The war

Over the last couple of decades, companies involved in all forms of digital content are investing exponentially increasing amounts of money and efforts for the Digital Rights Management (DRM). Each of these efforts have resulted in solutions that followed months of engineering and the work arounds have ironically been quick, simple and downright free.

Reminds me the anecdote about NASA splurging millions of dollars to manufacture a pen for their astronauts that could write in conditions like underwater, zero-gravity, vacuum etc; while the Russians simply gave their astronauts a pencil!

To curb piracy, Sony launched a multi-million research-backed technology to protect a CD/ DVD from being copied. In the very next hour, a group published that the workaround is to simply mark the inner most ring on the CD with a black permanent marker because that is the part where the validation logic is stored.

A few years back the public (and their lawsuits) forced the DRM on audio CDs to be taken down. The audio companies realised that they were wasting too much money and time on something that is merely a puzzle game for the crackers/ hackers out there. There is a constant race between the various hacking groups for releasing the hack.

Undeterred by all this, Microsoft regularly tries to push out OS updates to identify pirated Windows. They have every right to protect their income! Their previous attempt at locking out a Windows XP had a disastrous effect on some of the customised/ OEM copies of the OS. There were reports of computers left unusable after the update was applied. Recently, MS released another 'Windows Genuine Advantage' (WGA) update for Vista that when installed checks for the installed OS being legitimate. By definition, this could very well be a spyware, no! Those with legitimate product keys are unlikely to have any issues and those using a pirated copy, will simply choose to ignore the update. So the only point in the update is, perhaps, catching those unwitting users who inadvertently install it without thinking!

And so the war continues...