Digital rights management nightmare

Commentary: Sony faces 'spyware' backlash

JohnC. Dvorak

BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Content theft is here to stay and the big media companies are going to have to get used to it.

Attempts to manage content with protection tricks simply antagonize the consumer and can become a long-term public relations nightmare.

Over the past few weeks such a PR nightmare unfolded for the Sony Corporation music division as the company attempted to protect its music with a Digital Rights Management tool that consisted of what is considered onerous spyware. And it was the worst kind of spyware -- the dreaded "rootkit." It makes a computer vulnerable to all sorts of other forms of malicious software.

Numerous geeks and nerds discovered this and became alarmed. Within hours of the discovery of the Sony
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malware, the intertwined mesh of blogs and websites went berserk and the situation forced Sony to recall all the discs. Now Sony is seen as some sort of evil villain. Its reputation tarnished.

Here is probably the most elaborate explanation of what this onerous software is all about. Click here. It tells the whole story followed by a massive public denunciation of Sony by way of added reader comments.

Thinking you are going to trick an audience filled with technologists who hate to be tricked is folly. From my perspective all DRM schemes have to be out in the open and people need to be warned in advance about what they do and how they work.

It seems that the marketing folks know that this sort of thing will actually hurt sales and thus you have attempts to fool the public in hopes that nobody figures it out. One day someone will realize that if DRM is hurting sales, then perhaps it's not such a good idea after all.

The idea behind DRM is that content in electronic form is so effortlessly copied and distributed with computers and networks that some tool is needed to keep tabs on the content itself. It needs to be managed somehow in the wild.

This means mechanisms not dissimilar to the copy-protection schemes designed to keep commercial software from being copied. These began to appear in the 1980's resulting in the growth of commercial companies such as Central Point Software which specialized in devices that could defeat these systems.

Back then there was a real fear that not having backup copies of software could be a disaster. This was a legitimate argument.

But the rationale for defeating these systems has changed.

Today the users and buyers of content who dislike DRM mechanisms believe that once they own a copy of the content they should be able to listen (or watch) it on whatever device they choose and make as many personal copies as they want. This is a massive change in rationale for cracking the protection mechanisms.

This change in mentality I believe evolved from the cassette tape era when people legally copied music from record to tape. Each blank tape had a copy fee attached to it paid to the record companies who factored this into their finances. Once this model was established it became common (and acceptable) to copy.

It is not possible to reverse this mentality. Any attempt to do so brings with it a backlash, as we've seen with the Sony situation.

Once computers were able to read data from CD's and DVD's it was inevitable to everyone (except those who did not understand computers) that copying would run rampant. Worsening the situation was the Internet that allowed the data on the hard disk to be transferred over a network to anyone. Thus an actual sale was lost with each transfer and the industry saw this as a theft -- not of physical property but of a virtual sale whether real or imaginary.

From here it gets fuzzy and debatable with the concept of "sharing" suddenly appearing.

There is absolutely nothing that can be done about this problem.

Content management will never work. If it did work then nobody would buy the products. The fact is that content producers are going to have to rethink their business model and make less money, the way print folks have had to do.

Writers like myself and my editors make 1/10 the money people can make in the movie or music business for doing about the same amount of work (content generation). Our value is lessened by the fact that we cannot protect the written word from rampant copying. It started with the printing press, bootleg publishing, plagiarism, Xerox machines, email, online pilfering, cut-and-paste, etc., etc. We simply got used to it and live with it.

Sony and all the other big media companies are simply going to have to live with what writers and editors have lived with for some time: a big cut in pay.

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