DRM

Rights Management

The term "digital rights management" is currently under hot debate. Unfortunately a lot of the discussion is less fruitful than it could be, due to lack of distinction between two aspects:

(LAW) logical attribution of warrants

Here the legal aspects and processes are drawn out to determine correct and without doubt all assignments and claims.

(ARM) actual restriction measurement

Digital and legal means of executing orders according to the former.

---

The situation is even worse, since related considerations lead to partially conflicting goals. LAW is by definition independant of factual power, while ARM seeks to be incircumventable.

Current digital "rights" management systems[1] are usually just a method by which owners of a machine or plattform (see technological protection measures) control access restrictions for their users/customers.

Such control, executed in good faith and sold as a service, could be deployed as forseen by the European Directorate General for the Internal Market and Services when they wrote In principle, digitisation has empowered rights holders to control the licensing of their works or other subject matter and transformed the collection and distribution of royalty into a process of individual electronic payment (pay-per-use). (stakeholders consultation on copyright levies page 6.)

However full risk assessment lets recall that individuals will execute powerful control at their own discretion either in good faith or as wrongdoing. As soon as restriction measurement (ARM) receives legal protection beyond balance, it automatically infringes with basic rights and legal certainty (LAW). It may even be posing risk to the constitutional state itself. The right to private copies is definately not based on the premise that an act of private copying cannot be licensed for practical purposes (same source page 2, emphasis mine). It's much more important:

What's at stake?

Strong DRM protection has a high potential for abuse by terrorists distributing hostage and murder videos, by child pornographers, or felons sending extortion letters: If it was only hard to break, the main practical use of DRM will become hiding evidence. Period. If breaking became illegal, things will be worse. Hence it's so important to keep actual (technological) protection measures factual and legally subordinate to the logical attribution of warrants.

Since the legal system and ~certainty (LAW) is based on public witness, it ultimately relies on the general public right to private archival copies of any virtual artefact for the sake of protecting evidence. Everybody belonging to the "public" must be able to understand how those restriction management systems work. Including would-be-analysis and dissection under privacy protection. ARM systems failing to provide LAW-controled exceptions violate fundamental human rights and legal certainty/liability requirements where long-term availability and privacy deserves highest possible guarantees. They should not be considered as acceptable source to incure legal consequences within a constitutional state.

At the other hand Copyright and ARM system control (re)distribution. Claims based on Copyright may be considered as long as the aforementioned barrier protects the legal basics. Controling distribution (only) is also well balanced with respect to copyright holders interests since there is no damage until redistribution takes place.

Askemos concerns only the logical layer and may be used with any restriction measure seen fit for the particular purpose[2]. Following the Askemos rule set of for rights management, the system is incorruptible, user rights are never not alienated. It should be understood as a functioning solution to the question how legal rights management systems could be build.

---

1. DRM is sometimes also digital rights management, but that's double speak; see news forge)

   As with many security related issues, the background it's sometimes couter-intuitive (like, for instance, the DoD's definition of trust) in http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050613130705170 there's a fine article from legal background which explains how in the market setting, restriction management puts the publishers or computer/software manufactures into the owners position, while the customers are just users, not owners. No matter how much they believe they bought the computer, they still don't own it.

2. Askemos does not provide any enforcement system by itself. The current implementation supports link encryption via SSL plug in. A C-level call interface allows control of other enforcement systems.
3. see also RousseauSocialContract, http://www.digital-rights-management.org/, drm.info, Center for Democracy Technology, JKomG, GDPdU, UStG §14
4. I'm root. If you see me laughting, you've better had a backup.