Lazycoder

Grey areas of DRM

Doc Searls said:

Yes, the next generation of PCs and Macs will have DRM cripplecrap in them. Hey, who needs WIPO, Congress and the U.N. to mandate copyright craziness, when Intel is glad to put the means right in the hardware?

But current PCs already have DRM, truth be told. (Try getting a screen shot of a DVD frame on your Mac.) Yet you can still make music and movies that can be heard, watched, produced and distributed outside The System. That won’t change.

via Burningbird » Debate on DRM

It seems to me that every argument for/against DRM always brings up the fact that hardware/Software manufacturers will be including a means of enforcing DRM in the “next version”. They also always using music and video content as the poster-children for why DRM is bad. e.g. “I can’t play my ITMS files on my Treo!” or “I can’t make a copy of my DVD in case my cat pees on it!”. But what about the flip side of DRM?

Let’s say Intel and Microsoft jointly provide a way for a document to be tied to a certain machine (or machines, say in the enterprise). Would you feel safer knowing that your finanacial records, which you store on your machine, can’t be viewed by anyone who isn’t using your machine or a machine you have authorized? Even if they embed a WMF file in their popup ad? How would you react if your medical provider called you to tell you that they had accidentally emailed your medical records to your insurance company, just after you noticed that your premium was raised? How would you feel if they said, “But it’s OK because they were protected with Fairplay DRM.”? Aren’t there grey areas of DRM?