What is DRM?

Oh yes, our brand new studio has been completed. Yes, and uh, and now there's a curtain separating us from Jerry, so we can't see when she's you know, surfing Facebook or whatever. She can do whatever she likes, and we'll be back here in our own little room. In fact, she might not even be in there anymore. We don't know. All right, then well we should we should, we should

go ahead and get started. Then, yes, let's do that. Actually, we are recording this um just before I am about to leave the office to go catch a flight, So if we talk quickly, that's why, because I need to go and get on a plane. But we're gonna talk about dr M or digital rights management and exactly what it is and why some people are really against the whole idea in the first place. Um, But to really talk about DRM, we kind of have to step back

and just talking about copy protection in general. Yes, because um, well, actually before we even really get into that, I just like to point something out, um, that digital rights management is supposed to be about who owns what essentially, and uh, you know, if you buy a program off the shelf, take it home and put it on your computer, the the people who make it basically want to ensure that they can't you know, that you can't make as many copies as you want to give them to all your friends.

Thereby they only sold one copy of this software. Well, the thing is, though, there are a lot of other digital rights involved, uh, including yours. You have rights to that software. So it should be pointed out that copy protection is only one part of the digital rights spectrum. And you know, digital rights management sort of as a bad name simply because of that. And that's why people are so upset because they view it simply as copy protection. But we can we can get into that a little

bit later. We should just go ahead and get into copy protection. Yeah, let's talk about copy protection, and we'll we'll work our way into why some people feel DRM is far too restrictive and that it goes well beyond copy protection to the point where it can actually ruin your your experience as a customer. But we'll sure, we'll really dive into that. So copy protection is pretty much self explanatory. It's a method of protecting a work from

being copied illegally and distributed beyond the rights holders. Um uh scope right. So uh in the olden days, way way way way back, when a copy of protection really wasn't that important. And for instance, a book, if I were to public a really long book, it would be difficult for anyone else to make a copy of that book without going to great links and using a lot

of time and effort to do so. Yes, as a matter of fact, that's uh, that's a big reason why it wasn't an issue people that the publishers really just simply were not concerned that people were going to run out and copy these things by hand, and what are they going You would either have to write it down, longhand or you would have to create, you know, build up printing press and and copy it that way, or eventually you get to the point where you can mimiograph

or xerox pages, but even then you're doing it page by page. It was such a laborious and uh an unrewarding task, especially if something went wrong in the middle of it. You don't have to stop and fix everything to continue. Um. It really wasn't an issue. You know, it's very few people were going to take that kind of time and effort to copy someone else's work. That's right.

But now let's let's move ahead and go toward well, you know, we we could even talk about things like the cassette hate business and how that was a big issue, as as was VHS. UM. Anything that allowed a customer to to put something that was uh published in one medium and then transferred to another medium was met with a great amount of resistance in the various entertainment industries.

That's right. Um. As a matter of fact, if if you really think about it, it's the advent of electronic technology that would allow you to copy something that really made it an issue. There's there's a mention of it in the Constitution, I believe, a very very simple mention of copyright, and it's it's a very vague sense and the thing is they didn't have to worry about it.

But then in the twentieth century, not only do you have things like cassette tapes and VCRs, you've got uh, photo copiers, you've got facsimile machines, and suddenly, uh, you know, Congress is having to deal with a number of different pieces of legislation, uh, coming from different companies going hey, wait a minute, people are making lots and lots of copies of our work, and you know, hey, we did a lot of work on this thing. We don't want people just running off with it. So you know, you

have to write some laws to protect that. But the thing is, even though there are laws in place, as someone has said to me on more than one occasion, it's only illegal if you get caught, right. So the thing is, you've got all this technology, but if you never get caught doing it, you can still duplicate it

at will. Yeah. And on top of that, beside the fact that it had suddenly become easy to start making copies, or at least relatively easy to make copies of material that did not belong to you, uh, there's also the concept of fair use, which all which clouds things up considerably. Well, it's cloudy in and of itself. Right, fair use itself is not is not specifically defined. Is it is vague on purpose and it ends up being an issue that ends up that that's decided on a case by case basis.

But in general, things that are considered fair use or if you are taking some material in order to comment upon it, to to provide some sort of insightful commentary that is outside the scope of the original material, then you could present some of that original material, although the definition of how much you can present is not Again, that's not really defined. So is it all right to to take a paragraph out of a previously published work and then comment on it? Maybe? What about twenty pages?

Well maybe not. The problem is that it's not very well defined. If you if you took a line from a High Coup, that's a third of it essentially, Well no that but that is the point it really, It really does depend on how much of the material you're taking from it. If you're taking it from say the Odyssey, well that isn't in copyright, but it's something that size um and you're taking two pages of it, Well, that's all things considered, that's a pretty small amount of it.

Another thing that is important to consider is how transformative it is well. And another issue of fair use is not just if you are transforming something or if you are commenting upon something. It's also the idea of being able to create a backup copy of something for your own use. Now, this is another part that comes into play with digital rights management in just a little bit.

So the the idea here is that if you were to uh to purchase something like let's say you back in the seventies you bought a vinyl record and then you know, in the eighties you've got some cassettes and you think, oh, you know what, I'm gonna make a copy of that vinyl record on cassette for my own use to archives. So if anything does happen to that record, I still have the music. I don't have to go and purchase it again. That's okay, Okay, you can do that.

You can actually make a backup copy of something in order to if the only purposes, so that you can have it in case something happens to the original. Uh, you know, you can't go and distribute it. You know, it's not supposed You're not supposed to do something like transfer that record to cassette tape and then start selling those cassette tapes out of the trunk of your car. Um, that would not be covered under fair use, and you could be prosecuted for a copyright violation under those rules.

But the digital rights management manages to circumvent the whole notion of fair use. So let's let's kind of sort a segue into digital rights management now. Before when we're talking about cassettes and tapes and that kind of thing. Um, there's still a level of effort that you needed to put forth in order to really make a copy. When we get into the digital realm, that effort is reduced dramatically. In some cases, all you have to do is click a couple of buttons on your computer and you've just

made a copy of a file. And that's all you needed to do. Uh, there's no effort really there. And because you're not taking a physical uh format, you're not taking like a record or a disc or whatever. You're just taking a digital file. It doesn't even feel like

stealing because you're not not taking a physical object. You're not you know, you can't you can't compare it to say shoplifting because if I go into a music store and I shoplift and I steal a CD, not only have I taken something that doesn't belong to me and I haven't paid for it, but the shopkeeper can no longer sell that individual CD. Clearly right, because it's not

no longer in the shops possession. For the shopkeeper keeper has uh spent the money on buying that item, but will not be compensated for that because it is no longer in the shopkeepers possession. Right now, with digital copies, you can sell a digital copy copy rather without any

sort of physical medium at all. So if I were to copy something, Let's say that Chris is Uh Chris's band has got their album out in a digital format, and I decide I want to listen to that, but I also decide that I don't want to pay for it, and I go and I copy that digital format. Well, you could argue, well, you know, but Chris, Chris didn't lose anything. He can still sell that digital copy to whomever wants it. It's not like I took the only

instance of that I made a copy of it. However, I have denied him that that sale, So there is still an element of theft here. Now, this is what kind of pushed various entertainment industry companies into backing the

whole idea of digital rights management. They wanted a way to control their product so that people could not easily make copies and distribute them, and beyond that, they even wanted to kind of control how you experience that particular product, right, and a copy protection was the very first version of digital rights management because it was, in essence, the the root of what they wanted to accomplish by by doing that. Um. Now, the thing is, um, there have been a variety of

different ways of doing a copy protection. Uh. And I'm going to mention one of Jonathan's favorite words. Um. Some of the earliest that I encountered was, you know, I would buy a copy of a program from my Amiga and I would you know, load it on on the computer and it would say you need to insert your dongle. And this was a little piece of hardware that plugged into one of the ports on the side of the machine.

And if you didn't have the dongle attached to the side of the machine and the software could not detect it was there, Basically, the program would not run a very effective piece of copy protection, I'd say, but kind of been practical if you happen to lose that little dongle right right, or if something were to happen to the port, for example, exactly if if the port goes dead, then then you have to have your computer fixed before

you can run that programming. Right. And then you start thinking, well, now you've created a copy protection that is dependent upon a couple of different factors, some of which are beyond my control necessary possibly beyond my control at any rate. Um, but I've paid money to access this. So this is the key to the people who opposed Digital rights management. That's that's the key to their argument is that DRM, the copy protection element of DRM, really hurts the the

legitimate consumer more than it hurts the prospective pirate. And the idea that, you know, the person who actually buys the product ends up having his or her experience impacted by this DRM, and the people who want to steal the content will find a way to steal it no

matter what kind of block you put there. Um. Really, the whole purpose of the block being there, you could argue, is not to to prevent someone from stealing, but to provide the legal basis to pursue that person in court once they do find a way to get around it.

You have a point, Yeah, it's kind of it's it's it's interesting because when you think about it, drm is it's like, Um, it's like you put a a lock on your door, but you put a lock that's not impossible to It's not impossible to pick that lock, right, Um. And the reason you put the lock on the door is not in order to make sure no one can ever get in. It's to make sure that anyone who does get in who doesn't have a key can be prosecuted.

And and that's kind of uh. But then you're also saying that anyone who legitimately has a reason to come into the house always has to have that key with them because the door is never going to be unlocked. So if that person loses the key, that's kind of tough. They're gonna have to go and buy another key. Uh. Kind of a roundabout way of getting at this. But another another early version of copy protection would require that you have, uh. The idea being that if you purchase

a game, for example of a computer game. Uh, the idea of if you actually legitimately purchase it, you would have the game, and you would have whatever documentation came with the game. Yes, So a lot of these games would have a section where they would ask you a question that would be answered within the documentation. Yes, turn two page seventeen and tell us what the third word

is in the second paragraph. And I even had some of these manuals printed on dark blue paper, the idea of course being that you would not be able to uh photocopy it. It would all just come out as a black sheet if you tried to photocopy these UM these pages. Now, people got around that too, because there's only so many questions you would be able to create

to for this copy protection. It's not like the entire manual would be in the game UM copy protection, So once people figured out what the questions were, they would just circulate that, so you would still be able to get around the game UM. There are also other physical forms of copy protection where uh by physically changing the disc and this is back in the five and a

quarter inch floppy desk days. By physically changing that disk, you could make it hard to make a copy Like that, that function would not be available, but you could get around that too, if you knew how. And that's really another issue with the The whole DRM is just the idea that if you really want to get around DRM, you can find a way to get around it. So really the only people who get affected are the average

consumers who don't know better. Yeah, the manual version that you were speaking of just a moment ago is the kind of thing that would discourage probably the casual uh software duplicator. You know, um Steve down the street. He wants to to, uh make a copy for his buddy. He's like, oh, man, well you know I can last name is in jobs or was ni act. I just wanted to pick something of the Bob. I usually say Bob,

but it just makes me think of Microsoft Bob. Um. Yeah, that's that's gonna get his emails just to mention of Microsoft Bob. Anyhow, we should do a podcast on that. Um it'll be like two minutes long. Um anyhow, Now, the uh, the whole thing is that that's the kind of thing that would discourage probably the casual, the more casual UM person from duplicating the software. But it eventually involved to the point where it actually had a layer of software encryption on it and of course people were

cracking that. As Jonathan said, you know, people really wanted to get around it. They could do that. Um, that's what we did our podcast on usenet. The wearer's channels are basically, uh, software that has been cracked, whether the copy protection has been removed or disabled on it. Um. And uh you know that that's a little bit different because once that's disabled, you can actually just generally use it. Of course, sometimes disabling the copy protection will damage the

software in the process. UM. More modern efforts have gone to using the software key. Like if you, for example, bought a copy of Microsoft Windows, it's got um I think a sixteen digit or is it longer than that? Now it's longer than that now, Uh, like an encryption key that comes along with it. Once you plug that in and the software is registered online, no one else is going to be able to use that key on

another computer. So you know, if you say, bought a copy of Windows, you use the key and you gave it to a friend down the street, Um, he or she is going to have to find another legitimate t which is generated by an algorithm. So if you just make up letters and numbers, it's not gonna work. Probably not gonna work. Well, the odds of it working are at least astronomical, at least immediately. Yeah, I spent sixteen

hours trying to anyway. Um So, but that that actually comes into uh into conflict with another right that is legitimately yours, which is the right of first sale. Right. You know, the right of first sale says that if you purchase something, you have the right to sell that again, uh further down the road, because that property is yours. You have purchased it from someone, but it belongs to you, so then you can dispose of it as you see fit.

So for example, if you buy a car and you've paid for the car, the car is completely paid off, it's well within your rights to sell that car to whomever you like. You or game stores right use video game stores another good example. So problem about d r M is that it can get it can interfere with

your right to sell something that you've purchased. For example, if I purchase a an MP three from from some store that has DRM attached to that MP three, how do I sell Let's let's say that I no longer like that song and I want to try and recapture some of the money I spent on that song. I would like to sell that song to my buddy who really likes that one and hasn't purchased it yet, and I'm like, well, you know what, I'll sell it for

fifty cents. I bought it for a dollar, even though there's no real depreciation in digital content the way there is in physical content. But I can't really do that, and I can see why it doesn't make sense from in a digital perspective. And the main reason for that is again, digitally, we can make copies of stuff, So I can make a copy of a song that I own, sell the copy, I still have the original and I'm making money, and I can undercut the the legitimate copyright holder.

So if Amazon on, for example, is selling a song at at a dollar twenty nine, and I buy a purchase copy that song, or I buy that song for a dollar twenty nine, but I start selling it for fifty cents, you know, it doesn't take long for me to recapture my costs and that I'm undercutting Amazon, and then Amazon is not making money off that song. And you can see where you can see where the foundation is for DRM for the copy protection element of DRM

right now. The problem is that the implementation of DRM sometimes goes a little too far. Did you want to talk about Sony specifically? I do, But I was going to mention one other thing that's missing from this transaction going on that you were mentioning. Sure, and that's trust. Let's say Jonathan wants to sell his MP three to me, and I'm willing to pay him the fifty cents for it,

and we're going to do everything completely above board. Jonathan says, I don't want to listen to this MP three anymore. As soon as I send you the copy, I'm deleting it from my computer. Technically, that would be essentially like selling me a copy of a used book. He no longer has that book. He's sold it to me, and I've given him whatever he wants for it, and that would be the right for sale. What what the producers here are doing, the publishers of music or movies or

what software whatever? Um, they don't trust us to do that. And you know, I'm sure in a lot of cases that probably is well founded. UM, Because honestly, Jonathan could say, oh, you know what, I'm tired of this MP three here, Chris, you can have it for fifty cents, and I pay him fifty cents, he sends me a copy of it, and what if he doesn't deleted from his machine, then

we're doing exactly what they're afraid that we're doing. Now we have duplicated the program and he has charged any money for it, So he is making money off of something that was somebody else's and he kept his original copy. So they don't They don't trust people. And like I said, some people are going to do that, some people are not. So there there's an element of trust here. They don't trust people to do this, which is why we're still

relying on copy protection. But as you pointed out, some people, like Sony did a few years ago, have taken it to an extreme right. Why why don't you tell us a little bit about what Sony did? Well? UH, Basically, back in I guess around two thousand five or so, Sony BMG Music Entertainment UH sold some different UH music CDs by a few different artists, UM and UH. As soon as you put the CD in a computer, what it would do is be to install what's called a

root kit on the computer. And basically it's a It was a piece of software that was running underneath the surface. It's not like you said, it said, Hey, hold on a second, I'm installing a program on your machine. You wouldn't know was being installed. You wouldn't know it was running the average person speaking. I mean, obviously someone discovered it. But what was going on was they were installing this root kid in there, and the point of it was

to uh manage copy protection. They wanted to make sure that you weren't going to duplicate that CD and give it to, you know, the music to someone else. The problem is the root kit provide quite a bit of access to computers and uh and basically was a back door to hackers getting access to your system. And again, the average person is not going to know that software is on there, and they got caught. Yea, So Sony, what what Sony did was went well beyond just ensuring

that this music wasn't going to be distributed illegally. What Sony did was allowed for a remote access to your machine. Um. And the root of all of this the root kit, But the root of it all was that Sony did

not trust its customers. And the other thing that that gets people upset is not just that that these companies aren't trusting their their customers, but that um that it's a it's a relatively small percentage of people among all customers who actually engage in illegal behavior, but everyone gets affected by it, that's right, So every one is being punished for the the behavior of a small percentage of users. And digital rights management can go beyond just preventing you

from making copies. For example, um, for video games or computer games, there might be protection there where you can install that game on a limited number of systems before it will not let you install it again. Well, again we're getting to the point of this this. You know they're limiting how you can use this this uh this product. And again you can kind of understand why. You know, they don't want you to go and install it on all of your friends computers so that everyone has a

copy of the game without buying it. But on the flip side, if you are someone who updates his or a computer on a regular basis, before long, you can no longer play that game even though you purchased it. Um Like, if you got rid of those computers, then you that's it. That game is useless to you. You cannot install it on your current system. And so this this opens up lots and lots of wars for people to come in and say that DRM is really not fair. Um I mentioned before the idea of fair use and

making a backup copy. Here's another big example of where DRM has got people upset. So there's the the digital see see if I get this right's d m c A, Digital Management Copyright Act Digital Millennium Millennium Copyright Act. Yes, thank you. I knew I was going to mess up the m the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was past. Yes, I remember the year. I just can't remember what the

darn thing is called. Um So d m c A. The the whole idea of this was to provide companies the level of protection they wanted, so that if anyone were to try and circumvent UH copyright protection, they could be punished two extreme extents. I don't think that's unfair to say that they could, because I think you could be uh fined up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per incident of copyright infringement, right, so, which for

the average person is going to be pretty uh pretty severe. Well, yeah, hundred for anyone. I don't care who you are. Bill Gates would not say, like a hundred fifty ah, that's a lot of money. So even if you can afford it,

that doesn't mean that you want to know. But at any rate, So one of the things about DRM is that while it's still legal for you to create a backup copy of whatever it is you've purchased in order for you to to have it in case something happens to the original, it is not legal for you to

circumvent any kind of digital rights management right copyright protection. So, in other words, if you purchase a DVD, and even if you have the the technology to make a copy of that DVD, you can't make legally a backup copy of that device because it would require you to circumvent the d R m R. So your fair use rights are trumped by the right of the copyright holder. UM. In fact, it's illegal to even create a device that can circumvent the DRM right. It's it's against the law.

So you even if you tried to create a code or whatever in order for you to make your legitimate backup file, UM, just making that code, even if you've never run the code, even if you've never actually used it to break DRM. Just creating it is against the law. Yeah, the Real Networks, the company Real Networks sort of ran into that problem with Real DVD, which was its DVD

copying software. And basically they've said, sure, you'd like to make copies to run on your portable media players that you know, like, for example, an iPad they didn't specifically mention that, or uh, an iPhone or an Android powered device. You'd like to make a copy of your movies, Sure, we have software for that will help you do that, and then you can make a backup copy or you

can watch copies of the stuff you bought. And uh, Hollywood essentially brought suit against Real Networks and said, uh no, this violates the d m c A, and the courts essentially upheld that agreed with them, and there is no Real DVD for sale. Um. But you know, it looks pretty promising as far as as those programs go. But you know, essentially the level of trust would have been the issue there. You know, I've had trusted people to

do that. And now that there's that legislation. UM. It's not just here in the United States either, Canada's Bill C thirty two. UM, basically has included that same provision that you if you are trying to circumvent copyright protection in order to make your legitimate backup copy, that you may not do that. So as long as they don't put copyright protection on their products, then you can make

a backup copy. But no one's going to not but copyright protection on their products, so you're kind of it's almost like your right to make a backup copy doesn't exist at all. Might as well be it's effectively you can't make that backup copy legally. Yeah, you know, I I should. We should wrap this up pretty soon here, but yeah, you know, I wanted to ask you if you remembered another name from our copy protection past. Do you remember a Place for Sure? No, I do not.

Microsoft had was was selling music for a while, and uh use the Place for Sure format, And um, the Place for Sure format was sort of like Apple's uh you know it's It had a layer of information encoded into the file that said, you know, oh, yes, you are indeed Jonathan Strickland the person that bought this file. Listen to it as many times as you like. Um. Well, that was fine until Microsoft decided to eliminate the service, and then there was no longer anything to validate that DRM.

So anybody who bought files with the place for sure DRM embedded in it. When Microsoft decided to abandon that line of revenue, those people, you know, they said, Microsoft said, you only have a certain amount of time to back these up, and then you could still only listen to them in limited circumstances. And once, you know, after that those machines die, that's it. You won't be able to access those files anymore. And that's not the that's not

the same. Only one that's ever done that, you know, yeah, who had the same problem. And well, i'll close on this. I'll mention one other example, the one that I think is just absolutely insane is UBI Soft with their their software where the only way you could play the game, and it was a single person shooter. Um, so you're

playing by yourself on your computer. The only way you could play is if your computer was also hooked up to the Internet to connect to their DRM servers to to make sure that the copy of the game you were playing was valid, which meant that if you lost your Internet connection for any reason, you could not play the game, even though it was not a multiplayer game.

It wasn't an online game. The only reason you have to be online was just to make sure that you hadn't copied the game exactly, and that I think shows the true that's probably not even the furthest extent. We're gonna see DRM go too. And I'm not even saying that all DRM is bad. I'm just saying that the implementations that we've seen so far have been shortsighted and again punish the average customer. They're not the pirate, the draconian.

Draconian isn't a good word for it. Yeah, it's just, you know, they want to get paid, and that's okay. You know, it's just that they do restrict people who are legitimately using uh the whatever it is for their you know, they're illegal within their legal rights. That's true. Again, it's all about rights and what rights you have as a consumer as well. And you have the right to write us, yes if you'd like to. Our email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. Also remember

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