David Wagner wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

...

Legislation of DRM is not in the cards, [...]

Care to support this claim? (the Hollings bill and the DMCA requirement for Macrovision in every VCR come to mind as evidence to the contrary)

The line you quoted was the summary from a message which described the detailed reasoning that supported the claim. To reiterate and lay out the points explicitly: - Legislating DRM would be extremely expensive in the current environment as it would require phasing out all computers presently in use. This provides a huge practical burden and barrier for any legislation along these lines. - Some have opposed voluntary DRM because they believe that it would reduce the barrier above. Once DRM systems are voluntarily installed in a substantial number of systems, it would be a relatively small step to mandate them in all systems. - But this is false reasoning; if DRM is so successful as to be present in a substantial number of systems, it is not necessary to legislate it. - Further, even if it is legislated, that will not stop piracy. No practical DRM system will prevent people from running arbitrary 3rd party software (despite absurd arguments by fanatics that the government seeks to remove Turing complete computing capabilities from the population). - Neither the content nor technology companies have incentive to support legislation, as they still must convince people that paying for content is superior to pirating it. Legislating DRM will not help them in this battle, as piracy will still be an alternative. - What would help them legislatively is some kind of enforced watermarking technology, so that the initial "ripping" of content is impossible (this also requires closing the analog hole). Only by intervening at this first step can they hope to break the piracy chain, and this is the real purpose of the Hollings bill. See also the recent work by the BPDG. But this is not DRM in the sense we are discussing it here. Those were the points made earlier in support of the summary statement quoted above. As far as the Hollings bill in particular, the most notable aspect of it was the tremendous opposition from virtually every sector of the economy. The Hollings bill was not just a failure, it was a massive, DOA, stinking heap of failure which had not even the slightest chance of success. If anything, the failure of the Hollings bill fully supports the thesis that legislation of DRM is not going to happen. As for Macrovision, this is an example of "watermarking" technology and as mentioned above, it does make sense to legislate along these lines (although it is questionable whether it can work in the long run - Macrovision defeaters are widely available). It represents an attempt to close the analog hole. The point is that this is not a simple-minded or unreflective analysis. We are looking specifically at the kind of DRM enabled by the TCPA. This means the ability to run content viewing software that imposes DRM rules which might limit the number of views, or require pay per view, or require data to be deleted if it is copied elsewhere, etc. The point of TCPA and Palladium is for the remote content provider to be assured that the software it is talking to across the net is a trusted piece of software which will enforce the rules. It is this kind of DRM to which the analysis above is directed. This DRM does not prevent piracy using any of the techniques available today, or via exploiting bugs and flaws in future technology. It does not and can not prevent people from running file sharing programs and making pirated content available on the Internet (at least without crippling computers to the point where necessary business functionality is lost, which would mean sending the country into a deep depression and making it an obsolete competitor on world markets, i.e. it won't happen). This kind of DRM can nevertheless succeed on a voluntary basis by providing good quality for good value, in conjunction with technological and legal attacks on P2P systems such as are in their infancy now. All of these arguments have been made in the past few weeks on this list. Hopefully reiterating them in one place will be helpful to those who have overlooked them in the past.