IEEE studying 'digital personal property' alternative to DRM

Jake Widman
Wednesday, 09 September 2009 01:54

Business IT - Security

An engineer has formed a study group sponsored by the IEEE Microprocessor Standards Committee to evaluate the feasibility of "ownable" digital products. The idea is that "owned" products could be lost or stolen, meaning that consumers would keep them under control rather than distribute them.

Standard digital rights management (DRM) approaches place restrictions on a digital content "owner's" use of the product. The item cannot be easily resold, for example, or can only be played on certain licensed machines.

The inconvenience and resulting resentment leads consumers to try and break the DRM, contributing to today's market in unlicensed digital content.

As described in Ars Technica, engineer Paul Sweazey has an alternative proposal: Digital Personal Property (DPP), a way of making digital media behave more like physical objects.

The digital content would be encrypted but could be copied and shared, and a "playkey" would be required to access the content. The playkey, however, could not be copied.

That would mean that a content owner could loan or sell the content. But since the seller would have to provide the purchaser with the playkey as well, there would still be only one person at a time who could access the content.

The result, in Sweazey's view, is that the content owner could share the media with as many people as they wanted, one at a time, but would not share it with anyone and everyone because someone would undoubtedly steal the playkey.

Sweazey also thinks that DPP should be a unified standard. He tells Ars Technica that he doesn't want "another DRM, another single company making a solution."

That's why he started the study group, which has six months to decide if the scheme is technologically and politically feasible. Sweazey's call for participation and contact information is available here (PDF download).