A Copyfighter’s Musings

The Coral Consortium is a cross-industry group promoting interoperability between DRM. On that note, let me repeat:

There is no such thing as fully interoperable DRM.  Don’t even click your heels – just accept it. 

As Ed Felten wrote a few months back, “To make DRM work, you have to ensure that not just anybody can build a music player — otherwise people will build players that don’t obey the DRM restrictions you want to connect to the content. DRM, in other words, strives to create incompatibility between the approved devices and uses, and the unapproved ones. Incompatibility isn’t an unfortunate side-effect of deficient DRM systems — it’s the goal of DRM.”

I understand that Coral may help certain players shake hands – maybe Apple gets friendly with MS and Real, and all their limited set of devices work together using some “transcoding,” and that provides some benefits in the marketplace.  However, that in no way equates to “maximizing” consumer choice as Coral purports to do.  Maximizing consumer choice would mean actually allowing anyone to create a device or software that plays digital media.  At the very least, all the open source creators will be left out in the cold, for they cannot sign the relevant non-disclosure licensing agreements any DRM would require. 

Felten again: “MP3’s designers … didn’t seem to realize that customers would get their own technology, and that customers would decide for themselves what technology to build and how to use it. The compatible-DRM agenda is predicated on the same logical mistake, of thinking that technology is the province of a small group that can gather in a room somewhere to decide what the future will be like. That attitude is as naive now as it was in the early days of MP3.”

What’s more, how socially wasteful is this?  Consider how many random consortiums have been created over the last year to deal with this problem.  First, none of them have done anything. Second, if they were to actually “fix” this problem, then DRM would lose much of its value. The only purpose DRM serves right now is in creating these barriers to interop and legitimate uses.  It doesn’t prevent piracy.  Given that, they could eliminate all these barriers simply by selling in MP3 or Ogg.  Rather than taking this route, companies are investing large sums in these consortiums.

Filed by Derek Slater at 3:46 pm under General news
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