Jul. 3rd, 2013
You can't stop the signal
Jul. 3rd, 2013 08:43 pmThe fundamental technical problem with Digital Rights Management is that you have hand paying customers the media you want them to watch, the code that unlocks it, and the key to unlock it with. And once you've done that, they can _completely_ unlock it, and give it to all of their friends.
The best you can do is hand them those things in a form that's jumbled up, in the hope that it will be tricky to extract them all.
Of course, there are people who see that as a fun challenge. And there are more of them than there are people working for media companies. And a lot of the time, they're smarter.
A prime example of this can be seen here, where one of the original hackers behind Netscape Navigator is having fun with YouTube's latest attempts at stopping people downloading their videos. Take a look through the comments to see that within days there are multiple projects all working at breaking it, sharing their discoveries with each other.
It's doomed. It really is. And while we're stuck with it it makes life harder for paying customers (or people who would be paying, if you would sell them video files that weren't encrusted with awfulness and would thus play on whatever device they wanted it to).
The best you can do is hand them those things in a form that's jumbled up, in the hope that it will be tricky to extract them all.
Of course, there are people who see that as a fun challenge. And there are more of them than there are people working for media companies. And a lot of the time, they're smarter.
A prime example of this can be seen here, where one of the original hackers behind Netscape Navigator is having fun with YouTube's latest attempts at stopping people downloading their videos. Take a look through the comments to see that within days there are multiple projects all working at breaking it, sharing their discoveries with each other.
It's doomed. It really is. And while we're stuck with it it makes life harder for paying customers (or people who would be paying, if you would sell them video files that weren't encrusted with awfulness and would thus play on whatever device they wanted it to).