the spec
is opened then there is NOTHING TO CRACK! It's not a matter of
technical prowess on the DRM supplier's part to prevent that from
happening.

This is really basic stuff that has beaten to death a zillion times
since the DMCA has been introduced. I won't even get into how
ridiculous it is to expect that you can lock down the whole thing to
the point that nobody can get their hands on unencrypted music any
more. It's just absurd.


-- 
seanadams
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