Security Engineering, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 24Copyright and DRM

Be very glad that your PC is insecure – it means that after you buy it, you can break into it and install whatever software you want. What YOU want, not what Sony or Warner or AOL wants.

– JOHN GILMORE

24.1 Introduction

Copyright has been among the highly contentious issues of the digital age, and drove the development of digital rights management (DRM). The big fight was between Hollywood and the tech industry in the 1990s and 2000s; by 2010 it had essentially been resolved. We won; power in the music and film industry passed from firms like EMI and Universal to firms like Apple, Spotify, Amazon and Netflix, while Amazon cornered the market in books – first physically and then with ebooks. Technically, the world moved from enjoying music and video from local media such as CDs and DVDs (which many people used to share) and satellite broadcast TV (which some people used to hack), to broadband streaming services where subscription management is fairly straightforward. I thought seriously about dropping this chapter from the third edition and just referring you to the second edition chapter online, as there's not a lot more to say technically. On reflection I decided to edit it to give the context as seen from 2020. Just as the multilevel secure systems I describe in Chapter 9 are largely obsolete but drove the development of military computer security and influenced today's security landscape in many subtle ways, so also the copyright wars left ...