I’ve been asked to speak at the April meeting of the North London branch of the British Computer Society (more details nearer the time) and they invited me along as a guest to the March meeting so I’d get a feel for how their meetings work.
The meeting was at a Microsoft office in central London and the topic was Digital Rights Management – so I was already feeling a little uneasy as I took my seat.
The first few talks gave a quick overview of what DRM is and the legal ramifications of copyright in the digital world. This was followed by a chap from the British Library talking about how they are facing up to their huge DRM nightmare.
But the main point of the evening was the two chaps from Microsoft talking about their Rights Management Server[1]. This is a frighteningly Orwellian system whereby you have complete control over what people can do with documents that you create. You can prevent them from copying, forwarding or even printing them. Of course, in order to do this you need an “RMS-enabled” application and currently that means Office 2003 or IE6 with the appropriate add-on. This, of course, breaks backwards compatibility with older versions of Office and anyone using something like OpenOffice.org to read Office documents will be completely out of luck. I asked if they’d be releasing the specs so that other people could produce RMS-enabled applications and they suggested that as it was a SOAP application you might be able to reverse engineer the protocol by sniffing the wire.
I really hope that this doesn’t take off. Currently I co-exist pretty happily with people in the Windows world. I can read 95% of the stuff that I get sent. But if RMS becomes common that percentage will fall dramatically.
I know that Microsoft will be selling this as a solution to the problem of of copyright theft and many people might be persuaded by that argument. But I find it hard not to see it as another Microsoft attempt to ghettoise people who aren;t using the latest versions of their products.
[1] And what marketing genius decided to call this piece of software RMS for short. I bet that Stallman is livid.