Why DRM cannot work

Cory Doctorow (of boingboing fame) wrote a nice column where he explains why DRM (Digital Rights Management) will never work. The article is intended to explain to non-technical people why DRM is impossible. It also explains why DRM only hurts people who actually go out and buy the content and NOT the pirates.

The thing is that when they say that you can’t travel than fast than the speed of light, they’re talking about the fundamental principles of physics: it’s impossible to get beyond lightspeed, even if science fiction movies help us conceptualise it.

In the same way, we can imagine building progressively better software locks for movies, music, ebooks, and software until we hit on one that even the wiliest hacker can’t defeat. But, just like the physicists, the geeks who say that DRM can never reach this point are speaking about fundamental principles of information science. It’s impossible to get that far.

Link.