Why crypto is unfair
A little over 10 years ago, personal electronic privacy became mainstream. We had tools like PGP which helped keep our documents secure. We also had people like Bruce Schneier, who promoted the use of personal cryptography.
The philosophy was pretty simple. Maybe you didn’t want your kid brother to read your diary. Maybe you were having an illicit affair, or planning a corporate takeover. What mattered is that you had information that you wanted protected. You wanted to make sure that nobody could read your communications, that your recipients knew that you were the actual sender, and that the messages were only readable by the intended parties. Sounds reasonable, right?
Except only, that last part is a bit tricky - it’s actually DRM. Replace yourself with a music label, and the idea sounds a lot less palatable.
It is an interesting conundrum - how can we expect personal enforcement of our rights, and deny that to other parties (such as a corporation). (Don’t confuse the right to personal privacy with the restriction of access. This is why RMS justifiably calls DRM Digital Restrictions Management).
The issue at hand (at least for music) is usually fair use - the ability to copy music to portable devices, the ability to burn to CD, or to play on a different OS. As far as most DRM systems go, they try hard to enable these scenarios, while still protecting the rights of the copyrighter.
To a far lesser extent is the issue of open source. Because of the nature of DRM, certain private keys need to be hidden within access of potential attackers. Because you can’t just keep private keys in source form, it is unlikely that you can have a fully open source DRM solution.
RMS is concerned less about fair use, and more about morality. DRM makes sharing difficult, and takes control away from the users. I wonder if this makes a case for “open-source” music (or I think Stallman might prefer the term Free Music).
I still get jittery about DRM. When I buy a song off an online service, I still have the desire to tear off the encryption and have my content in the clear. But, at the same time, I’ve never recently had problems with my DRM getting in the way. I just want to burn my songs to a CD, rip my songs from CDs, and put them on my portable music player. And to that end, I can do what I want to do.
Is DRM finally a legit technology? Will it ever be? Is it inherently evil? Or is it just misunderstood?