Peter Jenner [A2k] Paris TACD Meeting: Draft 'understanding' on RMI and TPMs

[Peter Eckersley]

On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 10:41:38AM -0400, Manon Ress wrote:
>
> I find this stuff all very interesting, but without some sort of 'passive'
> DRM it is hard to see how the creators or the rights holders will get paid
> for the use of their work.  How else are we going to be able to estimate
> usage of particular works or recordings?

I've done a fair bit of research on this question :).  The model the French
parliament considered recently (collect usage statistics from a sample
population of a few thousand people) is probably the simplest option.

Making a reliable system for usage data collection (I wouldn't call such a
system "DRM", passive or otherwise) is the same problem as securing an online
voting system.  It needs to be highly resistant to viruses and trojan software
that try to distort the outcome.  There are two ways of achieving that: (1)
custom hardware gadgets that are predictable because they are very
simple; (2) TCPA-style trusted computing hardware that does "local
attestation" of code (note that TCPA DRM requires remote attestation, which is
where things start to get invasive).

Any of these three options would be costly to employ, but the overheads are
small compared to the volumes of royalties involved.

--
Peter Eckersley
Department of Computer Science   &                  mailto:pde@cs.mu.oz.au
IP Research Institute of Australia             http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~pde
The University of Melbourne