Re: “Content protection” vs. “DRM” (was: Re: Letter on DRM in HTML from the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus)

Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@hsivonen.fi> wrote:

> My reading of the above is that #1, #2 and #4 involve some sort of DRM
> (with the DRM part either inside or outside of a W3C spec) and,
> therefore, don't illustrate a difference between "content protection"
> and "DRM" except to the extent #2 distinguishes "breakable DRM" from
> robust DRM.

In this whole discussion, all kinds of DRM systems that have been
mentioned have the property that the potential adversary has access to
the encrypted content data and to computer code capable of decrypting
it, when that computer code is executed in a certain context.

Hence, if the adversary has sufficient interest and the ability to
spend a sufficient number of skilled person-hours on the project, the
protection measures can be reverse engineered and circumvented, no doubt
about that.

The distinction is just how easy it is to do that. If the source code is
available, circumvention is of course much easier and quicker than in
the case of an obfuscated binary executable where lots of checks that
the code is executed in the expected kind of environment are intermixed
with the actual decryption computation.

So I would propose to refer to those two types of DRM systems as “easily
circumventable DRM” and “obfuscated DRM”, respectively.

> Password-based access control to all types of Web
> resources has already been developed, so it would be weird for
> "content protection" as a new chartered item to mean #3.
> 
> It seems to me that "content protection" is just a synonym for "DRM".

I agree - especially as long as EME is *the* spec for enabling "content
protection" that is pushed forward in W3C, and it is clear that those
who want this want some kind of DRM (even if there open to alternative
architectural suggestions besides EME), that is the reasonable
interpretation. Even if there is a theoretical possibility that at some
point in the future, a non-DRM-oriented spec might be developed under
the banner of (differently interpreted) "content protection".

Greetings,
Norbert
FreedomHTML.org

Received on Monday, 17 June 2013 11:29:33 UTC