The future of Digital Rights Management

One of the lectures I attended was about the future of Digital Right Management. The lecture was given by Jan van der Meer, ‘Director Standardization’ at Philips and also president of the DRM workgroup within the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). This is somebody who has been involved with the standardization of audio and video compression within MPEG. Right. So this was somebody who knew what he was talking about.

I sure was interested what he had to say about the future of DRM, especially since you might know that I have raved about Apple and what I saw as their walled garden. My protest about Apple aside (as I wasn’t right on a few things), I hate DRM restrictions and everybody who makes them or puts them on their content. As with a lot of things in the (mobile) market, there isn’t an easy answer to it. In a world of piracy, it is logic that creators want to protect their content. But DRM is far from perfect, let alone secure. From my point of view, content restrictions are annoying for its users but not even a small threat for hackers. Since the restrictions are meant for the latter, DRM is more of a problem then a solution.

But let’s get back to the lecture. First, he explained a lot about the history of both DRM and the Open Mobile Alliance. Second, Jan van der Meer explained how the process of securing the content works. He focused on encryption with mobile devices like phones. Very interesting, it’s always nice to find out how something works. But as the title of this post has already revealed, his last (and for me most important) part was about what the future of DRM will be.

 

The future

 

Before you get high hopes: don’t. There is no answer to the question of how the future of content restriction will look like. He did stated the obvious by saying that the DRM technology has come a long way since its start, and that nowadays advanced DRM technology is available. According to Jan, it’s way ahead of the current market’s requirements. He states that there is no major market need for sophisticated DRM features. Err, right. A personal thought of me is, that if this technology will continue to improve in the future, might it become less cumbersome to its users? At least it is a hard needed improvement.

Since Jan van der Meer had nothing else to tell about the digital rights future that was interesting, I asked him why he thought that DRM would stay, since a number of content selling companies offer DRM-free stuff. I got a pretty standard answer, but it is fair enough. I quote: “The music industry will always need some kind of content protection. It will be a less positive experience for the customers, but otherwise the music industry will die.” I bet you saw that one coming…  As I said before, I am very unhappy with DRM messing up the user experience, but it is still needed.