Commentary-- Scotty the Engineer was always my favorite character in the original "Star Trek". Sure, Captain Kirk was the hero, he was at the heart of all the action, and got to romance all the green-skinned women, but if he wanted that amazing ship to actually do anything, he had to ask Scotty. He had to ask him nicely. If you think about it, Scotty had all the real power in that show. If he told Kirk the dilithium crystals were drained, there was never any real argument, the captain would cry like a whining child, but in the end he had to face reality and wait for Scotty to fix it.
I always thought Scotty should have said "no" to the captain more often, especially when Kirk would ask for something completely outrageous that, more often than not, violated the laws of physics. But engineers don't like saying no to management, and poor Scotty would end up having to make the magic happen week after week, until even as a child I began to suspect that his skills had more to do with the scriptwriters than his deep understanding of the laws of the universe. Still, he did end up with a reputation as a miracle worker, which can't be so bad.
Trying to make Digital Rights Management (DRM) work in the real world is like asking engineers to do "Star Trek" style magic, rather than real engineering. DRM simply cannot work. For less technical readers who might be wondering what I'm going on about, DRM is the attempt to control copying on a digital file, or sometimes even to add a restriction on how many times such a file can be copied. It's usually applied to online music or movies, but it's never sold to the consumer for what it actually is, an added restriction on what can be done with something they've paid for. DRM is always explained as the "wonderful new technology that will help protect your medical records from thieves." The truth is, it can't even do that.
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I have always disliked DRM...why? Because it is doomed to failed. So the question becomes...how much money and time do we want to waste on it?
It always reminds me of Law #3 of Microsoft's Ten Immutable Laws of Security -
"If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore"
Music might not be a computer...but they are giving us full unrestricted physical access to the media....thus it is doomed to fail.
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