Consumers hate DRM—all that "phoning home," the outside control over one's behavior, the fact that you can't resell encrypted digital media, the worries about activation servers dying. But what if digital rights management could be turned into "consumer rights management" and people could actually own and fully control the digital content they purchase? That's the dream of Paul Sweazey, who's heading up a new study group on "digital personal property" at the IEEE.

Selling unencrypted downloads would certainly make this possible, as it has in the music industry, but movie makers and other rightsholders have shown no inclination to offer such open copies of their work to the public. In Sweazey's view, most people understand why rightsholders want some limits on copying, but they can't abide the electronic tethers that DRM currently requires. They don't want to be told what to do and who to share their content with; what they want, he tells Ars, is for digital property to "complete the emulation of the physical world."

Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects. For instance, you might loan your car to a friend, a family member, or a neighbor. You might do so on many different occasions and for different lengths of time. But you are unlikely to leave the car out front of your house with the keys in it and a sign on it saying, "Take me!" If you did, you might never see the vehicle again.

It's that the ability to lose control over property that is central to the DPP system. DPP files are encrypted. They can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here's the trick: anyone who can view your content can also "steal" it irrevocably. The simple addition of a way to lose content instantly leads consumers to set up a "circle of trust" that can be as wide as they like but will not extend to total strangers on the Internet.

How it works

Digital content lends itself easily to the creation of identical copies, so crafting a system in which digital content can be "stolen" is trickier than it might sound. The idea is to make it a "rivalrous good," one that, after being taken, deprives someone else of something.

DPP hopes to do this by relying on two major pieces: a title folder and a playkey. The title folder contains the content in question, it's encrypted, and it can be copied and passed around freely. To access the content inside, however, you'll need the playkey, which is delivered to the buyer of a digital media file and lives within "tamper-protected circuit" inside some device (computer, cell phone, router) or online at a playkey bank account. Controlling the playkey means that you control the media, and you truly own it, since no part of the system needs to phone home, and it imposes no restrictions on copying (except for those that arise naturally from fear of loss).

The playkey, unlike the title folder, can't be copied—but it can be moved. To give your friends and family access to the file in question, you can send them a copy but must also provide a link to the playkey. Under the DPP system, though, anyone who can access the playkey can also decide to move it to their own digital vault—in essence, anyone can take the content from you, and you would no longer have access to the media files in question if they did so.

To Sweazey, this system solves most consumer problems with DRM: no Internet tether on files, no online authentication servers that could go dark, and the unlimited ability to backup files and share them with others. Want to send a song to fifty friends? You can. Want to back it up online, on DVD, on your NAS, and on 3.5" floppy disks? Knock yourself out. Want to resell DPP files by transferring the playkey to a new owner? You can. You just can't share with the entire world—or someone will steal your purchase.

Kinder, gentler DRM



"Deep down inside, I'm just a regular guy consumer," says Sweazey, who argues that DPP has to be a single unified standard. What it can't turn into is "another DRM, another single company making a solution."

That's why he's chairing the IEEE study group, hoping to drum up enough interest to start work on a standard. Under IEEE rules, the group has six months to decide if it's worth pursuing the project and if the entire idea is technologically feasible. They also must decide if it is politically feasible, since the DPP scheme relies on support from hardware and software vendors for the tamper-proof digital vaults and the playback decryption apps.

Given that digital content just isn't like physical content, I ask Sweazey why we might want to force it back into that model; why not provide truly open files for download, perhaps reserving traditional tethered DRM for rentals and streaming? His answer is that such freely-copiable goods breaks the basic business model of human commerce by making goods nonrivalrous; it no longer has aspects of a private good, and this makes it difficult to sell.

The study group's mission statement makes the same point, saying that it wants to give consumers true ownership of content while still "preserving business models based on the sale of private goods where the number of items in circulation equals the number sold and the number of users of each item is naturally, reasonably, and unavoidably limited."

But not even a full DPP implementation would suddenly make content rivalrous. The scheme will be cracked, and once it is—even if only a few technically-savvy people can do the necessary work—content will flood P2P networks. Barring that, there's always streamrippers and screen recorders. Barring those, people can always record movies using a video camera pointed at a screen (as the MPAA helpfully suggests).

There's simply no way to truly control the distribution of media material anymore. If you can watch it or listen to it, a copy can be made; if you can't watch or listen to it, there's no point in paying for it in the first place. And once it's out on the P2P networks, we'll find ourselves in the same situation we have now, where DRM inconveniences the lawful users and doesn't stop the pirates. Making DPP much kinder and gentler doesn't appear to change this basic dynamic, though the scheme does sound less noxious than some of the DRM systems out there at the moment.