I just finished watching the awesome Evening at Adler video (I wish these sorts of things weren’t always on the opposite side of the world). Somewhere in the middle there is a discussion of digital rights management and one of the guys (I think it was the shape shifter guy) says he doesn’t mind weak DRM (i.e. as long as he can circumvent it), and then in further discussion that’s determined to be a slippery slope.

I remember reading quite a while back (though I can’t find where now) a discussion of DRM from a legal perspective as an inflexible implementation of legal principles (which are intended to be flexible). I guess it sort of goes back to what I said previously about “Intention, technology and the law“; much as people like me might like hard and fast rules which can be implemented, neither real life nor copyright law are supposed to work like that.

I suppose DRM is a 99% solution. I’m allowed to do most of the things I might want with files from the iTunes music store after jumping through a few hoops, and it does stop me from putting the files up on file sharing networks or giving them to other people. The problem is that there’s no way, other than breaking the DRM, to deal with the other 1%. There’s no one I can go and ask for special dispensation if I happen to want to play music on six different computers because the limit is hard coded at five (or whatever it is). Without DRM, I could just play it on that sixth computer, and trust that my intentions would be seen as perfectly reasonable if the matter ever came up.

Unfortunately, I don’t really have any solutions to offer. I suppose from a privacy perspective, it wouldn’t be possible for the usage patterns just reported back and investigated if they looked sufficiently suspicious, but I guess that’s the closest analogue to the traditional real world situation.

One last note, and something that has always bugged me. I have a VHS copy of ‘the princess bride‘ sitting on my bookshelf. Now, I know I don’t actually own that movie, but when they sold me the video, the gave me a license to view it (but not broadcast it etc.). In fact, you could reasonably say that most of the money I paid was for that license, with the rest going to the actual cost of the VHS cassette. If that’s the case I’d like to buy a DVD copy of the same movie for the one or two dollars the DVD and packaging would cost; after-all, I’ve already got the license to watch the movie.