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| Authored by: jrl on Thursday, May 30 2013 @ 04:38 PM EDT |
Inherently broken, cannot be fixed.
The OP put it well - you must have the key to
view the DRM-"protected" content, but you are
not allowed to know what the key is, or
"the encryption is broken".
Very often, what I get called on to do for work
is to take a slightly broken computer system and
look around trying to find what's wrong, what's
right, and how to fix it. DRM, in order to "work",
cannot tolerate that kind of intrusion. And when I
say "work", it is not only a way of indicating that
it doesn't really work at all in the sense that
engineers think about having something work, but also
that the perpetrators (uh, "content providers") DON'T
have to work (in the effort/labor sense) hard to make
the "system run". This means that they want to be able
to print out a run of thousands of DVDs and send them
out all with the same key, and have nobody even try
to find out what the key is.
There are theoretical ways to make something like DRM
work (in the sense of "function effectively and
efficiently), but the current efforts are just something to
laugh at, and the content providers are far too lazy
(and almost certainly not competent) to do anything.
Maybe "lazy" isn't exactly the right word, it would be
expensive to make this idea "work", and they have
the CFAA and DCMA to "protect" them from having to
do anything difficult or expensive.
The software package equivalent of DRM (things like
flexlm and so on) are similarly annoying and I regard
them as a kind of aversive therapy - the more I am
exposed to them the more I am inclined to avoid avoid avoid.
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