01.17.07

Burning down libraries remotely

Posted in General at 4:43 pm by Steven

Seeing this article over at Wired (Public Libraries, Private DRM) reminded me of a cool thing you can do to help accelerate the downfall of civilization:

  • Invent a DRM scheme with revocation (naturally, most of the ones coming out, such as AACS, have this).
  • Get useful content recorded with your scheme, then into libraries, through the force of the marketplace.
  • Let people go on thinking that libraries are a way to preserve cultural content beyond its life in the market and outside of the hands of future censors.
  • Revoke, revoke, revoke! The content magically disappears off library shelves (given that devices can no longer read the content, ever again).
  • Instead of revoking explicitly, you can also go out of business, release a new and incompatible version of your DRM scheme, have a bug in your DRM, let your servers go down, etc. The possibilities are wide open.

1 Comment »

  1. Allanimal said,

    January 20, 2007 at 3:22 pm

    That is so true. I have thought of this many times. Why haven’t people thought of this?
    DRM doesn’t belong in libraries.
    Heck, it doesn’t belong in anything, IMHO, and I vote with my dollars (and Euros).

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