[sword-devel] drm

[Michael A. Peters]

On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 19:37, Kahunapule Michael P. Johnson wrote:
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> At 11:37 21-04-04, Michael A. Peters wrote:
> >I'm sure this has been asked before, but are there any plans to add 
> >some
> >kind of a drm mechanism so that "locked" modules can be purchased?
> 
> I don't think Crosswire wants to do that, but maybe providing tools so 
> that others can sell modules with proper publisher permission might be 
> OK, if you wanted to do that.
> 
> >I don't know about windows, but one way to do it in Linux that would 
> >be
> >pretty safe is a key based upon the users gpg - sword could
> >automatically request a license file from vendor based upon users gpg
> >public key, and get a license file that is only usable with that 
> >users
> >gpg private key.
> 
> OK, so I generate a new gpg key pair just for that purpose, get the 
> license string, then post both for my hacker buddies?

If your hacker buddies are interested in sword modules, Good Work! ;)
There is no drm that won't eventually be cracked.

I can burn my itms songs and re-rip them and have drm free songs that
are still very high quality - or I can use that program dvd jon wrote
and strip the drm from the aac files completely.

Yet Apple still sells music - which is far more likely to be ripped off
then a distribution protected Bible module.

As the sword project currently is - unless I create my own sword modules
(which I might do - it can't be *that* hard to write a script that can
parse a chapter from biblegateway.org into a module) the only way for me
to use these texts is to use a different project, which presently would
require the use of wine (or booting into that OS I really don't like)

Right now - the only way honest people can use such bible texts in sword
is if they create them themselves, and I think this does hinder the
widespread adoption of the project.

Some mechanism to allow copy protected modules not only would allow
students to use NASB and NRSV - but it could potentially also open up
sword to additional commentaries etc. that currently are not available.
It would be great to be able to read Daniel side by side with the Joyce
Baldwin commentary on it.

> 
> Seriously, most people don't have a gpg key. Only a very small 
> minority of people care enough about authentication and/or privacy to 
> learn how to use PGP or Gnu Privacy Guard. These programs are not user 
> friendly enough to enter the main stream.

It is extremely trivial (at least on *nix) to write a gui that generates
a PGP key. I could do it in AppleScript in probably 15 minutes (except I
don't currently run OS X on anything). Maybe half a day in Linux simply
because I would need to look up pygtk syntax.

That's not a problem. People don't use it because people generally
either don't need to, or don't know they need to. I only use my key when
signing an rpm - I don't use it for anything else.

> 
> I think that it would be about as secure, really, to just tie the 
> personal unlock key to the customer's name + some unique identifier, 
> like maybe an email

That's what Apple does with their drm for itms - that would be fine too.
I think the real purpose would be prevention of accidental copyright
infringement - those who want to infringe will infringe, if not with
sword - then with whatever other Bible packages that already exist.

-- 
Cheap Linux CD's - http://mpeters.us/linux/