Digital rights management

"We also concluded that any single-machine locks and keys, or special time-out and self-destruct programs, would be onerous to our best customers and not effective against clever thieves. Because we could not devise practical physical security measures, we had to rely on the inherent honesty of our customers."

"Its baffling to me that the content industries dont look at the experience of the software industry in the 80s, when copy protection on software was widely tried, and just as widely rejected by consumers."

"Its a polite fiction... Lawyers and technologists continue to sell this snake oil of control, whether its from the court and the police [RIAA legal jihad], or whether its coming from technology [DRM]... When I was 14, I told girls I loved them to sleep with them too. It was a fiction. Steve Jobs just leaves a little money on the table. We see Jobs and Gates making promises to the content industry that they have no intention of keeping. Its the promise you make to move forward. The content owner wants to hear it. If were honest wed say to the content owners "were not going to succeed from what we can tell..." But we dont say it. Well say what we need to say to get it... Once you reach the realization that it isnt going to solve our problems, then you begin to embrace the alternatives."

"The development of the Internet has... created significant challenges to any distribution model which depends on scarcity... The financial and skill barriers to making content available globally have simply fallen away... The application of technology to this problem, if it is to be effective, must therefore in some way reestablish a point of scarcity on behalf of the rights holder. However, this raises a fundamental paradox, [which is] the business of publishers lies in providing access rather than in preventing it... Nevertheless, unless copyright is to be abandoned as a mechanism for trading in intellectual property entirely, it will be essential to find an answer to this paradox... They [rights holders] also recognized that those approaches would be ineffective unless the law itself provided enhanced protection for those processes and systems."

"In my opinion, content protection and rights management exist only as vestigial efforts to preserve existing models of content sales for as long as the bulk of the consumer market remains clueless. History has shown every content-protection scheme invented for consumer-grade goods to have almost no impact on piracy, and little impact on casual copying, except when it has doomed the technology carrying it. This is inevitable."

"Most people, I think, dont even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

"DRM is used to lock consumers to proprietary technology. It is used to control supply and push higher prices. It is used to undermine practices we have long defined as fair use so they can be shifted to fee-based."

"Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege. Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos [...] If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player."

"If consumers even know theres a DRM, what it is, and how it works, weve already failed."

"There is a cost associated with DRM, and that is lost sales of content."

"To recap: we decided to end the Google Video download to own/rent (DTO/DTR) program, and are now refocusing our Google Video engineering efforts. The week before last, we wrote to Google Video DTO/DTR program customers to let them know that videos theyd already bought would no longer be playable."

"We said [to the record companies]: None of this technology that youre talking abouts gonna work. We have Ph.D.s here, that know the stuff cold, and we dont believe its possible to protect digital content."