Digital rights management: desirable, inevitable, and almost irrelevant

provides a very brief overview of some of the main points. References are given to my papers, where those points are explained in more detail, and citations are provided to the extensive literature on the subject. The fundamental issue that limits current use and future prospects of DRM is that, in the words of [10], The important thing is to maximize the value of your intellectual property, not to protect it for the sake of protection. DRM all too often gets in the way of maximizing the value of intellectual property. To some extent this is the fault of the DRM technologies. We simply do not know how to build secure systems. The last half a century demonstrates this conclusively. And in general we do not know how to build usable systems. In contrast with secure systems, there is more knowledge about usability, and more examples of successful designs, but still only a few, and it is not clear the situation will change. DRM also gets in the way of maximizing the value of intellectual pr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DRM
• Authors: Andrew M. Odlyzko
• Keywords: DRM 2007, DRM Technologies, Intellectual Property, Secure Systems