Microsoft delivered their "Darknet" whitepaper at the Association for Computing Machinery DRM conference early this week. I saw an earlier draft of this, and it's a pretty remarkable paper. MSFT argues that watermarking and DRM are both doomed strategies, as are anti-circumvention laws — but of course, MSFT is also advocating the Palladium Trusted Computing platform, which obviates the need for any of that stuff in favor of really rigorous technical locks that are enforced in hardware. Still, it's amazing how radical their position ends up. Check out the intro:
People have always copied things. In the past, most items of value were physical objects. Patent law and economies of scale meant that small scale copying of physical objects was usually uneconomic, and large-scale copying (if it infringed) was stoppable using policemen and courts. Today, things of value are increasingly less tangible: often they are just bits and bytes or can be accurately represented as bits and bytes. The widespread deployment of packet-switched networks and the huge advances in computers and codec-technologies has made it feasible (and indeed attractive) to deliver such digital works over the Internet. This presents great opportunities and great challenges. The opportunity is low-cost delivery of personalized, desirable high-quality content. The challenge is that such content can be distributed illegally. Copyright law governs the legality of copying and distribution of such valuable data, but copyright protection is increasingly strained in a world of programmable computers and high-speed networks.
For example, consider the staggering burst of creativity by authors of computer programs that are designed to share audio files. This was first popularized by Napster, but today several popular applications and services offer similar capabilities. CD-writers have become mainstream, and DVD-writers may well follow suit. Hence, even in the absence of network connectivity, the opportunity for low-cost, large-scale file sharing exists.
Link (1MB Word file)
(Thanks, Deirdre!)
