BAD: First HD-DVD, now Vista DRM

[andygates]

I can't keep the grin in any longer.  Vista's extremely silly Protected Media Path (PMP) has been hacked.  That didn't take long, did it?  Alex Ionescu describes how he did what he did in his blog, but daren't release actual code for fear of a black helicopter visit by DMCA attack lawyers.

The weird thing is that the commercial success of the entire IT sector relies on many perfect copies being made form everything.  That's the whole point: it's why cassettes were good too.  We get involved, we dick around, we don't just passively consume.  Mixtapes are cool to share.  The business model that was appropriate for manufactured pressings of vinyl - few high-quality originals dispensed from the central vendor - is totally and catastrophically broken by fast easy digital copying.  That model assumes a need for relatively low losses as the product is relatively expensive to produce; with digital media the cost of reproduction is trivial but the bean-counters haven't yet worked out that this means that massive unit losses are financially acceptable. 

The example of the MP3 player - mine is full of personal rips and allofmp3.com downloads - is canonical: because I can get lots of cheap easy music, I do.  Some I pay top whack for, and that's the profit.  But I wouldn't have bought the half-dozen CDs I have recently unless I had been energised and enthused - and engaged - by the dozen downloads.  And (listen up, suits) I would not have bought all eighteen; or all six, more likely one or two.  I would have passively flicked over MTV and Scuzz and shrugged and done something else.  Rob Zombie has a dollar to spend on shampoo and carny chicks because of piracy.

Anyway, there's the memetic imperative.  Information wants to get copied.  We, as memetic entities, like copying information.  "Hey, have you heard this?" is a memegasm.  And to play something, you have to decrypt it somewhere along the line.  So even without black-hat snarkiness at the corporate bishops, DRM will fail every time.  And it deserves to fail, and it will not be mourned. 

A wise geek observed that the internet routes itself around damage.  DRM is getting the same treatment, and with good reason: encrypted, unplayable data is damaged data.  The internet will route around it.  All things being equal, if you insert broken and healthy data into the memestream, the broken data will be copied less and will eventually die (a phenomenon which also explains the self-healing of Wikipedia and survival of healthy bittorrents).  DRM data is broken as designed.