drm

There's a new version of the Hype Machine! Cool. The mp3 blog aggregator's gotten a new coat of paint and a different flash player. It looks pretty nice, although I'm not entirely sure what substantive changes have been made. Nevertheless, it's at least much more t-shirt-compatible.

I decided to celebrate the occasion by digging into the workings of the site a bit more. Hypem provides a lot of music, but is understandably hesitant to provide direct downloads lest they be busted by The Man. But how do you go about providing an mp3 for listening but not for saving? It's as fundamentally unsolvable as any other DRM problem — more so, given the relatively open technologies in use.

Still, they do their best. For instance, only requests from known web browsers are allowed — try to use a command-line tool like wget or curl to fetch content and you'll get an "access denied" message. But it's easy to fake user agent strings (or just to do the dirty work within your browser). So let's have a look at the anatomy of playing a song on hypem:

Being the curious internetizen that you no doubt are, you might have read about Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's "Useful Void" proposal (PDF), in which he tackles the problem of individuals' increasingly long tails of digital cruft. Slashdot ran a story on it about a week ago, and today Bruce Schneier wrote it up as well.

I used the original press mention as a jumping-off point to ruminate about Facebook, the work/personal divide and darknets over here. Along the way I casually dismissed Mayer-Schönberger's proposal:

I'm sure his heart is in the right place, but this is dumb for all the same reasons that DRM is dumb. You really, really can't control the spread or persistence of publicly available digital information. Efforts to do so are a waste of everyone's time.

But then, much to my surprise, the man himself popped up in comments, leaving this polite note:

You seem to suggest that my proposal is similar to IP secured by DRM. It seems that you haven't actually looked at my paper. In the paper I suggest that a DRM-like approach (as Lessig has made in Code 2.0) would be overkill. What I desire is not perfect solution, just a shift in defaults that makes users think again about the choice of forgetting.

I encourage you to read the paper - it's a free download, including from my website, and I think addresses some of the concerns you seem to have.

In contrast your solution (cognitively accepting the fact that we are transparent and thus weigh things differently) depends on our brains ability to adapt - not something that cognitive scientists have much hope in I am afraid, espcially since biologically we are wired to forget.

Kind regards,
VMS

Well, guilty as charged — I hadn't read his proposal. But now I have, and I'm afraid that I still arrive at much the same conclusion: I don't think that it probably wouldn't be workable, and definitely wouldn't be wise.

Ed Felten has an interesting post up this morning discussing the 09-f9 HD-DVD key and why the net has been replicating it so enthusiastically. He has a number of explanations for why people are showing such antipathy toward the AACS LA's efforts to suppress the key. I'm most interested in the second one, because it's pretty widespread and very, very silly: