Stealable Digital Personal Property: COOL!

[no1_vern]

Goodbye, DRM; hello "stealable" Digital Personal Property - Ars Technica

People hate DRM, but one IEEE study group has a possible fix for many of its problems: make digital content easy to steal from others. The moment that happens, consumers can be trusted with content.

By Nate Anderson | Last updated September 7, 2009 8:00 PM CT

Selling unencrypted downloads would certainly make this possible, as it has in the music industry, but movie makers and other rightsholders have shown no inclination to offer such open copies of their work to the public. In Sweazey's view, most people understand why rightsholders want some limits on copying, but they can't abide the electronic tethers that DRM currently requires. They don't want to be told what to do and who to share their content with; what they want, he tells Ars, is for digital property to "complete the emulation of the physical world."

Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects. For instance, you might loan your car to a friend, a family member, or a neighbor. You might do so on many different occasions and for different lengths of time. But you are unlikely to leave the car out front of your house with the keys in it and a sign on it saying, "Take me!" If you did, you might never see the vehicle again.

It's that the ability to lose control over property that is central to the DPP system. DPP files are encrypted. They can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here's the trick: anyone who can view your content can also "steal" it irrevocably. The simple addition of a way to lose content instantly leads consumers to set up a "circle of trust" that can be as wide as they like but will not extend to total strangers on the Internet.

Given that digital content just isn't like physical content, I ask Sweazey why we might want to force it back into that model; why not provide truly open files for download, perhaps reserving traditional tethered DRM for rentals and streaming? His answer is that such freely-copyable goods breaks the basic business model of human commerce by making goods nonrivalrous; it no longer has aspects of a private good, and this makes it difficult to sell.

Making the consumer responsible? What a concept. I predict that if it is ever implemented it will be hacked within days so everyone can keep the property while allowing everyone else to share.

[nemowolf]

The concept of taking something that has nothing but 1's and 0's and making someone the owner of it and not able to share it is just ludicrous. They need to stop thinking about making money off of stuff and start getting hip with the modern idea that information is to be free and shared, even music and movies are nothing more then a knowledge share.