rights management
Someone who read this pointed me to a Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, while someone else pointed me to this response. If you don't mind video's, there's some interesting background discussion over on channel9.
One simplification of the complexity is as follows:
- Intellectual property can be easily copied if the original is encoded in some digital format
- There's a big market for digitally encoded content, and as a consequence of that demand the owners of intellectual property have decided to provide a supply
- These suppliers want / need to enforce the protection of the intellectual property represented by this digitally encoded content
- Technology provides mechanisms to provide that enforcement mechanism - some more successfully than others
- Holes can be used to circumvent the enforcement, and as technology improves to close the holes some legitimate scenarios for using the product can be blocked
- Some implementations of enforcement also block consumers rights, for example in some jurisdictions the right to 'fair use'
- Some people dispute what rights people have or how the legal definition of a right translates to actual actions
...and your opinion on all this, and what matters, depends in large part on where you view that set of complex interactions from.
There's much more detail on the background to this in the book Pirates of the Digital Millennium [amazon], which, thanks to the library, I've just finished and, to wrap things up nicely, Mr. Jobs has just published an essay on the topic slated towards music and Apples' rights management system.
