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Microsoft patents a DRM scheme
September 23, 2009 | 8:16 am
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By Paul Biba
This one seems to be aimed a peer to peer networks and let’s hope it doesn’t find its way into the ebook realm. From The Inquirer:
SOFTWARE IMPERIALIST Microsoft has been awarded a patent for a distributed DRM system that works over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.
Patent number 7,594,275 is entitled, “Digital rights management system” and uses encrypted public and private keys as the licensing mechanism.
DRM is about as popular with online music stores as Scottish PM Gordon Brown is amongst his constituents. But Microsoft seems to think that there might be life in the old dog yet – DRM not Brown.If the Volish DRM works as it says on the tin, that might mean that we could see P2P networks reemerge as viable, albeit protected, content sources.
The patent was filed in 2003 when DRM was hated but had not been dead and buried.
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Paul Biba, TeleRead, Microsoft, DRM, Defective by Design
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Comments:
2003? I don’t know how likely we are to see this reemerge.
I’m going to take a contrarian view for just a moment to make a point. In “olden days”, a telephone number was associated with a _thing_ and a _place_. For example, when I was a kid our number was associated with that big lump that hung on the wall in the kitchen. If you wanted to use it in the living room, you needed to stretch that cord hard so it would reach. This was stupid in any number of ways, of course, but the main reason why it was stupid was because those placing a call wanted to talk to a _person_, not a _thing_ or a _place_.
Today, of course, telephone numbers are associated with people. You can keep your number if you change phones (_things_), you can keep your number if you move (change _places_), and you can even keep your number if you change carriers. [I'm speaking of the United States here, of course. I have no idea what other countries allow or disallow.] We can argue about what other things remain stupid, but the big thing–that association of our number to _us_ and not some _thing_ or _place_ is a big improvement.
One of the (admittedly many) objections to DRM is that it associates our content–that stuff we bought–with a _thing_ instead of with _us_. We bought that book from Amazon; the Kindle did not buy the book. Yet, the purchase is associated with the Kindle device, much like my old phone number was associated with that ugly blob on the wall in the kitchen. A much better system would provide me the ability to say, “This is me–let me read my books.” It would be best if it didn’t matter where I was, or even what device I was using. [We can push that whole "e-babel" thing off for the time being...]
One way to prove that “I am me” is to have a private key in a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). If the content is encrypted with my public key, only I can decrypt it with my private key. In this world, it wouldn’t matter if I got a new Kindle (or 7 new Kindles); I would be able to read _my_ content on any of them assuming I could present my private key to the device. This arrangement, rather that having Amazon, or Microsoft, or Apple, or Google keep track of the serial numbers of specific devices, makes a lot more sense. People just sell me stuff and encrypt it with my public key. What happens next, or later, or years from now has nothing to do with the publisher. It is my private business with my private key.
While it is still DRM, it is a much more sensible arrangement than those in play today. If we’re going to have DRM, let’s have something that looks more like PKI model than the “telephone on the wall” model.