DRM

This podcast features a keynote session entitled, "Up Against the Firewall", presented by Brenda Laurel, Chair and Professor of the Graduate Program in Design at the California College of the Arts, and Rob Tow, Science and Technology Consultant at the California College of the Arts. The session was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2008 Western Regional Conference.

In this hour-long podcast, we present a session from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Policy Conference entitled, "Digital Entertainment on Campus: Old Lawsuits and New Business Models". This session consists of a panel discussion as well as Q&A from attendess. The panel includes:

Michael J. Bebel, CEO, Ruckus Network

Jeffrey Bronikowski, Senior Vice President, Business Development, Global Digital Initiatives Division, Universal Music Group

Larry Jacobson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Cdigix

Session moderator: Susan Butler, Senior Correspondent, Billboard Magazine

The morning keynotes hinted at the [d]evolving state of DRM. Hopefully Bill McCoy will touch on his interest in Social DRM at his session tomorrow. Michael Jensen, Peter Brantley, and Ale de Vries hosted an interesting session on DRM too. In my estimation, they mostly talked around the idea of DRM and the problems one can encounter when approaching the topic. I got a late question in regarding the music publishing model and the potential for using performance rights organizations to introduce an new form of renumeration for the book trade. I approached the same topic with Brewster Kahle in our interview from 2005.

I've been a long-time critic of Digital Rights Management (DRM), not so much on philosophical grounds but on practical grounds—I just don't see how it can be made robust enough and secure enough. Those cunning cryptanalysts have come up with a theoretical timing attack against DRM which just completely undermines the concept of DRM on multi-tasking general purpose CPUs, including all desktop computers.

Cryptanalysts already known the time taken to make different calculations using the same encryption key might, in theory at least, give attackers code-breaking clues in much the same way electro-magnetic leakage or power fluctuations can be used in so-called "side-channel" attacks on secure systems. The new so-called Branch Prediction Analysis (BPA) attack is a refinement on this approach that makes code breaking feasible on commodity PCs instead of expensive high-performance kit.

A carefully written spy-process, running alongside the RSA-process, is able to collect almost all the secret bits used in an RSA signing operation by monitoring the states of a CPU. The approach yields far quicker results than statistical analysis, cryptography researchers say.

Much ink has been spilt about the new security measures in the upcoming Windows Vista. Whether you love them or loathe them, they'll almost certainly result in a more secure operating system, fewer malware and hopefully less spam from infected boxes. What you won't hear much about is trusted computing, which was set to be the next big thing in security.

Trusted computing is a scheme to create a secure, protected zone within computers which they can then use check the security of the rest of the system. In principal the scheme by the trusted computing group is a great idea but many people foresee problems. The early plans for Vista included extensive use of trusted computing, but as time has gone on, these have been whittled away and only one service in Vista uses it, the so-call BitLocker

The "Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia?" postprint is now available.

The abstract is below:

Three critical issues—dramatic expansion of the scope, duration, and punitive nature of copyright laws; the ability of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems to lock-down digital content in an unprecedented fashion; and the erosion of Net neutrality, which ensures that all Internet traffic is treated equally—are examined in detail and their potential impact on libraries is assessed. How legislatures, the courts, and the commercial marketplace treat these issues will strongly influence the future of digital information for good or ill.

If you would like a more detailed description, see my posting about the preprint.

In this 28 minute recording, I sit down with Denise Troll Covey, Principal Librarian for Special Projects at Carnegie Mellon University.  Tune-in as she shares some thoughts about her work covering the Orphan Works debate, insights on fair use and DRM, and close with some thoughts on social software. 


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Spring Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

This 37 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled Digital Rights Management Technologies: Their Use and Impact on the Use, Distribution, and Protection of Digital Content in Higher Education.