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(This page is part of a discussion of Digital Rights Management For All within the Trust and Security in Virtual Communities theme).

DRM has quite a bad press, over all. Why is this?

I suggest:

• Some of the opprobrium is unjustified. People may dislike technologies which prevent unfettered copying of content, but that does not alter the generally-accepted perception that doing so is generally unethical, illegal, and somewhat self-destructive.

• Conversely, most technologies for DRM have been rather poor. This has several impacts:
  • They have been readily circumvented by determined attackers, and so have served to inhibit the regular user and done nothing against the "mass market pirates", or so many have argued. I'm inclined to think this argument is slightly spurious also: wholesale unprotected content would be copied even more often (by far) than protected content is. Those making this argument are generally relatively technically competent, and overlook the majority of users who are not ahead of the curve in collecting copy-protection-defeating tools.
  • They have materially damaged people's systems (q.v. Sony's anti-copy root-kit). This is indefensible.
  • They often enforce a rather naive idea of ownership and licencing: as a result, many users find themselves being asked to pay several times over for the same content. This is rightly resented (though you could see it as simply an expression of the free market).
  • They tend not to allow for traditional (and legally-protected) "fair dealing" rights. This justifiably annoys legitimate users.
  • Rather than improving the technologies, some manufacturers have sought recourse though the law: the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (and European Directive...?) which makes the reverse-engineering of any copy-protection device illegal. Giving legal protection to some of these seems akin to charging with "breaking and entering" those who step over a painted line marked "do not cross".

• There are those who argue that the whole model is broken, and that music should be free, like software (but not necessarily like beer).

• Some, particularly Ross Anderson, have argued that strong DRM has the potential to alter quite substantially the economics of software distribution: "vendor lock-in" takes on a whole new dimension, if that lock-in is enforced by cryptography. Others have argued that the discipline of the market will address this problem.

None of these issues is particularly germaine to eScience, which is why I suspect that it would be wisest to invent a new term for the ideas we want to pursue, in order to distance them from this quagmire. Of course, this is nothing but a modern instance of "mandatory access control" - though a far cry from Bell and La Padula - so that might be one phrase to use.

Alternatives include:

• Personal Rights Management (not quite sexy enough)

• Corporate Rights Management (sounds very sinister)

• Owner-centric distributed access control (ugh).

• etc.

• ...

(suggestions welcome).