It seemed like a good idea, but what happens when you can't contact the server to confirm you can open the document you protected?

DRM - digital rights management - is usually criticised because the "rights" that get conferred are those you'd expect on an analogue product, but which are somehow withheld to be endowed by whoever is in charge of the DRM. (Such as Apple's "Fairplay" system, which will limit the number of computers that a digital product can be played on.)

Sometimes though it's the "management" bit which gets messed up. Such as happened with the owners of Office 2003 documents who found, after enabling protection of the documents using Microsoft's Rights Management System (RMS), that nobody could open them. Including the creator.

The reason? According to an embarrassed Microsoft blog post, because a certificate had expired. Which meant of course that the server didn't like any request made to it to access the document.

Though there's now a hotfix for Office, Word Viewer and Excel Viewer (not apparently Powerpoint Viewer - is there one? - or Outlook?). But it's still something that shouldn't have happened.

Now put yourself in the place of the people who listened to the Microsoft salespeople in 2002 or so when they were extolling the virtues of RMS. "And it's online, so you can enable just who you like to read the document, wherever they are in the world!" Sounds great; in practice, liable to central failure like this.

In its way, this is very similar to the experience of people who've signed up for server-based DRM. Cory Doctorow has warned about this in the past: as he puts it, "Don't fall for the Potemkin scam". Given that that piece was written in 2007, it's worth revisiting, because its fundamental truth remains:

The DRM business model is the urinary tract infection of media experiences: all of the uses that used to come in an easy gush now come in a mingy, painful dribble - a few pennies out of your pocket every time you want to watch a show again, hit the pause button, or rewind.

Or of course open those documents.

And ask yourself: if you had been bitten by this bug, would you have hurried to upgrade? Knowing that the bug exists, do you want to use that DRM?

(Thanks to Daniweb for the pointer.)