French plans about DRM

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/12/french_drm_concessions/ reports on Apple iTunes vs the French government.

It’s interesting that the french government gets the concept that computer and network protocols must be open, and must be cross-platform. This is more than the Canadian government does ( http://www.sandelman.ca/mcr/blog/2006/05/03#canadian_online_census_violates_privacy ).

This is really very good news. I don’t know much about the bill or the proposals to force DRM to be that way. I’m not clear that one can really have an open source DRM implementation — if the DRM is actually well designed, then one would need to have some kind of private key embedded in the application, such that it can decrypt things, and the public key part would need to be signed by some industry consortium. So, the source code might be public, but the private key would have to be… private. I’m not sure how this can work, since the private key could trivally be reverse engineered out.

The alternative is that every citizen needs to get online and ask for session keys that permit the citizen to decode the content. That doesn’t scale, and more importantly, there is little incentive for the citizen not to share the key.