D.R.M. Way Back When.
D.R.M. stands for Digital Rights Management, a far reaching term which encompasses any scheme which creates barriers to accessing material which is subject to copyright protection using technological means. D.R.M. gets rid of a person’s usage control over the possession of digital content and switches the power balance in favour of the computer program. The applications and methods of D.R.M. is a non-exhaustive list.
For the purposes of this long blog, I hope to take D.R.M. back to its roots and show you where this hugely prominent source of protection came from. Despite D.R.M. being created much earlier, the term itself really didn’t come into existence until the late nineties through the U.S.’s implementation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998. This was a United States copyright law that implemented the two previous 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization.Â
Ryoichi Mori, head of the Japan Electronics Industry Development Association, is accredited with creating the first primordial form of D.R.M. back in 1983. The principles which he used in order to govern his creation were quite the opposite to what we see nowadays in modern D.R.M. software protections. He named his brainchild the Software Service System. The system was structured to resemble a peer-to-peer-architecture with the following components:
A cryptographic wrapper for digital products that was not removable and stayed in place whenever the product is copied
A digital rights management system for tracking usage of the product and assuring that any usage of the product or access to its code conforms to the terms set by the product's owner.
An arrangement for secure payments from the product's users to its owner.
The foundation for all this however was an approach known as Superdistribution, the concept being that ideas, information and software should all be permitted to move uninhibited throughout the Internet. It is very much a far cry from the modern day distribution models we have become accustomed to, but nonetheless the protections developed by Mori were self-effacing, simple by nature, and arguably particularly effective. Considering this ease of replication as an positive as opposed to a negative.
Why all this generosity? The reason behind it all is that the software is in fact "meterware." There are definite strings that are attached, whose purpose is to decouple revenue collection system from the manner by which the software was distributed in the first instance. Superdistribution software contains embedded instructions which render it unusable except on machines that are specially created for this brand of revenue collection.
Thanks to people like Ryoichi Mori D.R.M. can, when properly exercised, shield a developer’s intellectual property without making legitimate customers feel like criminals. There is a problem however, it’s rarely ever done right these days. Everything is either too cumbersome or too invasive and drives a number of people, who might otherwise be satisfied customers, towards piracy.
