The Impossibility of Technology-Based DRM and a Modest Suggestion

When I was a teenager in the late 1970s, there was no World-Wide Web, no Internet, and no IBM PC. But I, along with a small group of friends, became obsessed with computers: the TRS-80 and the Apple were the targets of our passion. Each time a new computer game was announced, we awaited its release with great anticipation: not because we wanted to kill the dragon or get to level 37, but because we wanted to see how hard it was this time to remove the copy protection from the software. In those early days of personal computing, game manufacturers made perhaps one million dollars per year, and there were only a handful of companies. Few had ever heard of Microsoft, and there were no such things as CD burners or high-speed networks. So trying to control illegal copying (or ‘‘pirating’’ as it was already called back then) was a concern limited to just a few small companies. Today there are software companies with tens of billions of dollars in gross revenues, each with a strong vested interest in overseeing the legal distribution of their products. Additionally, media companies (in particular, music and film producers and distributors) continue their fight to control illegal distribution of their content, especially now in the presence of the $50 CD burner. To address these problems, media companies have turned to technology such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) to prevent copying and enforce protection of copyright. In this paper I will argue that the media companies’ reliance on a technological solution is almost certainly doomed, and that a variety of motives will continue to drive people to circumvent any such technology. The best solution to the problem is not a technological one, but instead one of education. In Section I of this paper, I will discuss some historical and current examples where the media companies have relied on technology to