Fergie's Tech Blog

Safety and Reliability Questions About DRM

Victor Yodaiken, President and CEO of FSMLabs, has an excellent summary of the DRM evils over on Groklaw:

DRM is a potentially dangerous and intrusive licensing technology that is being pushed into production before safety and reliability issues have been addressed. The widespread use of standard computer products to control all sorts of important systems is being ignored and DRM is being introduced as if there was no role for computers except as personal entertainment devices and as if computer users were purely consumers of prepackaged “content”. This approach seems sure to create more problems as time goes by.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies are supposed to protect digitized “content”, like movies and musical performances from being illicitly copied or used. DRM technology is sometimes described as security technology when it is really licensing technology –- something very different. In fact, DRM may decrease security and reliability.

posted by Fergie @ 1/11/2006 08:14:00 PM