Metrics for Digital Rights Management
September 8th, 2006 by David Sohn
On Thursday CDT released a paper called “Evaluating DRM: Building a Marketplace for the Convergent World.” We informally call it our “metrics” paper, because it aims to provide metrics for evaluating DRM. Of course, these aren’t metrics in the sense of fully quantifiable criteria that can be precisely measured and recorded. Nor have we attempted to tell people what specific DRM schemes or products they should or shouldn’t purchase. Rather, we try to lay out systematically the types of questions one would want to ask to understand all the various choices and tradeoffs involved in a given DRM scheme. It’s a set of tools.
The paper starts from the premise that, like it or not, DRM is likely to be a continuing feature of the media marketplace. But the forms DRM will take, and the impact it will have, will depend in part upon how the public responds to it in that marketplace. We hope the paper can contribute to ongoing discussion about both DRM in general and in specific implementations.
As a practical matter, it may be that the kind of systematic inquiry suggested by these metrics is more likely to be undertaken by product reviewers and tech enthusiasts than by members of the mainstream public. But in the age of the Internet, word can get around. In the end, judgments about what DRM-equipped products represent good bargains, given price and other factors, will be up to individuals. Our hope is that there will be sufficient choices, and sufficient information, for consumers to vote with their wallets.
This paper was in the works for a while and a number of folks provided valuable input and comments. In-house, Alissa Cooper, Ross Schulman, Michael Steffen, and Ross Housewright all contributed. Susan Crawford of Cardozo Law School, Bill Rosenblatt of DRM Watch, and Bruce Gitlin, among others, were generous in providing detailed and knowledgeable feedback.
We also did a quick online cheat sheet laying out the basic metrics, with links to the explanatory text from the paper.
This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 10:34 am and is filed under Digital Copyright. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 14th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
I am a Product Manager at Essential Security Software (http://www.essentialsecurity.com) a company that develops DRM software for personal and small business users. While the CDT paper and many other articles place thier focus on DRM technologies as a(potentially menacing) means to preserve copywrite in digital media, such as music and videos. I strongly believe that DRM applied in a different way can be of great benefit to the general population, by ensuring privacy of communication between two users.
I believe people should have the tools at thier disposal to keep thier email communications strictly between themselves and thier intended recipients. If I send an email that is private and meant for you, I don’t want you to be able to forward it to anyone else. Think of having a private conversation over dinner; sending a regular email has the potential to be like standing on your table and shouting the intimate details of your conversation to the room. DRM can keep these type of conversations at a whisper. Nearly everyone has sent an email at one time or another contains content that if forwarded to a wide audience or displayed on the internet could have negative implications. Going a step beyond encryption, DRM gives the sender confidence that they can enforce a level of trust between themselves and thier recipient.
Since encryption is a fundamental part of DRM technologies, expanding the number of people who regularly encrypt thier email helps to preserve our freedom from those in government who might want to overstep the constitutional restrictions of thier powers. I strictly beleive the government has no right to read mine or anybody elses private messages. DRM can help in this by not only encrypting the message, but also by limiting the amount of time the message can be read, after which the keys are destroyed and the message contents are unrecoverable.
In short, people must start approaching DRM technologies as a method for expanding and preserving freedoms, not just limiting them.