DRM References

Books About DRM

Books Related to DRM

These books are of relevance to DRM from a technical and/or legal perspective:

• Hacking the Xbox" by Anderew "Bunnie" Huang
  
  I don't normally endorse hacking or aid the spread of hacking information, but I'll make an exception in this case. First off, the cat is out of the bag and everyone that wants to hack an Xbox can do it. Second, and more importantly, it makes clear the absolutely brilliant level of talent (we're talking MIT PhDs in engineering crafting custom logic analyzers here) which MIGHT attack any given content protection system.
  
  
• "Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C", by Bruce Schneier
  
  Considered by many to be the best work on cryptography for those looking for technical depth and breadth without getting lost in advanced math.
  
  
• "Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems" by Ross Anderson
  
  Arguably the best book on security technology in the broad sense, that is, the design of overall systems for security in the real world.
  
• "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World" by Lawrence Lessig
  
  This is a "big idea" book with a scary but well-argued premise: that the current trends in policy and law in the USA - and by implication, the world - threaten to turn the Internet into an instrument of control, used to the advantage of powerful corporations. It's not just a rant - he has some proposals to fix things as well.
  
  • "Internet Law in Canada" by Michael A Geist
    
    This is a definitive work which is regularly revised and which links to a Web site to provide current information in this fast-evolving field. Although many of the details are Canada-specific, the presentation and issues will be of interest to follows of cyberlaw in other countries as well.
    

  Papers Relating to DRM

  If you exclude vendor's product plugs, most online papers are academic works focusing either on issues of copyright or on the difficulty of secure DRM.

  • "On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs" Barak et al
    This paper argues that there is no effective method of "obscuring" software. Whether this is right or wrong depends on how high you set the bar on "effective". It does however provide a clear case for not "betting the farm" on any particular obscuring methods, since very intelligent attackers do exist, and given a large enough, or stationary enough, target, they will hit it.
  • The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution (by Peter Biddle et al. (MS Word Format)
    This seminal paper goes right past the issue of "copy protection" and looks at a world - the "Darknet" - where copy protection is always cracked by somebody, somewhere, and free-but-illegal content is always, at least in principle, an option. The issue then becomes, does everybody cheat, and if not, why not ? This involves examining the flows of pirated content and cracks from producers to consumers, and the motivations of all of the participants.

    It is worth a read, partly because nobody expected a paper like this from Microsoft, and partly because the Darknet is a fact of life.

  • "Taking the Copy out of Copyright" by Feigenbaum & Miller.

    This paper argues convincingly that, since modern digital technology makes copying nearly impossible to prevent, copyright needs to evolve away from controlling copying per se. Their proposal is that public distribution, not copying, be controlled. From a common sense point of view this is quite appealing. Unfortunately, this is extremely difficult to implement with any forseeable technology. (Thus your humble scribe's bias in favour of mediating use of content - there seems to be some hope of implementing that.)

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