On 4/14/2011 1:07 AM, Invisible wrote:
> On 13/04/2011 04:55 PM, Darren New wrote:
>> On 4/13/2011 0:55, Invisible wrote:
>>> And this is why DRM will never work. As long as at least one device
>>> exists
>>> which ignores DRM, the system is trivially broken.
>>
>> In that sense of trivial, it's already trivially broken, because there
>> are no secrets involved. To play encrypted media, you have to decrypt it
>> on the customer's equipment, meaning the customer has in his hands
>> everything he needs to know to bypass the DRM.
>
> It would be harder to crack if you invented some new storage format and
> then made all devices capable of playing it respect the DRM. (In
> particular, this means not making it playable on a PC.) Trouble is, as I
> say, as soon as one company manufactures a device that ignores the DRM,
> everything is ruined forever.
>
Such systems have existed, I will give you two guesses why they never 
took off. First, it locks you into using *only* devices that actually 
support it, which is exactly what the DRM of DVDs attempted to do. Ones 
that decode them for OSes/devices that can't natively do so still have 
to use the DRM, they just don't have to use the "approved" method. Any 
system that was unbreakable, would be useless though, since you would be 
forced to use it only how the distributor allowed. And.. That isn't 
going to go over too well. Second, it creates conditions where the data 
becomes unreadable, once the technology is passed out of use. Half the 
shit produced for computers over the last 30 years either requires the 
original hardware to even read, or had DRM on it, which requires 
"cracking" the DRM method used, to replicate it some place else, and 
even when there wasn't any DRM, simply difference in file formats, or 
media formats, have rendered everything from NASA records, to old games, 
to office documents, unusable.

If you care about the content persisting at all, you **can't** DRM it. 
If you don't give a shit that 50 years from now the only copy requires 
some device, which understands the DRM, and can read the media, of which 
only one is known to even exist, then.. lock the thing up as tight as 
you want. Just don't whine to the few people that managed to copy it 
anyway, that you are losing revenue, or some such, over something even 
*you* can't reproduce any more.

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