Copy protection is getting out of hand.
The big fear is that since the media, be it audio or video, is digital that the 'bad guys' can make unlimited copies of the original media and that there would be no quality degradation. This fear has caused numerous organizations to add severely restricting technologies to our CDs, DVDs, and download able content.
I think i have the beginning of a solution to this problem. It is a combination of the way the telephone industry has matured in combination with the way personal LANs have been managed.
First let me describe my Utopian household. I like to think of my house as a black box. There are several inputs, or feeds into my house. In some respects, my house is no different than any other. I have an electrical feed, a telephone feed, a water weed, a natural gas feed and a satellite television feed. I also have a garbage output feed, but that does not necessarily pertain to this conversation. I happen to also have a cellular feed as well as an Internet feed that comes into the house that not all of my neighbors have.
Using the telephone feed as an example, there is a box on the outside of my house that my local telephone company sends a dial tone to. What I do with this dial tone once it reaches my house is my business. Hence the 'black box' metaphor. What happens in the black box is unknown to the outside world. I could have a single phone hung on the way or I could have a complete PBX with multiple extensions spread out around the house.
My Internet feed as sent to me via a cable modem connection. I have a cable modem that is connected to a wireless router. Once again, the cable company is responsible for ensuring a consistent Internet connection. They have no idea how many connections I have inside my 'black box' that uses their cable modem. It could be one connection or it could be 50 connections. This is all managed via Network Address Translation (NAT).
Since I also have a wireless connection I use wireless security so that my data can't be intercepted easily nor can anyone connect to my LAN. At any time I can connect to my router and see exactly what IP addresses are currently active. I can also see the MAC address of every piece of hardware on the LAN.
What does this have to do with copy protection? What if someone produced a hardware device that connected to my LAN that was something like a license server. What if that server managed all of the hardware and software IDs in my house?
I would envision myself going out to iTunes for example and purchasing a track of music. After paying my $0.99 and downloading the track it would be registered with this License Server. Once that happens, that track can be played on any hardware device that is also registered on that License Server. In other words I can make as many copies of that track that I want.
If I have several iPods, they all could play the track. If I want to play the track on my home stereo via iTV or my Media Center PC, they would all be registered with this License Server.
Obviously, this concept would work equally well with movies. Once I download the movie, I could play it on any device in my network. I could copy it to my portable device, say a video iPod. I could play it through my Media Center PC on my main television. I could make numerous backup copies of it if I wanted.
Now lets say that I give a copy of this movie to a friend. His device would not be registered in my house so his device would not play the movie. If I copied the movie to a device of his, when he would try and play it, his License Server would not authorize the movie.
While I am sure that there are holes in this concept I certainly think it is a technology that is possible today and this concept is something that can be the solution for artists, recording industries and the consumer.
What do you think?
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Posted by swfields at December 1, 2006 10:33 PM | TrackBack