New Music Strategies: How TPM can lead to DRM

New Music Strategies: How TPM can lead to DRM

Very interesting article from Bill Thompson about how TPMs - Trusted Platform Modules - which are aimed at making your computer more secure from viruses and theft at a hardware level - may end up restricting what we can do with the media on our PC. Key (lengthy) quote:

"Because the trusted computing base is also used to make digital rights management (DRM) systems more secure, this will give content providers a lot more control over what we can do with music, movies and books that we have bought from them.

"We have seen recently how allowing digital rights management services into our lives can lead to unwelcome consequences.

"Users of Apple's iTunes used to be able to stream the music they had brought to up to five other iTunes users, a great way of letting your mates discover your music collection. Apple has changed some of the streaming capabilities

"But the latest version of iTunes limits this capability, just as an earlier upgrade reduced the number of times you could burn a selected playlist of purchased songs to a CD.

"Another took away the ability to play songs downloaded from Real's Harmony service on your iPod.

"...Similarly, users of TiVo digital video recorders have found that they cannot record some shows, and other programmes that they have recorded are automatically deleted after a day."

But Thompson argues that the moves will not work because "in order for the purchaser to view the content it has to be unlocked. Once it is unlocked then someone, somewhere, will figure out a way to make a copy of the unlocked version. And once an unlocked version leaks onto the network it will be uncontrollable."