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cory doctorow
This is a fallacy for two reasons: one technical, and one social.
They’re both bad for society, though.
Here’s the technical reason: I don’t need to be a cracker to
break your DRM. I only need to know how to search Google, or
Kazaa, or any of the other general-purpose search tools for the
cleartext that someone smarter than me has extracted.
Raise your hand if you’re thinking something like, “But NGSCB
can solve this problem: we’ll lock the secrets up on the logic board
and goop it all up with epoxy.”
Put your hand down.
Raise your hand if you’re a co-author of the Darknet paper.
Everyone in the first group, meet the co-authors of the Dark-
net paper. This is a paper that says, among other things, that
DRM will fail for this very reason. Put your hands down, guys.
Here’s the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest
user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us
that their technology is meant to be proof against average users,
not organized criminal gangs like the Ukrainian pirates who
stamp out millions of high-quality counterfeits. It’s not meant to
be proof against sophisticated college kids. It’s not meant to be
proof against anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold
down the shift key at the right moment, or use a search engine.
At the end of the day, the user DRM is meant to defend against is
the most unsophisticated and least capable among us.
Here’s a true story about a user I know who was stopped by
DRM. She’s smart, college educated, and knows nothing about
electronics. She has three kids. She has a DVD in the living room
and an old VHS deck in the kids’ playroom. One day, she brought
home the
Toy Story
DVD for the kids. That’s a substantial invest-
ment, and given the generally jam-smeared character of every-
thing the kids get their paws on, she decided to tape the DVD
off to VHS and give that to the kids — that way she could make
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