Sophocles, in his work Antigone, said, "No one loves the messenger who brings bad news."

This week provided more than it’s share of light entertainment with blogs of disinformation.  Top of the list goes to the people who figure that Lizard Safeguard ought to work on every operating system known to man (or is that persons?).  It says clearly on the box, works with PC and Mac – and nothing else.  It’s rather like buying a book that’s published in English and then complaining because it isn’t in Danish (and likely never will be).  It doesn’t run on an IBM mainframe either, btw.

And second error prize has to go to those who say it doesn’t work on the Mac.  It does. 

As a general rule, two out of three is pretty bad, but what about number 3?

“The system is unusable because it insists on always connecting to the Internet before you can use anything.”

It is true that you have to connect to the Internet the first time you open a document – it has to check that you are the bona fide purchaser, and it has to get the information needed to decrypt the document.  After that, it totally depends on what the owner of the document has chosen to enforce.  And nothing to do with LockLizard, because they can only enforce what the publisher defines as the rules.  You don’t go round blaming Microsoft because your system administrator decided the frequency you update your logon password – so why blame LockLizard about the way the system administrator has configured their controls?

But, of course, the modern attitude is to use any possible reason to try and prevent people from implementing DRM controls, even though all the available evidence proves rampant piracy and theft of digitized information.  So use every possible opportunity, no matter how ridiculous, to claim rights that don’t exist. 

And don’t forget to blame the messenger!  The DRM provider creates a toolkit that the publisher implements in whatever way they see fit.  But of course the DRM provider is the evil guy because they are stupid enough to implement what the publisher said.  It’s Hobson’s choice - damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  If you are the DRM provider and you don’t enforce what your customer, the publisher, says, then they will soon be after you, and probably with good cause.  But it seems that if you implement what the publishers want, then the people getting the information want to blame you for doing a good job!

Of course the attitudes are so different if what is being published is personal data – oh you should have taken the strongest possible means to protect it – what do you mean you didn’t check who was accessing the data.  And so on.  Just because it’s not your personal data, it doesn’t mean you have the right to do what you like with it – or does it?