Felten’s talk on DRM Wars: TNG
Last week at the Usenix Security Symposium, I gave an invited talk, with the same title as this post. The gist of the talk was that the debate about DRM (copy protection) technologies, which has been stalemated for years now, will soon enter a new phase. I’ll spend this post, and one or two more, explaining this.
Though his post isn’t exactly a recap of the talk Professor Felten delivered, it’s an excellent survey of the points and ideas he presented in that talk, which I was fortunate enough to hear in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. At the end of the talk, I got up and asked what now seems like an embarrassingly dumb question:
Dan Sandler: You mentioned that there is an argument to be made in favor of using DRM-based lock-in to reward companies for their R&D investment [example during the talk: Apple and iTunes/iPod/iTMS]. Don’t we already have a well-established legal tool for exactly this purpose, called “patents”? Used this way, DRM is like a meta-patent-factory [yes, I actually said this—what was I thinking?] that can create patent-like protection, enforced by technology, without any kind of oversight or expiration date. So, my question is this: Do you think that, as “copyright” loses primacy in future arguments for DRM, the DRM debate will meet up with the ongoing technology-patents debate mid-stream?
Prof. Felten: I have to admit that it’s quite refreshing to come to USENIX Security and hear someone arguing in favor of patents.
[The Audience laughs thunderously.]
Of course, the correct (read: witty) riposte here would have been, simply, “I’m new here.” Failing that, I mumbled something or other into the microphone, and Felten continued by explaining that, yes, you might think that a great meeting of the minds will take place in the halls of government, debating the issue on the merits, whereas what will actually happen is all the people who like {patents, DRM, flag-burning, kitten-killing, whatever} will stand on one side of the room, all their opponents will stand on the other side, and each side will be counted to determine who wins.