Digital Rights Management or DRM is an umbrella term being used to describe a number of technologies that place limits on what can be done with digital information. DRM prevents you from copying data unless you have the right key and the right software to unlock the data. DRM is strongly advocated by the corporations behind the various DRM programs, focusing on its benefits but purposefully sidestepping DRM’s downside. This piece will highlight how steep the downside can be by focusing on three threats posed by DRM technologies.
The Free Software/Linux Threat
When some piece of data is protected with DRM, think of it as being placed inside a virtual box with a digital lock. In order to unlock the data, you need to have the right key and the right software to use the key. This poses a number of issues.. Since Windows has the overwhelming share of the end user/desktop market, these DRM programs almost invariably run only on Windows. Thus, not only do I need to purchase the content itself, I need to purchase an additional piece of software, Microsoft Windows, to access the content. Thus if the latest piece of music, or the latest file from your company was encoded with a form of DRM, you could only view it on Windows. As a matter of fact, Microsoft’s first entry into the DRM world is known as Windows Rights Management Server or RMS (those initials probably look familar to you but for a very different reason). Thus not only do you need a Windows OS and Windows DRM client software, you need a Windows server to do the encoding and to authorize against when you attempt to access the content. Pretty ingenious, isn’t it? MS gets to sell a whole range of products in order for DRM to function. If generating revenue is your goal (as it is for MS and any corporation) then DRM is a gold mine driving sales of clients, servers, and client software. On top of that, if the “MSDRM” becomes the defacto standard, MS would then be able to charge content providers a small royalty on the content itself, in the same way the DVD consortium gets a small royalty on all DVD players sold.