[CAnet - news] Digital rights management: Desirable, inevitable, and almost irrelevant

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
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 [Here a couple of pointers to the issue of DRM.  The first is by the famous
iconoclast Andrew Odlyzko titled "Digital rights management: Desirable,
inevitable, and almost irrelevant".

The second pointer is from Paul Budde who was privileged to follow a
presentation by the award-winning Canadian essayist and novelist, John
Ralston Saul.

Both are well worth reading on the issue of DRM and the related topic of
Identity Management Systems (IdM) which, in many cases, an essential
component of DRM and is an equally unproven, illogical and has the potential
to be undermine some fundamental freedoms we take for granted in society--
BSA]



http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/drm2007.pdf
Digital rights management: Desirable, inevitable, and almost irrelevant

DRM is attractive for several related reasons. Content providers feel they
can get more control over their wares. Such control is comforting in
general, and could enable new methods of charging, which might provide
greater revenues. More generally, the Internet is enabling sellers to ¯nd
out much more about buyers' ability and willingness to pay, and also
(through DRM and other techniques) is providing sellers with tools to
control usage
(and thus prevent arbitrage), leading to unprecedented opportunities and
incentives for price discrimination [8, 9]. Thus it should not be surprising
that extensive e®orts have gone into research, development, and deployment
of DRM.

Yet the record of DRM so far is not too inspiring. And a rising chorus of
voices (including Steve Jobs of Apple) is urging the content industry to
give up or at least relax its insistence on DRM. The lecture summarized here
will review the arguments of DRM skeptics. This abstract provides a very
brief overview of some of the main points. References are given to
my papers, where those points are explained in more detail, and citations
are provided to the extensive literature on the subject.

The fundamental issue that limits current use and future prospects of DRM is
... to maximize the value of your intellectual property, not to
protect it for the sake of protection.

DRM all too often gets in the way of maximizing the value of intellectual
property. To someextent this is the fault of the DRM technologies. We simply
do not know how to build secure systems. The last half a century
demonstrates this conclusively. 
[...]




Changing societies and the role of telecoms
http://www.buddeblog.com.au/changing-societies-and-the-role-of-telecoms/


 
Introduction
I was recently privileged to follow a presentation by the award-winning
Canadian essayist and novelist, John Ralston Saul. He was lecturing at the
same conference at which I was speaking – the annual local government
management conference (SOLGM) in Wellington New Zealand.

John has been hailed as one of the great thinkers of our time. He gave an
awe-inspiring presentation, full of new ideas and philosophies about our
society, culture, economic developments, the environment and aboriginal
values.

[..]
John mentioned that our western societies still had not adjusted to the new
economic order. Our modern economic society started somewhere around 1770
and was based on competition for limited resources, capital, labour and also
the products we produced – food, clothing, luxury goods and so on were
scarce. However since the 1960s the economic order has changed from one
based on scarcity to one based on surplus.

[...]

The fallacy of Intellectual Property rights
As we have moved away from agricultural and manufacturing societies we have
changed into a society that is based on ideas and information. It is
therefore unforgivable that we are limiting the growth, and the flow, of
ideas and information through Intellectual Property rules and regulations.

According to John, the inclusion of Intellectual Property into the WTO is
severely hampering the flow of new ideas and information;  it is attempting
to control the dissemination of ideas, thus making the spread and sharing of
them increasingly difficult. This is damaging the new economy!

In the digital media industry we see this happening through Digital
Management Rights (DMR). This is a totally unsustainable state of affairs
and needs to be changed.

There must surely be better ways to protect Intellectual Property.

At the BuddeComm Digital Media Roundtable in August clear evidence was given
that people are prepared to pay for Intellectual Property, but that it needs
to be based on conditions that are acceptable to society as a whole, and not
on power of the few who want to protect the scarcity economy.

[...]



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