Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Digital rights management (DRM) can refer to any of a variety of actions owners of
intellectual property may take to protect their rights. As Christopher May puts it, “All
DRM technologies are aimed at tracking and controlling the use of content once it has
entered the market” [52]. DRM technologies may be incorporated into a computer's
operating system, a program, or a piece of hardware.
One approach to DRM is to encrypt the digital content so that only authorized users
can access it. Another approach is to place a digital mark on the content so that a device
accessing the content can identify the content as copy protected.
The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) was an effort to create copy-protected CDs
and secure digital music downloads that would play only on SDMI-compliant devices.
About 200 entertainment and technology companies joined the consortium, which
worked for three years to develop “digital watermarks” that would make unauthorized
copying of audio files impossible. The SDMI was unsuccessful for three reasons. First,
before any copy protection technologies could be put in place, the number of music
files being copied on the Internet mushroomed. Second, some of the sponsors of the
SDMI—consumer electronics companies—started making a lot of money selling de-
vices that became more attractive to customers as access to free MP3 files got easier.
Their sales could be hurt by restrictions on copying. Third, the digital watermarking
scheme was cracked [53].
In September 2000, SDMI issued a “Hack SDMI” challenge. It released some dig-
itally watermarked audio files and offered a $10,000 prize to the first person to crack
them. Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten and eight colleagues picked
up the gauntlet. Three weeks later the team had successfully read the audio files. The
team declined to accept the cash prize. Instead, it wrote a paper describing how it broke
the encryption scheme. It prepared to present a paper at the Fourth Annual Informa-
tion Hiding Workshop at Carnegie Mellon University in April 2001 [54]. At this point,
the Recording Industry Association of America sent Dr. Felten a letter stating, “Any
disclosure of information gained from participating in the public challenge would be
outside the scope of activities permitted by the agreement and could subject you and
your research team to actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act” [55]. Fear-
ing litigation, Dr. Felten agreed to withdraw the paper from the conference. However,
that did not prevent the information from being leaked. Even before the conference,
copies of the research paper and the letter from the RIAA were placed on a freedom-of-
speech Web site [55]. Four months later Felten's group published the paper [56].
In the summer and fall of 2005, Sony BMG Music Entertainment shipped millions of
audio CDs with Extended Copy Protection, a DRM system. Extended Copy Protection
prevented users from ripping audio tracks into MP3 format or making more than three
backup copies of the CD. It also monitored the user's listening habits and reported
