Responses to the history of copyright protection technology, part 2
Two of the more interesting comments on my recent history of copyright protection technology, one from Fred Smith on The Conversation and another from "Graham" on Technology Spectator, refer to copyright protection technologies in the computer software industry. Copyright protection for computer software does not seem to attract nearly so much attention as it does for music and video, and seemed to be an entirely separate stream of research and development when I worked in the area. But there may nonetheless be something here to learn.
Fred Smith says that "the digital distribution platforms [specifically, Steam] have introduced DRM in such a way as to make piracy harder than legitimately buying games (which is how it should be)". Not being a gamer, I haven't tried these platforms myself. Smith, however, seems to think these systems are working fairly well, and his description of Steam sounds something like what rights management researchers were trying to achieve for music and video between 2000-2010.
I can see at least two advantages that the developers of Steam might have had compared to the developers of earlier rights management systems. Most obviously, they've been able to learn from the experience of those researchers of the past decade; if so, I suppose we can feel some pride that our efforts finally amounted to a working system.
The second advantage, illustrated by Graham's comment, is that the developers of computer software are responsible for both the product and its protection. This eliminates cost-shifting between content providers and technology providers, which is arguably one of the contributors to the poor state of rights management technology for media products.
I suppose that Graham and others who argue that media providers should bear the full cost of copyright protection imagine a similar circumstance coming into being for the media industry. However, arranging this might not be so straightforward as it is in the case for computer software since media companies don't manufacture player devices.
One solution I've heard would be for the computer industry to simply buy out the music industry (I think Andrew Odlyzko mentioned it at the ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management 2007, for one). Proponents of this idea say that the computer industry is big enough to do this, though it's not clear that it could also buy out the film industry. But do we really want music and film to be controlled by companies whose core business is to make and sell computers? In any case, I'm not aware of any computer company wanting to do this, and the nearest approximation to it of which I'm aware — Nokia's Comes with Music — appears to have been a failure.
Some rights management consortia do include both technology and media companies. The consortium behind Ultraviolet, which was one of the more promising-sounding technologies in my review, is an example. I don't know what financial arrangements these consortia have, and I don't yet know how successful they might be. But it seems reasonable to hope that more might be achieved by co-operation than by having computer companies in one trench, music companies in another, each insisting that the other make our computers fit for entertainment.
