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February 21, 2003
DRM, My brother, and the rest...
So my brother has been corresponding with the newsmakers lately, not only has he engaged in the recent 12-year old can kill Hollywood debate, but had his picture on the Business Section Front Page of a local newspaper.
We grew up in a very technical household, full of electronics and computers, I went the way of computers, and he the way of communications, specifically Video production.
Our professions and interests collide at the point of DRM, the philosophy of information freedom, and technologies ability to protect information. Here's some thoughts.
My employer is a redistributor of financial information to institutional investors (Money managers, Mutual Funds, etc...). My role often involves designing technical solutions to providing integrated access to disparate data sources to these client on our proprietary platform.
the point: I feed my family in part by controlling access to information. Of course, I feel I am controlling access to the value that I provide, which is a better organization of already (mostly) publically available data.
So I'm chatting (IMing) with my brother and point out that I believe that a broadcast approach to media (Video) is incompatible with a limited or controlled audience. Its BROADCAST!
If the "movie industry" or the "music industry" wants to control who gets what, then they have to pay to individually ship data to people. This is technically and socially possible. Here's a solution: Using a public key infrastructure, encrypt the content with a person's PUBLIC Key which requires decryption with a PRIVATE key that an individual would be unwilling to share (for example, the key to their checking account).
The challenge for the movie industry here is, they would need to manage individual copies/streams/encryptions of the same data for each "viewer" that wanted to purchase it. This means more linearly scaling bandwidth/storage/management expense. This is likely to be cost prohibitive and of course there's that pesky last mile problem.
These industries seem to want the benefits of the digital age without the new approach that it brings (demands?).
Posted by KnipSter at February 21, 2003 02:10 PM
Comments
What is DRM?
Posted by: at March 1, 2003 09:32 PM
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