Followup: A Different Approach To DRM...
A few month’s ago, I did a post advocating a different approach to digital rights management. It discussed why it would make more sense to use a schemethat embedded a signature of the purchaser into a media file instead of using the current DRM ‘lockdown’ model.
Well I was reading an article in InfoWorld last week, and it seems there is a company in Germany that is doing just that. And that company is none other than the Fraunhofer Institute - the same folks that developed the original MP3 standard. They are using an approach that makes tiny changes to individual samples in the original MP3 to encode a unique signature. The changes leave the sound virtually unchanged, and the file playable on any standard MP3 playback device.
It is, however, traceable to the purchaser...
The article also references a music download service - Akuma - that is already using this technology on files they sell. (The site is in German, but the layout is fairly understandable.)
I am really happy to see an alternative approach to DRM in the marketplace. I was looking at the open source community as a logical place for this to develop, but even seeing it as a commercial venture is a positive step.
This is a development worth tracking...
Monday, September 18, 2006
