A Portable Chip for Digital Rights Management
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Thanks to various digital copyright management systems, many of us face the problem of having copyrighted content that we have legally purchased (such as music) locked up in a proprietary player. What happened to being able to play songs on whatever device could support the media? SanDisk thinks they have an answer to this problem with their new TrustedFlash memory, but will it serve our needs? And is it really what we want?
We’ve all heard about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law passed in the United States that was aimed at making it illegal to circumvent digital rights management systems. Most of us have also heard some version of a horror story involving DRM systems. This is enough to leave many of us wondering whether we will have to break the law to protect our ownership rights of something that we have legally purchased.
The one that did it for me came from a fellow technology journalist and concerned the music collection on his iPod. Apparently when you buy a song from Apple’s iTune’s music store, you agree to certain limitations on the use and enjoyment of your music, such as how many times the song can be loaded onto other computers or devices (or how many devices can be authorized to play your songs). As a result of a series of technical glitches which forced him to move his collection between several different computers, the journalist lost the bulk of his music collection. Keep in mind, this is music that he actually paid for.
This story illustrates one of the biggest problems with digital rights management systems: their lack of portability. Historically, as new media for storing and playing back music came out, we have been able to transfer songs to the new media, and then play them back on any player that handled the media: from recording vinyl albums onto cassette tapes, and later burning CDs. As the players became more portable, too, we grew accustomed to the idea of being able to take our music with us wherever we went. Now, with digital rights management systems in place, many people are finding limitations on their music collection that weren’t there before. The most obvious example is Apple’s iTunes; they won’t play in any portable MP3 players except for iPods. We have purchased the music; why can’t we play it wherever we want to play it?
SanDisk thinks it has a solution to this problem. Meet TrustedFlash, a new mini storage card technology that is supposed to be able to hold and play back secured content on a variety of devices, including smart phones, digital music players, and laptop computers. Are they offering us a good compromise?
Next: What is TrustedFlash? >>
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