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October 17, 2018 04:37 pm PDT

Incoherence, multiplied: Sony announces nebulous "blockchain for DRM"

Sony -- whose most notorious DRM foray infected millions of computers with malware -- has announced an incoherent plan to use blockchain to make DRM work, somehow.

Despite Engadget's inexplicable assurance that blockchain as "a DRM tool makes sense and may also help creators keep tabs on their content," there's no detail about how this will actually work, and it's hard to imagine a circumstance in which DRM helps blockchain or vice versa (indeed, given the recent bloodbath in cryptocurrency and blockchain, and the widespread public hostility to DRM, this feels more like tossing an anchor to a drowning victim).

Sony's proposal seems to involve tracking creative works' provenance using a distributed ledger -- presumably you could upload signed hashes of your work at different stages and later prove that you created them. This has nothing to do with DRM and addresses the most rare copyfraud circumstance, in which a plagiarist claims to have made a work that someone else actually created (the commonest copyfrauds are to claim that copyright endures in works that are in the public domain, or to falsely assert copyright infringement, including by ignoring fair use).

Sony also implies that every transaction in which someone buys a creative work will end up in the ledger. This has extremely grave privacy implications, but it also has nothing to do with preventing copyright infringement. People who lawfully acquire copyrighted works have the right to sell them, lend them, and give them away -- and they are not liable if (for example) their data (including copyrighted works) is stolen and released online. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/KI4mMnoytVM/anchor-for-the-drowning.html

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