Analyst: DRM has deep flaws

According to a senior research manager at the Cambridge-MIT Institute in England, digital rights management (DRM) won't protect the music and film industries' content and is easily circumvented by adept hackers. At the Changing Media Summit in London, researcher Ian Brown said, "It's the business models that need changing, not the technology." Brown runs through the list of age-old arguments against DRM, such as the data has to be decrypted to be used and once decrypted the data can be recorded and duplicated. Brown also called the algorithms used in watermarking "primitive."

Brown's comments echo a long line of experts before him, but his arguments aren't likely to sway the content providers on DRM anytime soon. The digital market is still a nascent one, and it will take more time for content providers to become comfortable with it. Brown does offer some constructive criticism: DRM may be best used as an encryption that holds for a short period, like during the broadcast of a live event. France is currently debating legislation that would make DRM developers disclose how their technologies work so that other companies can make interoperable systems.

For more on the DRM debate:
- see this article from PCWorld
- and this blog entry from Techdirt