Digital Home Thoughts: Can DRM be Future-Proof?

"When you infect a music CD with malicious anti-copying software, how long can you expect it to work for? Unlike most software, music CDs are liable to be loaded into computers decades after they're pressed; can an anti-copying program anticipate the state of computers in twenty years and ensure that their programs won't destabilize computers in the future? Princeton's Ed Felten and Alex Halderman continue to pre-publish sections from a major paper on the lessons to be learned from the Sony DRM debacle, in which it was discovered that the music label had deliberately infected its customers' computers with malicious software that spied on them, destabilized their computers, and exposed them to attack from other malicious entities. The software had no easy means of de-installing it, requiring many music fans to reinstall their operating systems. "



Issues like this are the very reason that Philips has been suing Sony and other publishers for several years now, and refusing to allow them to use the CD logo on their music discs. (Philips invented the CD format, and still licenses the production of various CD types to manufacturers around the world.) The Compact Disc is a very tightly regulated specification which is designed to facilitate the playback of music on a wide variety of devices. It does not allow for the disc to contain DRM software, and Philips has called the use of a CD logo on a DRM'd disc a misrepresentation of their specification and license. This paper demonstrates the dangers of putting software on a music CD, and the potential ramifications of doing so.