My Guardian column explaining DRM's impossibility to non-geeks

My latest Guardian column, "DRM Vendors Are Pushing the Impossible," has just gone live. It's intended to explain to non-technical people why DRM is impossible — and why geeks aren't just being difficult when they roll their eyes and sputter whenever civilians ask them to make a working DRM.

The thing is that when they say that you can't travel than fast than the speed of light, they're talking about the fundamental principles of physics: it's impossible to get beyond lightspeed, even if science fiction movies help us conceptualise it.

In the same way, we can imagine building progressively better software locks for movies, music, ebooks, and software until we hit on one that even the wiliest hacker can't defeat. But, just like the physicists, the geeks who say that DRM can never reach this point are speaking about fundamental principles of information science. It's impossible to get that far.

Link, Link to all my Guardian columns