Digital rights management enables distributing and selling digital works such as digitally-encoded movies, music, books, and computer games over a network. The Digital Rights Management project (1993-1998) developed concepts for electronic commerce in digital works. It showed how downloading and purchasing of digital content could be made convenient for consumers and secure for authors and publishers.
Inspiration
In
the early 1990’s the research-oriented ARPANET was undergoing its transition to become the public Internet. Electronic commerce had not yet started; the dotcoms were yet to rise and fall; and the browser wars between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer were years in the future. People knew that the Internet was going to change a lot of things and some people were worried. Al Gore, then vice-president of the United States, was interested in helping the Internet to become an important economic force. He had gathered together various experts to help him understand what needed to be done. One of the problems was that there had to be a way of protecting content in digital form.
In the months after the invention, the attitude of my colleagues at PARC went through several stages. First the consensus was that the problem was insolvable and that there had to be a flaw in the invention. However, one of my colleagues at PARC was Ralph Merkle, one of the inventors of public key cryptography. When Merkle pronounced the approach sound, the attitude shifted. It went from being impossible to being immoral! Years later, the attitude about the digital rights management continues to be controversial. I presented my own vision for the positive possibilities of digital rights technology in a paper Letting Loose the Light listed below.
Going Public — An Online Debate
There was much confusion about protection for digital content. John Perry Barlow believed that the problem was essentially insolvable, publishing a well-known article in Wired where he asserted essentially that copyright is dead.
“In any case, without our old methods, based on physically defining the expression of ideas, and in the absence of successful new models for nonphysical transaction, we simply don’t know how to assure reliable payment for mental works. ” (Barlow, The Economy of Ideas. Wired, 1984.)
In 1998, Charles Mann invited John Perry Barlow, Lawrence Lessig, and Mark Stefik to an online debate on the state of copyright and the future of publishing on the Internet. Lawrence Lessig was a famous legal scholar, political activist, and professor at Harvard. He was learned and outspoken on issues of copyright and would soon publish his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. John Perry Barlow was was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian political activist. He was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, was associated with the Grateful Dead, and had written the article for Wired cited above. In contrast to Barlow and Lessig, Stefik was relatively unknown. He had published the Letting Loose the Light paper in a book and had given a talk about it at a publisher’s convention. The three men had very different predictions about what would happen with digital works — music, movies, and so on — as the Internet became more widespread.
Mann invited Barlow, Lessig, and Stefik to debate the issues in the Atlantic Unbound, the new online edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Three rounds of debate were published as shown below with links to the debate.
Introduction by Charles C. Mann
Round One: Opening Remarks — posted on September 10, 1998
Round Two: Responses — posted on September 17, 1998
Round Three: Concluding Remarks — posted on September 29, 1998
My own journey in the invention of digital rights technology is documented in the book Breakthrough. It was available in digital form on Amazon kindle with DRM. It is now available for free on The MIT Press website.
Research and Spinout
During the mid-1990’s I became an evangelist for digital rights management based on a digital rights language for expressing digital contracts and trusted systems to enforce the contracts.
I spoke to many industry groups, law school classes, publishers, and computer science colleagues. Xerox created a development group to implement the ideas.
In 2000, Xerox and Microsoft created a company, ContentGuard, to develop and license software for digital rights management. Its eXtensible rights Markup Language (XrML) digital rights-management software, authorizes access to content or a network service in a language that multiple systems can read. In 2005, Microsoft, Time Warner and Thomson acquired ContentGuard.
Patents
We filed patents on the core ideas, resulting in a portfolio that includes over fifty U.S. patents and many other patents internationally. The journey in the invention of digital rights technology is documented in the book Breakthrough. Today that book is available online and DRM protected on Amazon.
Papers
Stefik, M. (1999) The Digital Wallet and the Copyright Box: The Coming Arms Race in Trusted Systems. in Stefik, M. The Internet Edge: Social, Technical, and Legal Challenges for a Networked World. Chapter 3, pages 55-78.
Barlow, J.P., Lessig, L., Mann, C., and Stefik, M (1998). Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Copyright …?, The Atlantic Unbound. (The on-line version of The Atlantic Monthly.) Roundtable essays related to the cover article of the September, 1998 Atlantic Monthly. (Available on-line at Atlantic Roundtable))
Stefik, M. (1999) Stefik, M. (1997) Shifting the Possible: How digital property rights challenge us to rethink digital publishing. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 12:1, pp 137-159, 1997.
Stefik, M. (1996) Letting Loose the Light: Igniting commerce in electronic publication. In Stefik, M. Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996. (Also published in Proceedings: Forum on Technology-Based Intellectual Property Management,: Electronic Commerce for Content. Interactive Multimedia Association Intellectual Property Proceedings, Volume 2, August 1996, pp. 35-60).
