Copyright and DRM
Ross Anderson · 2020
Copyright has been among the highly contentious issues of the digital age, and drove the development of digital rights management. The basic problem is that a PC, being a general-purpose computer, can in principle copy any file and send it to any other computer; unlike with analog copying, copies are perfect, so millions of copies might be made from one original. Hollywood's interest in finding new mechanisms for protecting copyright came together in the mid-1990s with the military's interest in unobtrusive communications and public concerns over government efforts to control cryptography, and started to drive rapid developments in the field of information hiding. There was a vigorous policy debate in the 1990s and 2000s between the tech industry and many of the owners of ‘intellectual property’ – copyright, patents and trademarks – as the opening up of the Internet made copying easy and threatened traditional music, book and film publishers.