[rights] FYI: Internet DRM group in the IETF

[Thomas Hardjono <thardjono@verisign.com>]

The Internet DRM (IDRM) group in the IETF is in the process of 
re-chartering.  It has been dormant for over a year due to DMCA-related issues.
The website is www.idrm.org.

If you are interested in DRM beyond rights-expression languages, here is an 
opportunity to contribute and shape the group.

Regards,

Thomas Hardjono
---------------
IDRM co-chair


>Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 15:43:00 -0800
>From: Mark Baugher <mbaugher@cisco.com>
>Subject: [IDRM] Disband or recharter IDRM?
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>Cc: thardjono@yahoo.com, Vern Paxson <vern@icir.org>
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>IDRM has obviously been dormant for about a year.  Over the past year, 
>many content-trading businesses and DRM technology vendors have 
>failed.  The movie studios are currently trying out Internet distribution 
>while there is a buzz in the technical community about the irrelevance of 
>DRM to internet entertainment.   Nonetheless, DRM-based products are 
>incubating at a few big software, entertainment, and consumer electronics 
>companies; these will likely affect the Internet in years to come.  The 
>EFF and a few other public-interest groups have consistently raised 
>important privacy and consumer rights issues related to aspects of DRM 
>technology.  Some of these concerns are echoed in the standards 
>bodies.  Although, MPEG and other organizations are standardizing 
>interfaces to key management, licensing, and content-protection systems, 
>IDRM has done little towards our original goals of investigating the 
>affects of DRM technologies on Internet open-standards and the end-to-end 
>model.
>
>Thomas, Sam Sun, Vern Paxson and I have been discussing the state and 
>direction of IDRM for many months now.  We have considered resuming our 
>work despite the dissension that the very notion of DRM causes within the 
>Internet community; we have also discussed re-chartering the group, as 
>well as disbanding the group.  We think that the right thing to do at this 
>time is to open a discussion on this list.  And we thought we would share 
>with you just a few things that we have discussed up to this point.
>
>First, there are interoperability issues in DRM.  Entertainment systems 
>typically use licensed standards rather than open standards so the 
>licensor can validate that the licensee addresses various concerns for 
>content handling.  When applied to the Internet, this tradition might 
>foster proprietary protocols that diminish interoperability, increase 
>complexity, discourage innovation and increase costs.  For example, DVB 
>simulcrypt interoperates with a great variety of key management protocols, 
>which is good, but it is prohibitively expensive to introduce standardized 
>key management in DVB systems, which is bad.  Regardless of one's feelings 
>toward DRM or content protection, open standards can mitigate some 
>negative effects of this trend through standard interfaces to end systems.
>
>There are also general end-to-end issues that have a technology component. 
>At the level of the global Internet, the DRM concerns raised by Internet 
>music and movie trading are another case of one community (national, 
>regional or virtual) wanting to assert control over how the Internet is 
>used by others.  DRM is closely related to privacy rights of individuals 
>and groups, to the conflict between community standards and a global 
>information infrastructure. There are some problems posed for the Internet 
>end-to-end principle by the demand for controls by geographical regions or 
>global industries.  I doubt whether these problems have technical 
>solutions but they may foster new technologies and standards, for better 
>or worse, such a P3P.  These technologies are of interest to the Internet 
>community, and the IDRM RG could serve as a forum for them just as it 
>could serve as a group that looks ahead towards new standards needed by 
>applications that use content protection or DRM technologies.
>
>We can think of reasons, therefore, to keep the IDRM group 
>functioning.  But our list has been dormant and little work has been 
>brought to the group over the past 18 months.  We should consider these 
>things as we consider what to do with IDRM.
>
>Mark