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DRM5 won the battle but loosing the war
Efforts to stop music (Digital) piracy 'pointless'
The paper was prepared for a workshop on Digital Rights Management, (DRM), at the US Association for Computing Machinery's annual conference on Computer and Communications Security.
Digital Rights Management describes attempts to stop people copying music from CDs and sharing the tracks via peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and Madster.
The researchers point out that the growth of consumer broadband and cheap data storage will mean the numbers of people willing to swap is growing and will soon outstrip attempts to shut them down.
The growth of instant messaging systems will also contribute to this gradual loss of control.
The rising numbers of recordable CD and DVD drives are also making it much easier for consumers to create their own music compilations and share them with friends which could also stymie anti-piracy work.
The paper also pointed out the technical flaws in DRM systems and said that, so far, all of them have been defeated.
In one case the CD protection system designed to stop people playing the disks on a computer was foiled by using a marker pen to cover the outer ring of a disk.
The authors reserve strongest criticism for watermarking systems which put invisible markers in music that stops tracks being passed around and shared.
But the "severe" commercial and social problems inherent in such schemes plus their technical shortcomings mean that they are "doomed to failure", warn the authors.
The paper's researchers emphasise that it represents their opinions rather than those of Microsoft, but their conclusions are likely to make uncomfortable reading for music industry executives.
In essence, say the researchers, file-swapping systems have already won. The only way for music companies to compete is on the same terms by making music easy to get hold of and cheap to buy.
Evidence gathered by critics of the music industry has shown that CD prices have steadily risen over the past few years and may have contributed to the slump in sales as much as the rise of file-swapping systems.
In "ebook" piracy case, people still can easily download pirated ebooks based on the scanned version of the printed book.

posted by Jerry permanent link