Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to text Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you Today? We're going to talk about the history and evolution and scope of digital rights management or d r M. Recently, I was talking about n f t s, you know, non fungible tokens, and why I find that whole concept frustrating. But I also I made a I made a whoopsie an error when I was doing that, and so big thanks to Jason Stadler on Twitter for pointing this out letting me know also did it in a really cool way, like it could have said like you're an idiot, and didn't, so I appreciate that a lot. But in way, the mistake I made is that I had said, if you look at n f t s as a way to support artists, it's not really that effective because the artist only gets paid once on that initial point of sale. So let's say that I make you know a little piece of digital music, and I create a digital token and n f T to represent the ownership of that piece of music, and I sell it to you for a dollar and then you turn around and sell it for ten dollars. Then well you made money off of it, but all I made was the dollar. Well, Stabler, include me in that, you know, because you're talking about a blockchain approach where every single transaction becomes part of the chain. You can trace it from point to point and see how many times a token changes hands. You can actually code in essentially a royalty feature in n f t s so that the creator of the n f T receives a little payout every time the n f T goes through a transaction. So in that way, n f t s are actually superior to a physical piece of art because an artist can only sell an original work of art once. Uh. They could, you know, create copies and and and sell those as well, but the original they only sell once and then whatever happens after that, it's out of the artist's hands literally, So in that way, n f t s can be superior. U. I still think that they are wasteful, uh and speculative, but that is an important thing to actually note, So thank you against Tadler. Anyway, that got me to thinking about digital rights management, and the whole point of DRM is ostensibly to make certain that the party that holds the intellectual rights to a certain digital property is able to exercise those rights. Uh, you know, digital stuff is different from physical stuff. I mean, that's one of the reasons that n f t s are a thing, right, is that you can't treat digital the same way you would, you know, an analog physical thing, because you can copy stuff and easily distribute it wholesale, as opposed to if if I'm selling something physical that that takes a lot more effort to make a copy and transfer it. So that's the idea, but in practice it's typically used to prevent folks from gaining unauthorized access to hardware or software, particularly in the Internet age, though the concepts of d r M actually predate the Internet, and often folks will use the term as a blanket term when really they might mean something more specific like copy protection, which is one aspect of DRM, or they might mean technological protection measures, which I would argue is a little more broad than DRM. But anyway, it's meant to cut off people's ability to copy or steal stuff, or, as is frequently the case with tech like printers, for example, to go outside a company's ecosystem. By that, I mean companies like Cannon have incorporated DRM to prevent people from using just any kind of toner cartridge with their Cannon printers, something that the company recently had to walk back a bit. In fact, let's talk about that for a moment. So Cannon was using toner cartridges that had a little chip in them, and the Cannon printer would scan and look for that chip to verify that the toner you just put into the uh, the toner cartridge that you just put into the printer was in fact an official Cannon toner cartridge. And this is kind of a DRM. If it didn't detect the chip, then you wouldn't be able to use the toner because the printers like, no, no, no, you should only be using Cannon toner. Uh. We all know that printers the the where the money is in that toner, right, Like you can buy a printer for an amazingly cheap price as the toner that's gonna cost you, like just just after a year or two, you're gonna spend way more on toner than you ever did on the printer. So the only way that works, obviously is if you can lock people into that ecosystem, because if they have an option to go somewhere else to get the toner where they can get it more, you know, cheap than the official source, that's what they're gonna do. So the way Cannon was trying to get around that was by using little chips embedded in the toner cartridges so that users would be forced to get those cartridges to use with their Cannon printers. But now we're in a semiconductor shortage and Cannon can't actually get hold of the materials to make the chips to embed in their toner cartridges, which means that Cannon's had to produce toner cartridges that don't have the chip, And it also means that Cannon has had to instruct users on how to use those those cartridges and bypass the d r M systems that are otherwise in place. Typical technically, what that means is Cannon's teaching people how they can get a work around on the system that is supposed to lock you into the Cannon ecosystem, where you know, theoretically you can go outside of it now because Cannon's just told you how it works. But yeah, that's that's one of the downfalls of d r M. Now, the folks who hold intellectual property rights saw DRM as a necessity in order to actually, you know, profit off of the i P that they owned. So you can think of it kind of like a lock that's on some piece of technology, and only legit customers are given a key to use it and only under specific circumstances, or as the Free Software Foundation puts it, DRM isn't really about protecting copyright or i P, but rather controlling the use of i P, as is clearly the case with the cannon printers. Also, DRM really describes an overall philosophy and strategy, not a specific implementation. There are a few really popular implementations of d r M and a couple of flavors of that, but it's it's more of a this is what this technology does, as opposed to this is a very specific tech, uh, and some people use totally different DRM methodologies than others, so it's not a singular technology or anything like that. There have been so many bad DRM implementations that I think a lot of folks in the text space immediately associate DRM with frustration and anger and betrayal. A bad DRM solution can become a real pain in the patookas for legit users of tech. For example, there are video games that have DRM protections in it where it's been shown that the d r M actually negatively impacts the performance of the game on gamers machines, So you might have things like dropped frames, or you might not be able to set the graphics settings as high as you think you should based upon your hardware, because the the involvement of DRM is actually impacting the quality of your experience. And perhaps the most exasperating thing is that in many cases it doesn't actually solve the problem it's meant to tackle. So in our lock analogy, imagine you've got a gate with a lock on it, and you've got a key for that lock. But sometimes the lock sticks right, Sometimes the key gets stuck in the lock and you can't even turn it or pull it back out, and it's just a pain to operate. Meanwhile, you look over and you see a bunch of folks casually standing nearby with a big old pair of bolt cutters, and you realize, well, they just have to get the lock off once and then they can actually go in and out of the gate as much as they like and you know, that seems to be the preference. That's that's the better way of doing things. So d r M, a lot of people argue, not only does it not solve the problem of say piracy uh or or having ownership over i P, it also hurts the legit users or customers who are are purchasing this stuff. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Let's well, we're gonna start by talking about the history of d r M and the various laws that have made an imperfect solution even more of a problem, because y' all, this starts to get absurd when you start really thinking about it. Now, many decades ago, even before the era of personal computers, we're talking like nineteen fifties nineteen sixties, you typically encountered computer systems in just a few environments. One might be academia like universities, you know, like Stanford and m I. T. They were working on uter systems and furthering the discipline of computer science. Another was in certain think tanks. They might have had access to computers, and a few businesses were starting to adopt them. So by the nineteen sixties you had a few big companies purchasing massive computer systems to run processes in the background. All right, this was not yet the era of desktop computers. That would take another decade and some change. Really, uh, you, we're really looking at massive main frames for the most part. Now, in the early days, computers and their software were tightly coupled. You had proprietary computer systems running proprietary software and it was only through that pairing with specific hardware and specific software that everything worked. Like you couldn't port the software over to a different computer system because it wasn't compatible. In fact, in some cases you were working with a hard wire system, a hard coded system, where the computer system could perform certain processes because it was hardwired to do that, and you couldn't separate software from hardware. It was effectively firmware. So the program would just live on a single computer and that was that. But towards the end of the nineteen sixties, things were starting to change and IBM saw that its customers needed more flexibility. There was a need to be able to move programs between machines, or to make backup copies of software so that you would have a backup available should something happen to your primary copy. But creating that kind of capability would also mean that customers would more easily be able to make illegal copies of software. What if someone were to give away copies of that software to colleagues, maybe even people in other companies, you know, companies that had not purchased the software, IBM would then be out of a customer. So we'll talk about what IBM did in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, So IBM is looking at ways to allow customers more flexibility with their software, but also preventing the wholesale copying of software, so that IBM doesn't just sell one copy and then that's it, right, Then it just goes viral as people start copying. And of course these are this is the old days, is pre Internet, or at least pre Internet in any meaningful way, and so you know, we're talking about physical copies at this point, and one of the things they were looking at was a cryptographic approach. This would be like the lock and key technique I was talking about before the break, where only entities that have a legit key would be able to use that software. But IBM saw that this was a poor swan because it would make the software harder to use, and perhaps most important, it would be expensive for IBM to implement. And also there was a concern that if you were to update your system, the method of encryption may no longer be valid, that you would have to consistently update the DRM as well as whatever the operating system was. It was just it was becoming a nightmare. And so what s Humphrey, who worked at IBM in the nineteen sixties would end up saying, quote, because we could not devise practical physical security measures, we had to rely on the inherent honesty of our customers. Our hope was that legal protection and criminal prosecution would limit the piracy problem end quote. So in other words, IBM came to the conclusion that forcing any kind of DRM, although it wasn't called it that yet uh would end up causing more harm than good. So IBM decided not to go down that route that we would later call DRM because the downsides were greater than the positives. At least that's the conclusion the company came to in the nineteen sixties. If you flash forward three decades, the company who had a very different point of view, and we'll get there now. In the late nineteen seventies, Apple executives and managers were deep in a conversation about creating a solution to protect Apple software and prevent folks from being able to make copies of it. So this is the early age of personal computers, where you frequently would purchase programs on a floppy disk, and you would insert that floppy disk into a floppy disk drive attached to a computer, and then you would run a program off the disk. Well, with the ability to copy the contents of one disk onto a blank disc, that meant there was a risk that you would sell one copy, the customer would then produce a ton of copies on their own and then either undercut you or worse yet, distribute them for free to other people. I think of the children. So folks like Randy Wingington and Apple's co founder Steve Wozniak debated on solutions that could cut back on or outright prevent software piracy. They outlined different levels of DRM. Again, it wasn't called DRM. It was really was more like levels of copy protection. So if a copy protection were perfect, they would describe it as level one. It would be the most restrictive and it would prevent attempts to copy the software illegally. Uh, and it went all the way down to level five. This would be the least secure at eight percent effectiveness. So there's still some copy protection there um. And essentially what they were saying is we you know this, this level of copy protection. Eight out of ten computer users would not bother to try and work around it. But if you were determined, you could find your way around that copy protection. And again, this was just a way of classifying potential solutions. And we know about all of this because a person who goes by the handle of vader Mere on Reddit happened to come across a bundle of Apple internal memos, like the physical paper and ink kind of memos. They found the bundle of documents in a goodwill store, and those documents detailed the back and forth between various engineers and Apple about potential copy protection solutions, and nearly every proposal was dismissed as either being too easy to get around or too difficult to implement, or too expensive to consider, or too inconvenient for the end user, or some combination thereof. So again, these were very smart people all debating the possibility of creating various copy protection strategies and realizing the downsides might be greater than any kind of benefit they might grant. I actually remember computer games in the nineteen eighties that would have their own takes on copy protection, and these wouldn't necessarily count as DRN, but there is some overlap with DRM there. For example, I remember I had a game that would prompt you to provide an answer to a question early on in the game. Like you could start the game, you could start playing, but before very long you would get a question posed to you and the answer would be found in the game's manual. Like back then, games came with physical manuals that you would have. Uh. Some of those manuals would be printed on dark paper, dark ink on dark paper, because the game companies figured that folks weren't just copying video games onto blank discs, they were also going to the local photocopier and copying the manuals too, and getting around this kind of rudimentary copy protection strategy. So the dark paper with dark ink would foil most copiers. They would just produce black pages. I want to say one of the Wizardry games did that, but I could be wrong, But playing those games was kind of a hassle because you have to have the manual handy and flip through it while all you really wanted to do was just play the darn game. Let's say that you know, you went out there and bought the game with your hard earned money, like for me from cutting the lawn over and over again, even if it didn't need it. Gosh darn it, because I needs those games. And I end up handing over my allowance money or the law and more money, whatever it was, And and I get a game, and I come home and now it's just a pain in the butt to play because there's this copy protection I have to get around. Uh. That plays into the issue with DR and potentially being inconvenient for legit users. In fact, it would start to tell you that maybe I just want a cracked version of this game so I don't have to deal with that. It's not because I want to steal the game, but just because this is a barrier between me and experiencing the thing I want to experience. But we really shifted into high gear with DRM in the nineteen nineties. This is also when we saw the birth of the World Wide Web, which for many people was their first exposure to the Internet. And again, the Internet had actually been around for a while before the Worldwide Web came along, but really only a fraction of the general public were even aware that it was a thing. Most people didn't know. Unless you were, you know, actively working on our bonnet, or you were a college student at the time in in one of the computer labs, you probably didn't even know the Internet existed. The Web represented a new way to access information, and that included information that could be under copyright protection. And you know, well, folks say information wants to be free, the parties that hold copyrights might not always feel the same way. Now, I should add this is understandable if you were to pour your time and effort and talent into creating something like let's say it's a novel, and you wanted to earn money off your work. If you thought this is something worth paying for, I want to become a professional novelist, you would be concerned about folks skirting around the whole paying for your work thing. They'd get to experience your work, but you'd make no profit from it. Now, I say this because I know I tend to come down pretty hard against corporations and stuff and for lots of good reasons. Corporations often make bone headed decisions. But I also want to make it clear that I do see the need and value of copyright, like I see the reason for it. I don't think it needs to be nearly as extensive as what we have here in America, but I digress. Also, by the way, I say that as the son of two authors who have published numerous books, the way copyright law is right now, assuming that my parents were too uh to grant the ongoing rights to either me or, say, my sister, uh, we would be able to collect royalties on works for the rest of our lives. Uh. But you know, I don't care about that so much. I think it needs to be less expansive than it is. But I digress. So the ninety nineties hit and the web provided a new way to distribute information and files, so there was a need for some sort of mechanism to make sure folks couldn't just steal stuff. Like if you wanted to sell digital files on your website, you would probably want a method to keep folks from copying your products without limitations. But have no fear. A man with a degree in sociology will soon be here as soon as we take this quick break. Okay, before the break, I teased the entrance of Victor Shear, so in nine uh he founded a company called Electronic Publishing Resources, but soon they renamed this company inter Trust. Sheer had an amazingly prescient vision of what the Internet would allow. In fact, this is before Tim berners Lee had established the first web server. In fact, this is before the National Science Foundation, which had dominion over the Internet back in those days, had even lifted the restrictions on the commercial use of the Internet. The NSF wouldn't do that till and Sheer founded Electronic Publishing Resources the year before. So uh, he really saw where where the path was leading. He saw that the Internet was going to become the marketplace where people would buy and sell digital goods. But how do you make that work? How do you make a stable marketplace for the the per just sing and selling and transferring of digital goods so that it doesn't just become a chaotic mess. How can you assure that the rights holder to say, a certain song, will not see their song just copied and distributed across the entire Internet. What was needed was a method to wrap files up into a container of some sort, and the container would have special rules associated with it, rules that the container would only uh, you know, allow users to do so, Like if it was within the rule set, it was fine. If it was outside, it wouldn't allow access to the file inside the container. Rules like how many times the file might be accessed. It could be something like a a subscription service where you would have to continuously pay a subscription fee in order to have continued use of a specific file. Uh. Maybe it would be on how many machines you can install the file. We saw this a lot with music file else where companies were creating limitations on how many machines you could install a particular album before you would get a message saying sorry, you've you've put this on the max number of machines you can have it on. Same with video games like that. That was a big thing with video games too, where you could purchase a game and you might get a message saying, no, you've already got this installed on another machine, so you can't install it on this computer, which is a real pain in the butt if you're doing things like upgrading your computer system, or you happen to have multiple computers and you just want to be able to port the experience from one machine to another. DRM would sometimes interfere with that, but anyway, Uh, those were the sort of rules that would be associated with these containers. That was Sheer's vision. Again, not bad for a fellow who had a sociology degree, and he would file several patents around this idea. And it was Sheer who called it a digital rights Management strate to g so that's where dr M comes from. The patents would end up making headlines later on when Intertrust, a company that at the time had fewer than forty employees, filed a massive lawsuit against Microsoft claiming infringement, saying that Microsoft was making use of DRM technology without actually paying Intertrust for for using it. The battle would last a few years, but Microsoft ultimately would settle out of court and pay Intertrust hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Something similar happened between Intertrust and Apple almost a decade later. But around that same time, work out of Xerox's famous park department that's p a r C. It stands for Palo Alto Research Center, they would develop a different approach to d r M, one that took into account not just copy protection, but the transference of files. That project would evolve into a product called content Guard. So yeah, the digibox from Intertrust and content Guard originally from Xerox, and then IBM. You remember them, the company that said that you know, a DRM approach would be bad for business. Well, they developed a cryptographic envelope methodology to send files inside as a type of DRM. They called it cryptolope, which sounds like something too young vampires in love would do if their parents didn't approve of their relationship. Cryptolope, You're welcome anyway. By now, we were into the late nineties and in the United States, Congress was hashing out a new law to address copyright issues in the digital age. In fact, this was the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m c A. Like when you hear about someone getting a d m c A strike, it relates back to this law, which became a law. Now. A big reason for the d m c A was that folks were now able to make digital copis of stuff and make them available over the Internet, and a big part of this was digital music. This was before the iTunes music store that wouldn't launch until two thousand three. But there was another way to get digital music. So some of y'all might be too young to remember this, but back in the day, the way you would get digital music onto a device, you know, like an MP three player, that's what we called him back then, before we had smartphones. Well, you would take your music collection from c d s and you would use a CD ROM drive connected to a computer, and then you would use a program to rip the music from those c ds and convert them into music files, and then you would transfer those files via a cable to the MP three player. There was no wireless MP three's back in those days, but this meant that you'd have musical files on your computer. You could potentially send those files to someone else or save them to some other disc and you could listen to music without actually paying for it. The horror. And then we had the rise of peer to peer networks, and those made it way easier to distribute files like music files across a large group of computers. You know, I had Napster and Kazan and those kind of of peer to peer networks, So you had a subset of folks who were uploading and downloading music files like crazy anyway, DRM was one method to try and prevent folks from just copying music wholesale, and one of the things that the d m c A did was to make it a crime to try and circumvent the DRM protections on files. Now here's where we get into a weird paradox that still makes my brain melt. All right, let's quickly talk about making a copy for the purposes of a backup here. Generally speaking, the US government has ruled that it's okay to make a copy of stuff you own for the purposes of a backup. So, for example, I have a small collection of Vinyl records. I might want to make a digital backup of those Vinyl records so that should anything happen to my physical collection, I still have the music. Now, granted, a lot of this example kind of doesn't work in the era of on demand streaming music, but just stick with me here. The point is if I made a copy of that Vinyl record album collection just as a backup for myself and that was it, I'd pretty much be in the clear. I mean, that is considered acceptable. It kind of falls in line with fair use. Fair use is a collection of legal exceptions that allow folks to copy or otherwise make use of material that they don't own. The copyright for um fair use, though, is a tricky subject anyway. In the era of DRN, making backup copies is way more complicated and infuriating. A lot of d r M just outright prevents customers from making a copy, including backup copies. So it's legal to make backups of your stuff, now, that's what the courts have said repeatedly. What the d M c A does however, as it says, well, yeah, it's okay for you to make a copy of your stuff for the purposes of backup, but it's not okay to get around the DRM protections that prevent you from making a copy. So this is a classic catch twenty two. You could make a legal backup copy if you could get around the d r M, but getting around the DRM is illegal. Other countries adopted similar legislation, which meant now that DRM has legal protection and people don't. Yikes. Uh, this kind of leads to lots of problems. I mean, we've got the issue with the individual users. That's a problem right there. Like if you aren't allowed to make a backup copy because of that protection. That's really frustrating. But another big one is archival and president vation of works. See, the way we store stuff evolves over time, and that also means that the older methods we were relying upon in decades past gradually become obsolete. Like let's go back to floppy drives. I'm sure some of you out there listening you might have a working floppy drive hanging around, but for the most part, I would say we could call them extinct, like the dinosaurs. So let's say that a company released a particular piece of software on floppy disks, and the disks contained a form of copy protection on them, and then decades later, someone needs to access that program, except now that company doesn't exist anymore, so you can't go to them. There's no one to go to the No one has floppy drives. So even if you had a copy of the disk in your hand, you wouldn't be able to make a copy of the old file because the way it was protected and the way it saved. So in the in the efforts to preserve important stuff, and it's kind of hard to think of certain things like like computer games as being important. But in order to preserve that for historical record. The copy of protection stands as a huge barrier to that, and so that's one of the reasons why people who are critics of DRM really hammer this home, saying DRM really makes it difficult for us to do important work. There's also the issue of if you want to do scholarly work, if you want to examine a computer program to look for vulnerabilities, for example, like you're doing some security research, DRM can stand in the way of that and to disable the DRM would be breaking the law. So there are people who really have legit criticisms for the way we treat DRM these days. And this means that over time we lose knowledge, right, we can't act says that anymore, the information literally becomes inaccessible. So again one of the biggest arguments leveled against DRM. That prevents the legal archival of information, and it means that those files and the stuff built from those files end up living on borrowed time. Then there's also the back end of DRM. So a lot of these methodologies rely upon a service running in the background where a file is checking in with the mothership back home. Right, So DRM is not just something that just lives on a file itself. It's part of a larger interconnected service. So what happens if the company in charge of that service goes out of business or gets acquired, will you still have access through the equipment or file? I mean, you purchased it, but if you lose it, like if the thing goes away, what happens to the stuff you bought. Here's a great example of this. I have purchased digital copies of certain television shows. The Mighty Bush is one of them. I did that on Xbox. I purchased the full seasons of The Mighty Bush, and I have it available in Xbox to watch whenever I want. Let's say something weird happens at Microsoft and the entire Xbox division goes defunct and I no longer have access to that. I paid for that that stuff, and I would have otherwise had access to it if they had sent me, say a physical copy of the DVDs, which by the way, I went ahead and purchased because of just this very reason. But I would no longer have access to that material. It's It's one of the big arguments against streaming services is the idea that should the streaming service go out of business, you lose access to all of that stuff. Or what about when a company that sells a DRM protected file decides to recall that file. Now, this happened with Amazon in two thousand nine, and in a fitting twist, the files were e books, and they were ebook versions of two George Orwell titles, Animal Farm and Nine. Now, considering the novel features an invasive government exerting control over virtually every aspect of people's lives, largely through the control of information, this hit pretty darn close to home. It felt like like like reality was mirroring fiction. So what actually happened? While according to Amazon, the company that had added these two titles to the Kindle Store didn't actually have the publishing rights for those books, which meant it would be illegal to sell those books because the company that was selling them didn't actually have the rights to them. So Amazon stopped the sale. But some customers had actually already purchased those titles they had added them to their digital libraries. So Amazon then recalled the titles from the customers who bought them and then issued a refund. But that meant that people who had purchased either of those books suddenly saw them just vanish from their kindle libraries. So let's think of that as if it were a physical book. Let's say you went to a brick and mortar bookstore and you purchased a physical copy of George Orwell, and you take your physical copy of the book home with you and you put it up on your shelf, and that night, someone from the bookstore breaks into your house takes the book off your shelf and leaves the purchase price for the book behind before leaving. That would be quite the invasion. And that is kind of what happened digitally speaking with Amazon, and it was made possible through DRM tools, which of course raises troubling issues. If DRM allows a company to recall a product after you've already purchased it, well, it's definitely not yours, is it? Like you, you just have access to it for as long as the company allows you to have access to it. So there are a ton of issues around DRM, and most of them poorly affect the end user. Uh. It often feels like you're being punished for having gone through the proper channels to purchase whatever the digital good is, whereas if you had just you know, pirated it, if someone had already cracked the d r M off of it, and you've got access to the pirated copy. You wouldn't have these concerns because it would all have been stripped away. Not a great message. I haven't even really touched on some of the methods of copy protection that have led to massive problems, like Sony's infamous copy protection methodology that was in the mid two thousand's. It would install a root kit on your computer. So you go out, you buy an album published by Sony b MG. You would come back and you put the CD on your computer, and maybe you want to rip the music to put onto your brand new iPod, or maybe you just want to listen on your computer, and boom, your computer installs files that create vulnerabilities on your computer system, vulnerabilities that hackers later were able to take advantage of and infect systems with malware. Uh. It was like installing a back door to your computer system. Something that's never a good idea. Now, the really crazy thing about all of this is that DRM doesn't work, at least not for the purpose for which it was invented, which was the whole idea of giving the rights owners the peace of mind that you know they're not going to be completely exploited by everybody else. There are folks who specialize in cracking DRM on files, and as long as they're not caught, the result is that the new files are DRM free and are preferable to the d r M versions, even for legit customers, and the entertainment industry has not faded away because of this. It's not like piracy has destroyed companies. The arguments for DRM typically end up not holding very much water, because, as it turns out, the problem with piracy doesn't actually seem to hit the bottom line, at least not nearly to the extent that companies would have us believe. Now. DRM is still a thing today, but the landscape has changed dramatically. For one thing, the proliferation of streaming services has created a new way to distribute stuff like music, movies, and television. To access the entertainment, you need a subscription to those various services, or you have to have a free version that's supported by ads or whatever. Whatever. The revenue generation model is not that this is the only way people access entertainment, but it's become so popular that a lot of DRM strategies are just moot because the entertainment gets locked inside a specific ecosystem, or you've got stuff like computer games or console games that require the player to have a persistent connect to the Internet. The purpose of that connection is to verify that the player in question is using a legitimate copy of the game, namely that the person playing the game purchased the game, and the connection Internet connection is a connection to a server that's verifying that. This is also an irritation because even if the game is a single player experience, you still have to be connected to the Internet to run the game. You're not playing against other people, you're just trying to play the game, and yet you need that connection time and again we've seen people resist that and to complain about it. So, yeah, DRM is still a thing because there's still this massive fear that the whole system would fall apart, or at the very least companies would make less money than they feel they should should DRM go away. But I've seen a lot of legit arguments that say DRM really just causes more problems than it and it doesn't really solve the problem it was meant to solve. So I'm also an advocate of just getting rid of DRM. I don't know that we can rely upon the honesty of the average person on the Internet. But I am pretty certain that DRM is kind of a broken solution to a problem that actually hasn't been well defined in terms of impact. I mean, the Government Accountability Office in the United States famously issued a report that said it is impossible to determine to what extent piracy actually affects the bottom line, and that the numbers that that content companies, that things like music companies and movie studios, the numbers that they cite saying we lost X billion amount of dollars because of piracy, those are unsupportable. Uh. The big reason behind that is that you can never actually say that someone who pirated something would have otherwise purchased it. So a pirated copy is not the same thing as a lost sale. Right If I pired a copy of an Adam Sandler movie, it might be that I'm morbidly curious, but not to the point where I would actually purchase the film. And maybe if I weren't, uh, you know, willing to pirate it, I would just never I just never bother watching it. I have never priorate it an Adam Sandler film because I don't I don't need to, I don't need to indulge in that. I'm okay, I'm good. Anyway, I thought that this would be an interesting thing to go down, and really it was the Cannon printer story that really drew my attention. That's what sparked this whole episode idea. This morning, I saw that that news item and thought I should do an episode about DRM, what it's for and how it often falls short of what the goals are. Uh yeah, I hope you enjoyed this. If you have suggestions on topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter, like Stadler did. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to text Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you Today? We're going to talk about the history and evolution and scope of digital rights management or d r M. Recently, I was talking about n f t s, you know, non fungible tokens, and why I find that whole concept frustrating. But I also I made a I made a whoopsie an error when I was doing that, and so big thanks to Jason Stadler on Twitter for pointing this out letting me know also did it in a really cool way, like it could have said like you're an idiot, and didn't, so I appreciate that a lot. But in way, the mistake I made is that I had said, if you look at n f t s as a way to support artists, it's not really that effective because the artist only gets paid once on that initial point of sale. So let's say that I make you know a little piece of digital music, and I create a digital token and n f T to represent the ownership of that piece of music, and I sell it to you for a dollar and then you turn around and sell it for ten dollars. Then well you made money off of it, but all I made was the dollar. Well, Stabler, include me in that, you know, because you're talking about a blockchain approach where every single transaction becomes part of the chain. You can trace it from point to point and see how many times a token changes hands. You can actually code in essentially a royalty feature in n f t s so that the creator of the n f T receives a little payout every time the n f T goes through a transaction. So in that way, n f t s are actually superior to a physical piece of art because an artist can only sell an original work of art once. Uh. They could, you know, create copies and and and sell those as well, but the original they only sell once and then whatever happens after that, it's out of the artist's hands literally, So in that way, n f t s can be superior. U. I still think that they are wasteful, uh and speculative, but that is an important thing to actually note, So thank you against Tadler. Anyway, that got me to thinking about digital rights management, and the whole point of DRM is ostensibly to make certain that the party that holds the intellectual rights to a certain digital property is able to exercise those rights. Uh, you know, digital stuff is different from physical stuff. I mean, that's one of the reasons that n f t s are a thing, right, is that you can't treat digital the same way you would, you know, an analog physical thing, because you can copy stuff and easily distribute it wholesale, as opposed to if if I'm selling something physical that that takes a lot more effort to make a copy and transfer it. So that's the idea, but in practice it's typically used to prevent folks from gaining unauthorized access to hardware or software, particularly in the Internet age, though the concepts of d r M actually predate the Internet, and often folks will use the term as a blanket term when really they might mean something more specific like copy protection, which is one aspect of DRM, or they might mean technological protection measures, which I would argue is a little more broad than DRM. But anyway, it's meant to cut off people's ability to copy or steal stuff, or, as is frequently the case with tech like printers, for example, to go outside a company's ecosystem. By that, I mean companies like Cannon have incorporated DRM to prevent people from using just any kind of toner cartridge with their Cannon printers, something that the company recently had to walk back a bit. In fact, let's talk about that for a moment. So Cannon was using toner cartridges that had a little chip in them, and the Cannon printer would scan and look for that chip to verify that the toner you just put into the uh, the toner cartridge that you just put into the printer was in fact an official Cannon toner cartridge. And this is kind of a DRM. If it didn't detect the chip, then you wouldn't be able to use the toner because the printers like, no, no, no, you should only be using Cannon toner. Uh. We all know that printers the the where the money is in that toner, right, Like you can buy a printer for an amazingly cheap price as the toner that's gonna cost you, like just just after a year or two, you're gonna spend way more on toner than you ever did on the printer. So the only way that works, obviously is if you can lock people into that ecosystem, because if they have an option to go somewhere else to get the toner where they can get it more, you know, cheap than the official source, that's what they're gonna do. So the way Cannon was trying to get around that was by using little chips embedded in the toner cartridges so that users would be forced to get those cartridges to use with their Cannon printers. But now we're in a semiconductor shortage and Cannon can't actually get hold of the materials to make the chips to embed in their toner cartridges, which means that Cannon's had to produce toner cartridges that don't have the chip, And it also means that Cannon has had to instruct users on how to use those those cartridges and bypass the d r M systems that are otherwise in place. Typical technically, what that means is Cannon's teaching people how they can get a work around on the system that is supposed to lock you into the Cannon ecosystem, where you know, theoretically you can go outside of it now because Cannon's just told you how it works. But yeah, that's that's one of the downfalls of d r M. Now, the folks who hold intellectual property rights saw DRM as a necessity in order to actually, you know, profit off of the i P that they owned. So you can think of it kind of like a lock that's on some piece of technology, and only legit customers are given a key to use it and only under specific circumstances, or as the Free Software Foundation puts it, DRM isn't really about protecting copyright or i P, but rather controlling the use of i P, as is clearly the case with the cannon printers. Also, DRM really describes an overall philosophy and strategy, not a specific implementation. There are a few really popular implementations of d r M and a couple of flavors of that, but it's it's more of a this is what this technology does, as opposed to this is a very specific tech, uh, and some people use totally different DRM methodologies than others, so it's not a singular technology or anything like that. There have been so many bad DRM implementations that I think a lot of folks in the text space immediately associate DRM with frustration and anger and betrayal. A bad DRM solution can become a real pain in the patookas for legit users of tech. For example, there are video games that have DRM protections in it where it's been shown that the d r M actually negatively impacts the performance of the game on gamers machines, So you might have things like dropped frames, or you might not be able to set the graphics settings as high as you think you should based upon your hardware, because the the involvement of DRM is actually impacting the quality of your experience. And perhaps the most exasperating thing is that in many cases it doesn't actually solve the problem it's meant to tackle. So in our lock analogy, imagine you've got a gate with a lock on it, and you've got a key for that lock. But sometimes the lock sticks right, Sometimes the key gets stuck in the lock and you can't even turn it or pull it back out, and it's just a pain to operate. Meanwhile, you look over and you see a bunch of folks casually standing nearby with a big old pair of bolt cutters, and you realize, well, they just have to get the lock off once and then they can actually go in and out of the gate as much as they like and you know, that seems to be the preference. That's that's the better way of doing things. So d r M, a lot of people argue, not only does it not solve the problem of say piracy uh or or having ownership over i P, it also hurts the legit users or customers who are are purchasing this stuff. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Let's well, we're gonna start by talking about the history of d r M and the various laws that have made an imperfect solution even more of a problem, because y' all, this starts to get absurd when you start really thinking about it. Now, many decades ago, even before the era of personal computers, we're talking like nineteen fifties nineteen sixties, you typically encountered computer systems in just a few environments. One might be academia like universities, you know, like Stanford and m I. T. They were working on uter systems and furthering the discipline of computer science. Another was in certain think tanks. They might have had access to computers, and a few businesses were starting to adopt them. So by the nineteen sixties you had a few big companies purchasing massive computer systems to run processes in the background. All right, this was not yet the era of desktop computers. That would take another decade and some change. Really, uh, you, we're really looking at massive main frames for the most part. Now, in the early days, computers and their software were tightly coupled. You had proprietary computer systems running proprietary software and it was only through that pairing with specific hardware and specific software that everything worked. Like you couldn't port the software over to a different computer system because it wasn't compatible. In fact, in some cases you were working with a hard wire system, a hard coded system, where the computer system could perform certain processes because it was hardwired to do that, and you couldn't separate software from hardware. It was effectively firmware. So the program would just live on a single computer and that was that. But towards the end of the nineteen sixties, things were starting to change and IBM saw that its customers needed more flexibility. There was a need to be able to move programs between machines, or to make backup copies of software so that you would have a backup available should something happen to your primary copy. But creating that kind of capability would also mean that customers would more easily be able to make illegal copies of software. What if someone were to give away copies of that software to colleagues, maybe even people in other companies, you know, companies that had not purchased the software, IBM would then be out of a customer. So we'll talk about what IBM did in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, So IBM is looking at ways to allow customers more flexibility with their software, but also preventing the wholesale copying of software, so that IBM doesn't just sell one copy and then that's it, right, Then it just goes viral as people start copying. And of course these are this is the old days, is pre Internet, or at least pre Internet in any meaningful way, and so you know, we're talking about physical copies at this point, and one of the things they were looking at was a cryptographic approach. This would be like the lock and key technique I was talking about before the break, where only entities that have a legit key would be able to use that software. But IBM saw that this was a poor swan because it would make the software harder to use, and perhaps most important, it would be expensive for IBM to implement. And also there was a concern that if you were to update your system, the method of encryption may no longer be valid, that you would have to consistently update the DRM as well as whatever the operating system was. It was just it was becoming a nightmare. And so what s Humphrey, who worked at IBM in the nineteen sixties would end up saying, quote, because we could not devise practical physical security measures, we had to rely on the inherent honesty of our customers. Our hope was that legal protection and criminal prosecution would limit the piracy problem end quote. So in other words, IBM came to the conclusion that forcing any kind of DRM, although it wasn't called it that yet uh would end up causing more harm than good. So IBM decided not to go down that route that we would later call DRM because the downsides were greater than the positives. At least that's the conclusion the company came to in the nineteen sixties. If you flash forward three decades, the company who had a very different point of view, and we'll get there now. In the late nineteen seventies, Apple executives and managers were deep in a conversation about creating a solution to protect Apple software and prevent folks from being able to make copies of it. So this is the early age of personal computers, where you frequently would purchase programs on a floppy disk, and you would insert that floppy disk into a floppy disk drive attached to a computer, and then you would run a program off the disk. Well, with the ability to copy the contents of one disk onto a blank disc, that meant there was a risk that you would sell one copy, the customer would then produce a ton of copies on their own and then either undercut you or worse yet, distribute them for free to other people. I think of the children. So folks like Randy Wingington and Apple's co founder Steve Wozniak debated on solutions that could cut back on or outright prevent software piracy. They outlined different levels of DRM. Again, it wasn't called DRM. It was really was more like levels of copy protection. So if a copy protection were perfect, they would describe it as level one. It would be the most restrictive and it would prevent attempts to copy the software illegally. Uh, and it went all the way down to level five. This would be the least secure at eight percent effectiveness. So there's still some copy protection there um. And essentially what they were saying is we you know this, this level of copy protection. Eight out of ten computer users would not bother to try and work around it. But if you were determined, you could find your way around that copy protection. And again, this was just a way of classifying potential solutions. And we know about all of this because a person who goes by the handle of vader Mere on Reddit happened to come across a bundle of Apple internal memos, like the physical paper and ink kind of memos. They found the bundle of documents in a goodwill store, and those documents detailed the back and forth between various engineers and Apple about potential copy protection solutions, and nearly every proposal was dismissed as either being too easy to get around or too difficult to implement, or too expensive to consider, or too inconvenient for the end user, or some combination thereof. So again, these were very smart people all debating the possibility of creating various copy protection strategies and realizing the downsides might be greater than any kind of benefit they might grant. I actually remember computer games in the nineteen eighties that would have their own takes on copy protection, and these wouldn't necessarily count as DRN, but there is some overlap with DRM there. For example, I remember I had a game that would prompt you to provide an answer to a question early on in the game. Like you could start the game, you could start playing, but before very long you would get a question posed to you and the answer would be found in the game's manual. Like back then, games came with physical manuals that you would have. Uh. Some of those manuals would be printed on dark paper, dark ink on dark paper, because the game companies figured that folks weren't just copying video games onto blank discs, they were also going to the local photocopier and copying the manuals too, and getting around this kind of rudimentary copy protection strategy. So the dark paper with dark ink would foil most copiers. They would just produce black pages. I want to say one of the Wizardry games did that, but I could be wrong, But playing those games was kind of a hassle because you have to have the manual handy and flip through it while all you really wanted to do was just play the darn game. Let's say that you know, you went out there and bought the game with your hard earned money, like for me from cutting the lawn over and over again, even if it didn't need it. Gosh darn it, because I needs those games. And I end up handing over my allowance money or the law and more money, whatever it was, And and I get a game, and I come home and now it's just a pain in the butt to play because there's this copy protection I have to get around. Uh. That plays into the issue with DR and potentially being inconvenient for legit users. In fact, it would start to tell you that maybe I just want a cracked version of this game so I don't have to deal with that. It's not because I want to steal the game, but just because this is a barrier between me and experiencing the thing I want to experience. But we really shifted into high gear with DRM in the nineteen nineties. This is also when we saw the birth of the World Wide Web, which for many people was their first exposure to the Internet. And again, the Internet had actually been around for a while before the Worldwide Web came along, but really only a fraction of the general public were even aware that it was a thing. Most people didn't know. Unless you were, you know, actively working on our bonnet, or you were a college student at the time in in one of the computer labs, you probably didn't even know the Internet existed. The Web represented a new way to access information, and that included information that could be under copyright protection. And you know, well, folks say information wants to be free, the parties that hold copyrights might not always feel the same way. Now, I should add this is understandable if you were to pour your time and effort and talent into creating something like let's say it's a novel, and you wanted to earn money off your work. If you thought this is something worth paying for, I want to become a professional novelist, you would be concerned about folks skirting around the whole paying for your work thing. They'd get to experience your work, but you'd make no profit from it. Now, I say this because I know I tend to come down pretty hard against corporations and stuff and for lots of good reasons. Corporations often make bone headed decisions. But I also want to make it clear that I do see the need and value of copyright, like I see the reason for it. I don't think it needs to be nearly as extensive as what we have here in America, but I digress. Also, by the way, I say that as the son of two authors who have published numerous books, the way copyright law is right now, assuming that my parents were too uh to grant the ongoing rights to either me or, say, my sister, uh, we would be able to collect royalties on works for the rest of our lives. Uh. But you know, I don't care about that so much. I think it needs to be less expansive than it is. But I digress. So the ninety nineties hit and the web provided a new way to distribute information and files, so there was a need for some sort of mechanism to make sure folks couldn't just steal stuff. Like if you wanted to sell digital files on your website, you would probably want a method to keep folks from copying your products without limitations. But have no fear. A man with a degree in sociology will soon be here as soon as we take this quick break. Okay, before the break, I teased the entrance of Victor Shear, so in nine uh he founded a company called Electronic Publishing Resources, but soon they renamed this company inter Trust. Sheer had an amazingly prescient vision of what the Internet would allow. In fact, this is before Tim berners Lee had established the first web server. In fact, this is before the National Science Foundation, which had dominion over the Internet back in those days, had even lifted the restrictions on the commercial use of the Internet. The NSF wouldn't do that till and Sheer founded Electronic Publishing Resources the year before. So uh, he really saw where where the path was leading. He saw that the Internet was going to become the marketplace where people would buy and sell digital goods. But how do you make that work? How do you make a stable marketplace for the the per just sing and selling and transferring of digital goods so that it doesn't just become a chaotic mess. How can you assure that the rights holder to say, a certain song, will not see their song just copied and distributed across the entire Internet. What was needed was a method to wrap files up into a container of some sort, and the container would have special rules associated with it, rules that the container would only uh, you know, allow users to do so, Like if it was within the rule set, it was fine. If it was outside, it wouldn't allow access to the file inside the container. Rules like how many times the file might be accessed. It could be something like a a subscription service where you would have to continuously pay a subscription fee in order to have continued use of a specific file. Uh. Maybe it would be on how many machines you can install the file. We saw this a lot with music file else where companies were creating limitations on how many machines you could install a particular album before you would get a message saying sorry, you've you've put this on the max number of machines you can have it on. Same with video games like that. That was a big thing with video games too, where you could purchase a game and you might get a message saying, no, you've already got this installed on another machine, so you can't install it on this computer, which is a real pain in the butt if you're doing things like upgrading your computer system, or you happen to have multiple computers and you just want to be able to port the experience from one machine to another. DRM would sometimes interfere with that, but anyway, Uh, those were the sort of rules that would be associated with these containers. That was Sheer's vision. Again, not bad for a fellow who had a sociology degree, and he would file several patents around this idea. And it was Sheer who called it a digital rights Management strate to g so that's where dr M comes from. The patents would end up making headlines later on when Intertrust, a company that at the time had fewer than forty employees, filed a massive lawsuit against Microsoft claiming infringement, saying that Microsoft was making use of DRM technology without actually paying Intertrust for for using it. The battle would last a few years, but Microsoft ultimately would settle out of court and pay Intertrust hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Something similar happened between Intertrust and Apple almost a decade later. But around that same time, work out of Xerox's famous park department that's p a r C. It stands for Palo Alto Research Center, they would develop a different approach to d r M, one that took into account not just copy protection, but the transference of files. That project would evolve into a product called content Guard. So yeah, the digibox from Intertrust and content Guard originally from Xerox, and then IBM. You remember them, the company that said that you know, a DRM approach would be bad for business. Well, they developed a cryptographic envelope methodology to send files inside as a type of DRM. They called it cryptolope, which sounds like something too young vampires in love would do if their parents didn't approve of their relationship. Cryptolope, You're welcome anyway. By now, we were into the late nineties and in the United States, Congress was hashing out a new law to address copyright issues in the digital age. In fact, this was the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m c A. Like when you hear about someone getting a d m c A strike, it relates back to this law, which became a law. Now. A big reason for the d m c A was that folks were now able to make digital copis of stuff and make them available over the Internet, and a big part of this was digital music. This was before the iTunes music store that wouldn't launch until two thousand three. But there was another way to get digital music. So some of y'all might be too young to remember this, but back in the day, the way you would get digital music onto a device, you know, like an MP three player, that's what we called him back then, before we had smartphones. Well, you would take your music collection from c d s and you would use a CD ROM drive connected to a computer, and then you would use a program to rip the music from those c ds and convert them into music files, and then you would transfer those files via a cable to the MP three player. There was no wireless MP three's back in those days, but this meant that you'd have musical files on your computer. You could potentially send those files to someone else or save them to some other disc and you could listen to music without actually paying for it. The horror. And then we had the rise of peer to peer networks, and those made it way easier to distribute files like music files across a large group of computers. You know, I had Napster and Kazan and those kind of of peer to peer networks, So you had a subset of folks who were uploading and downloading music files like crazy anyway, DRM was one method to try and prevent folks from just copying music wholesale, and one of the things that the d m c A did was to make it a crime to try and circumvent the DRM protections on files. Now here's where we get into a weird paradox that still makes my brain melt. All right, let's quickly talk about making a copy for the purposes of a backup here. Generally speaking, the US government has ruled that it's okay to make a copy of stuff you own for the purposes of a backup. So, for example, I have a small collection of Vinyl records. I might want to make a digital backup of those Vinyl records so that should anything happen to my physical collection, I still have the music. Now, granted, a lot of this example kind of doesn't work in the era of on demand streaming music, but just stick with me here. The point is if I made a copy of that Vinyl record album collection just as a backup for myself and that was it, I'd pretty much be in the clear. I mean, that is considered acceptable. It kind of falls in line with fair use. Fair use is a collection of legal exceptions that allow folks to copy or otherwise make use of material that they don't own. The copyright for um fair use, though, is a tricky subject anyway. In the era of DRN, making backup copies is way more complicated and infuriating. A lot of d r M just outright prevents customers from making a copy, including backup copies. So it's legal to make backups of your stuff, now, that's what the courts have said repeatedly. What the d M c A does however, as it says, well, yeah, it's okay for you to make a copy of your stuff for the purposes of backup, but it's not okay to get around the DRM protections that prevent you from making a copy. So this is a classic catch twenty two. You could make a legal backup copy if you could get around the d r M, but getting around the DRM is illegal. Other countries adopted similar legislation, which meant now that DRM has legal protection and people don't. Yikes. Uh, this kind of leads to lots of problems. I mean, we've got the issue with the individual users. That's a problem right there. Like if you aren't allowed to make a backup copy because of that protection. That's really frustrating. But another big one is archival and president vation of works. See, the way we store stuff evolves over time, and that also means that the older methods we were relying upon in decades past gradually become obsolete. Like let's go back to floppy drives. I'm sure some of you out there listening you might have a working floppy drive hanging around, but for the most part, I would say we could call them extinct, like the dinosaurs. So let's say that a company released a particular piece of software on floppy disks, and the disks contained a form of copy protection on them, and then decades later, someone needs to access that program, except now that company doesn't exist anymore, so you can't go to them. There's no one to go to the No one has floppy drives. So even if you had a copy of the disk in your hand, you wouldn't be able to make a copy of the old file because the way it was protected and the way it saved. So in the in the efforts to preserve important stuff, and it's kind of hard to think of certain things like like computer games as being important. But in order to preserve that for historical record. The copy of protection stands as a huge barrier to that, and so that's one of the reasons why people who are critics of DRM really hammer this home, saying DRM really makes it difficult for us to do important work. There's also the issue of if you want to do scholarly work, if you want to examine a computer program to look for vulnerabilities, for example, like you're doing some security research, DRM can stand in the way of that and to disable the DRM would be breaking the law. So there are people who really have legit criticisms for the way we treat DRM these days. And this means that over time we lose knowledge, right, we can't act says that anymore, the information literally becomes inaccessible. So again one of the biggest arguments leveled against DRM. That prevents the legal archival of information, and it means that those files and the stuff built from those files end up living on borrowed time. Then there's also the back end of DRM. So a lot of these methodologies rely upon a service running in the background where a file is checking in with the mothership back home. Right, So DRM is not just something that just lives on a file itself. It's part of a larger interconnected service. So what happens if the company in charge of that service goes out of business or gets acquired, will you still have access through the equipment or file? I mean, you purchased it, but if you lose it, like if the thing goes away, what happens to the stuff you bought. Here's a great example of this. I have purchased digital copies of certain television shows. The Mighty Bush is one of them. I did that on Xbox. I purchased the full seasons of The Mighty Bush, and I have it available in Xbox to watch whenever I want. Let's say something weird happens at Microsoft and the entire Xbox division goes defunct and I no longer have access to that. I paid for that that stuff, and I would have otherwise had access to it if they had sent me, say a physical copy of the DVDs, which by the way, I went ahead and purchased because of just this very reason. But I would no longer have access to that material. It's It's one of the big arguments against streaming services is the idea that should the streaming service go out of business, you lose access to all of that stuff. Or what about when a company that sells a DRM protected file decides to recall that file. Now, this happened with Amazon in two thousand nine, and in a fitting twist, the files were e books, and they were ebook versions of two George Orwell titles, Animal Farm and Nine. Now, considering the novel features an invasive government exerting control over virtually every aspect of people's lives, largely through the control of information, this hit pretty darn close to home. It felt like like like reality was mirroring fiction. So what actually happened? While according to Amazon, the company that had added these two titles to the Kindle Store didn't actually have the publishing rights for those books, which meant it would be illegal to sell those books because the company that was selling them didn't actually have the rights to them. So Amazon stopped the sale. But some customers had actually already purchased those titles they had added them to their digital libraries. So Amazon then recalled the titles from the customers who bought them and then issued a refund. But that meant that people who had purchased either of those books suddenly saw them just vanish from their kindle libraries. So let's think of that as if it were a physical book. Let's say you went to a brick and mortar bookstore and you purchased a physical copy of George Orwell, and you take your physical copy of the book home with you and you put it up on your shelf, and that night, someone from the bookstore breaks into your house takes the book off your shelf and leaves the purchase price for the book behind before leaving. That would be quite the invasion. And that is kind of what happened digitally speaking with Amazon, and it was made possible through DRM tools, which of course raises troubling issues. If DRM allows a company to recall a product after you've already purchased it, well, it's definitely not yours, is it? Like you, you just have access to it for as long as the company allows you to have access to it. So there are a ton of issues around DRM, and most of them poorly affect the end user. Uh. It often feels like you're being punished for having gone through the proper channels to purchase whatever the digital good is, whereas if you had just you know, pirated it, if someone had already cracked the d r M off of it, and you've got access to the pirated copy. You wouldn't have these concerns because it would all have been stripped away. Not a great message. I haven't even really touched on some of the methods of copy protection that have led to massive problems, like Sony's infamous copy protection methodology that was in the mid two thousand's. It would install a root kit on your computer. So you go out, you buy an album published by Sony b MG. You would come back and you put the CD on your computer, and maybe you want to rip the music to put onto your brand new iPod, or maybe you just want to listen on your computer, and boom, your computer installs files that create vulnerabilities on your computer system, vulnerabilities that hackers later were able to take advantage of and infect systems with malware. Uh. It was like installing a back door to your computer system. Something that's never a good idea. Now, the really crazy thing about all of this is that DRM doesn't work, at least not for the purpose for which it was invented, which was the whole idea of giving the rights owners the peace of mind that you know they're not going to be completely exploited by everybody else. There are folks who specialize in cracking DRM on files, and as long as they're not caught, the result is that the new files are DRM free and are preferable to the d r M versions, even for legit customers, and the entertainment industry has not faded away because of this. It's not like piracy has destroyed companies. The arguments for DRM typically end up not holding very much water, because, as it turns out, the problem with piracy doesn't actually seem to hit the bottom line, at least not nearly to the extent that companies would have us believe. Now. DRM is still a thing today, but the landscape has changed dramatically. For one thing, the proliferation of streaming services has created a new way to distribute stuff like music, movies, and television. To access the entertainment, you need a subscription to those various services, or you have to have a free version that's supported by ads or whatever. Whatever. The revenue generation model is not that this is the only way people access entertainment, but it's become so popular that a lot of DRM strategies are just moot because the entertainment gets locked inside a specific ecosystem, or you've got stuff like computer games or console games that require the player to have a persistent connect to the Internet. The purpose of that connection is to verify that the player in question is using a legitimate copy of the game, namely that the person playing the game purchased the game, and the connection Internet connection is a connection to a server that's verifying that. This is also an irritation because even if the game is a single player experience, you still have to be connected to the Internet to run the game. You're not playing against other people, you're just trying to play the game, and yet you need that connection time and again we've seen people resist that and to complain about it. So, yeah, DRM is still a thing because there's still this massive fear that the whole system would fall apart, or at the very least companies would make less money than they feel they should should DRM go away. But I've seen a lot of legit arguments that say DRM really just causes more problems than it and it doesn't really solve the problem it was meant to solve. So I'm also an advocate of just getting rid of DRM. I don't know that we can rely upon the honesty of the average person on the Internet. But I am pretty certain that DRM is kind of a broken solution to a problem that actually hasn't been well defined in terms of impact. I mean, the Government Accountability Office in the United States famously issued a report that said it is impossible to determine to what extent piracy actually affects the bottom line, and that the numbers that that content companies, that things like music companies and movie studios, the numbers that they cite saying we lost X billion amount of dollars because of piracy, those are unsupportable. Uh. The big reason behind that is that you can never actually say that someone who pirated something would have otherwise purchased it. So a pirated copy is not the same thing as a lost sale. Right If I pired a copy of an Adam Sandler movie, it might be that I'm morbidly curious, but not to the point where I would actually purchase the film. And maybe if I weren't, uh, you know, willing to pirate it, I would just never I just never bother watching it. I have never priorate it an Adam Sandler film because I don't I don't need to, I don't need to indulge in that. I'm okay, I'm good. Anyway, I thought that this would be an interesting thing to go down, and really it was the Cannon printer story that really drew my attention. That's what sparked this whole episode idea. This morning, I saw that that news item and thought I should do an episode about DRM, what it's for and how it often falls short of what the goals are. Uh yeah, I hope you enjoyed this. If you have suggestions on topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter, like Stadler did. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.