[IETF-IDRM] [IDRM] Disband or recharter IDRM?

[Mark Baugher]

IDRM has obviously been dormant for about a year.  Over the past year, many 
content-trading businesses and DRM technology vendors have failed.  The 
movie studios are currently trying out Internet distribution while there is 
a buzz in the technical community about the irrelevance of DRM to internet 
entertainment.   Nonetheless, DRM-based products are incubating at a few 
big software, entertainment, and consumer electronics companies; these will 
likely affect the Internet in years to come.  The EFF and a few other 
public-interest groups have consistently raised important privacy and 
consumer rights issues related to aspects of DRM technology.  Some of these 
concerns are echoed in the standards bodies.  Although, MPEG and other 
organizations are standardizing interfaces to key management, licensing, 
and content-protection systems, IDRM has done little towards our original 
goals of investigating the affects of DRM technologies on Internet 
open-standards and the end-to-end model.

Thomas, Sam Sun, Vern Paxson and I have been discussing the state and 
direction of IDRM for many months now.  We have considered resuming our 
work despite the dissension that the very notion of DRM causes within the 
Internet community; we have also discussed re-chartering the group, as well 
as disbanding the group.  We think that the right thing to do at this time 
is to open a discussion on this list.  And we thought we would share with 
you just a few things that we have discussed up to this point.

First, there are interoperability issues in DRM.  Entertainment systems 
typically use licensed standards rather than open standards so the licensor 
can validate that the licensee addresses various concerns for content 
handling.  When applied to the Internet, this tradition might foster 
proprietary protocols that diminish interoperability, increase complexity, 
discourage innovation and increase costs.  For example, DVB simulcrypt 
interoperates with a great variety of key management protocols, which is 
good, but it is prohibitively expensive to introduce standardized key 
management in DVB systems, which is bad.  Regardless of one's feelings 
toward DRM or content protection, open standards can mitigate some negative 
effects of this trend through standard interfaces to end systems.

There are also general end-to-end issues that have a technology component. 
At the level of the global Internet, the DRM concerns raised by Internet 
music and movie trading are another case of one community (national, 
regional or virtual) wanting to assert control over how the Internet is 
used by others.  DRM is closely related to privacy rights of individuals 
and groups, to the conflict between community standards and a global 
information infrastructure. There are some problems posed for the Internet 
end-to-end principle by the demand for controls by geographical regions or 
global industries.  I doubt whether these problems have technical solutions 
but they may foster new technologies and standards, for better or worse, 
such a P3P.  These technologies are of interest to the Internet community, 
and the IDRM RG could serve as a forum for them just as it could serve as a 
group that looks ahead towards new standards needed by applications that 
use content protection or DRM technologies.

We can think of reasons, therefore, to keep the IDRM group 
functioning.  But our list has been dormant and little work has been 
brought to the group over the past 18 months.  We should consider these 
things as we consider what to do with IDRM.

Mark