Marshall Brain's Blog

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DRM

This short video made me laugh out loud, even when I watched it a second time:


Pink Five

It also made me think about the movie Star Wars. If you have seen the original Star Wars movie (officially known as "Episode IV - A New Hope") or if you read the script, which was written in 1974, you can see that the premise of the entire movie rests on the stolen plans for the Death Star. The text crawl at the beginning of the movie says,

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.

Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents, Princess Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy...

Early in the movie, Darth Vader says to Princess Leia:

Don't play games with me, Your Highness. You weren't on any mercy mission this time. You passed directly through a restricted system. Several transmissions were beamed to this ship by Rebel spies. I want to know what happened to the plans they sent you.

What would happen today if the rebels got hold of the Death Star plans? They would immediately inject the plans into file sharing networks, post them on the Internet, send them to The Smoking Gun and so on. The plans would be everywhere instantly.

Also not mentioned in the movie is Digital Rights Management. In an advanced technological society like the one portrayed in Star Wars, the Death Star plans would be protected by highly evolved DRM software (Windows Media 9 being a primitive form early in the evolutionary chain). DRM would make it impossible for the rebels to open the plans even if they did receive them. Apparently rebel hackers have been able to break the DRM encoding...