DRM by any other name

As I've argued on several occasions, DRM can do just what Zitter suggests. The best examples are subscription music services such as Rhapsody and Napster, which let people listen to millions of tracks for a flat and (relatively) low monthly fee. Another example: online movie rental services, such as Movielink and CinemaNow. But there is growing opposition to DRM -- some of it insightful, some of it religious -- because few people think of DRM as enabling anything. The entertainment industry is poisoning the well by using DRM to limit what consumers do with the media they buy. I know, I know, digital media transactions are typically couched as licensing deals, not sales. "Buying" doesn't mean "owning," it just means acquiring specified permissions to use. Could somebody show me one iTunes music buyer who thinks he or she is paying 99 cents for a license instead of a song?

Speaking at the annual cable TV convention, Zitter suggested a few uses for DRM that would, in fact, enable consumers to do new and valuable things. The best one would be to offer cable subscribers the chance to watch brand-new movies at home instead of in the theater. In addition to a premium price, a necessary part of the deal would be a DRM that prevents copying, although it should still allow some limited buffering to let people hit the Pause button for a few minutes (after all, most people don't have a refrigerator or a microwave in their living room).

But when Zitter talked about what HBO would like to do with DRM today, he went right back into restrictive mode. If only Washington would allow it, HBO would use DRM to turn off the component analog outputs on high-definition cable set-top-boxes. That way, HBO on Demand subscribers who wanted to watch a movie in high def would have to use the encrypted digital outputs -- assuming, of course, that their TV set had the necessary digital input (or for those who also own an HD DVD or Blu-ray player, a set with multiple digital inputs or an input switching box), which millions of sets don't. Because it can't do that, HBO isn't putting high-def movies on its on-demand channel, Zitter said. The rationale is, as ever, the studios' fear of piracy. In this case, though, it's fear of what pirates may be able to do someday, not what's possible today. As far as I can tell, there's no consumer-level equipment on the market capable of recording a true high-definition signal coming out of a set-top box's component HD outputs. The amount of data -- about 1.5 gigabytes per second for 1080i -- is more than today's consumer-grade hard drives and microprocessors can handle. Still, given movie pirates' track record of resourcefulness, it's a safe bet that someone will find a way to record uncompressed HDTV signals before too long.