If you believed everything you heard from the music and film industries, you could get very confused very easily.  And you could all be fooled into thinking that they are the only industries that exist when it comes to needing DRM (it’s a bit like saying that governments are the only organizations that need privacy!).  So Amazon and Sony now say DRM is dead?  Or is this nothing more than the usual marketing hype after a disaster?

Actually, music and film have had long, chequered and cyclical love/hate relationship with DRM, mainly because they were the first people to get seriously exposed to piracy, and to feel pain where it truly hurts – in the bank account.  They got there in the 1960’s, long before the PC, or the iPod were more than the work of science fiction writers like Arthur C Clarke.  The fact that it would take almost 50 years before book publishers and organizations woke up and smelt the coffee is just history.

Their first outing was the cassette tape.  Up to then, copying a record was practically impossible, and although reel-to-reel recorders were around they were too expensive and difficult to use for normal mortals.  But anyone could use a cassette, and everyone did.  They tried suing people who sold cassette decks that would copy from one to another, but they failed, and thus started the hunt for the Holy Grail of the industry – a way of stopping people from copying music (and later film) so that they could charge premium rates for their wares.

Alas, it was not to be.  They lost the cassette wars, and later the VHS wars.  They won the DAT war (Digital Audio Tape) – remember it?  maybe not, when the hardware manufacturers lost a fortune because no consumer would buy into it because the copying controls were so aggressive you couldn’t necessarily copy your own personal recordings.  CD controls proved to be a lost cause, and DVD region pricing was outflanked by hardware manufacturers who were determined not to lose out on their own market opportunity this time around.  I remember a big meeting in LA when the music industry said they were going to implement secure MP3!  Laugh like a drain?  Well, I must confess I was close to being thrown out of the meeting.  Lately it seems that Sony decided on a rootkit approach to preventing copying that also opened up a serious hacking opportunity.

So maybe you should see the current position to be nothing more than posturing by an industry that wants to be the content deliverer to the mass consumer market, and has only one objective in mind – its own profitability.

That’s not to say that there’s anything bad about profit.  All of us are in business (in a particular sense), and if we don’t show a profit, one way or another, then things are very bad indeed (see Charles Dickens on Wilkins Micawber). 

And what most people (and organizations, for that matter) trade on is their intellectual property.  In the ‘knowledge economy’ that is what we are selling.  So we have to safeguard that IP or anyone and everyone (I used to say the World and His Wife, but apparently that is no longer Politically Correct, and saying it would render me liable to being excommunicated by the deity or politician of your choice) can rip (RIP – Requiescat In Pace or ‘you will rest in peace’) you off and make your personal trade value slightly lower than that of a Eunuch’s scrotum.  (Apparently that is still Politically Correct!)

What one has to think about very carefully, is what value DRM controls provide to you (either as an individual or as a business) in order to say if they matter, and when it is that they matter.

The music/film industries are under the cosh because you can either copy their stuff, or you can’t.  If you can buy a legal version, and then copy it by recording the sound or filming the picture on a seriously high quality screen then you are in business.  And they are not.

But that is a problem for those industries.  You can buy cracked codes for satellite TV systems with little or no effort or risk.  Try eBay – if it’s too cheap can it be real? 

But, for the document handling industries, things are only just beginning to warm up.  Computing is all about copying.  When you read this you are looking at a copy of what I wrote, in fact I am doing that when I watch the characters come up on screen in front of me.  And that’s the major hazard for the PC and the Internet.  Everything has been set up to promote copying.  And the software does not give a ‘tuppeny damn’ whether the information is to be public, be controlled, or kept totally secret.  Which is bad news if you are in the business of selling, or simply providing, information (your knowledge, expertise, capability, private advice to clients, tax return computations, price lists, sales manuals, repair manuals ….. the list seems endless). 

So enter DRM.  DRM is the only approach available that lets you specify not only who can see your proprietary information, but what use they can make of it.  The film and music industries were interested in preventing copying, but you will likely need to be able to stop people using information after a particular date, or make sure they can only see it for a couple of times, or print it once, or any number of other things.  Encryption does none of these things, it just prevents the un-anointed from being able to access information, not limit how and when they might use it. 

So whilst the music and film businesses figure they need to flex their market in order to maximize their own profits, they are operating in a different environment.  Commerce, industry, publishers, authors and ordinary mortals need DRM technology to protect their personal and commercial interests.  They have nothing else.  They are exposed to commercial or personal ruin by the uninhibited ability of the PC and the Internet to copy and re-distribute their information without any control at all.

So whilst the record industries declare DRM is dead, we say, “Long live DRM.”