How does this truely keep information locked up? [LWN.net]

How does this truely keep information locked up?

Posted Sep 11, 2003 4:33 UTC (Thu) by frazier (guest, #3060)
Parent article: An opening for OpenOffice.org

I fail to see how something like this truely keeps information locked up. Suppose I'd have to see an Office DRM'd document to find out.

I can see how it could be made difficult to retain the page formatting, but the actual document would seem available for copy/paste unless they somehow get the OS and/or Office 2003 to prevent that. Even then, I can imagine a VB app that screen captures each page automatically and OCR's it. This DRM scheme can discourage copying, but lets face it, if the document is worth a lot of money and someone has a digital camera, they can and will spend the time to take a digital picture of every page onsecreen if anything else (if they somehow prevent screen captures). It takes less time to take a picture of every page than it does to read each page, so time expiration wouldn't prevent this.

It's about impossible to secure information once you let it roam to an untrusted environment. There might be some loss of formatting, but the data presented is still presented.

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Or even use VMWare, and use the Gimp to do screen capture!

Posted Sep 11, 2003 18:00 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

Well, people have said some scary things like video signals will have to be
encrypted and monitors will only be able to decode them if they are
licensed. Cut-and-paste will use DRM because it goes through the operating
system.

Of course they really can't stop you from taking a picture of the screen or
something like that. A while back there was some talk of "closing the
analog loophole", which is ironic of course because all of this DRM is
supposedly because "digital information is different".

Or even use VMWare, and use the Gimp to do screen capture!

Posted Sep 18, 2003 12:34 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

Closing the analog loophole... I suppose they want to add digital fingerprints to DRM'd images, and add fingerprint detection software to digital cameras, camcorders and all the like, so that they stop recording when they see a protected image.

And for sure, you can't use VMWare to run Longhorn or that like, because it will want an untampered TPM, not a simulated one...

This all sounds so stupid that you can't imagine people being serious about it. But apparently they are. And don't forget: Resistance is futile. If you are a supplyer, and your customer demands you to accept IRM-protected documents, you can either install Windows or lose the contract. A lot of business works because "the customer is always right". That's a sad thing, since it applies even when the customer is obviously wrong.

How does this truely keep information locked up?

Posted Sep 11, 2003 17:28 UTC (Thu) by zonker (guest, #7867) [Link]

I fail to see how something like this truely keeps information locked up.

Well, the system isn't perfect control -- no. It won't stop really motivated people from using a digital camera or just copying the text or whatever. It will, however, prevent collaboration with people using platforms other than Windows/MS Office, which should (IMHO) be a major point of concern for Linux users.