Network Security Blog

DRM Talk for Hewlett-Packard Research

This is a really good article on Digital Rights Management by Cory Doctrow of Electronic Frontier Foundation fame. It’s plain text, which make it a little hard to read for some.

The following two paragraphs were my favorite part of the whole paper:

In DRM use-restriction scenarios, there is only a sender and an attacker, *who is also the intended recipient of the message*. I transmit a song to you so that you can listen to it, but try to stop you from copying it. This requires that your terminal obey my commands, even when you want it to obey *your* commands.

Understood this way, use-restriction and privacy are antithetical. As is often the case in security, increasing the security on one axis weakens the security on another. A terminal that is capable of being remotely controlled by a third party who is adversarial to its owner is a terminal that is capable of betraying its owner’s privacy in numerous ways without the owner’s consent or knowledge. A terminal that can *never* be used to override its owner’s wishes is by definition a terminal that is better at protecting its owner’s privacy.