Can digital rights administration technology stop the illegal spread of copyrighted content? Ten years ago this month, four engineers clarified that it can’t, forever changing how the world thinks about piracy. Their paper, “The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution” was performed at a security conference in Washington, DC, on November 18, 2002.
By itself, the paper’s sharp and provocative debate likely would have earned it a broad readership. But the really striking thing about the paper is who wrote it four engineers at Microsoft whose work many anticipated to be at the foundation of Microsoft’s future DRM schemes. The paper’s lead author told News that the paper’s deterministic view of Hollywood’s beloved copy protection schemes almost got him fired. But ten years later, its forecasts have proved impressively accurate.
The paper foretold that as information technology gets more powerful, it will grow easier and easier for people to share data with each other. Over time, people will assemble themselves into what the authors called the “darknet.” The term includes formal peer-to-peer networks such as Napster and BitTorrent, but it also incorporates other modes of sharing, such as swapping files over a local area network or transferring USB thumb drives loaded with files.
Once a popular piece of information says, a movie, a song, or a software title “leaks” into the darknet, preventing its spread becomes practically impossible. This, the engineers realized, had an important indication to prevent piracy, digital rights management had to work not just upon average users, but against the most tech-savvy users on the planet. It only takes a single user to find a vulnerability in a DRM scheme, remove the protection from the content, and deliver the unencrypted version to the darknet. Then millions of other users simply need to know how to use ordinary tools such as BitTorrent to get their personal copies.
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