The technical and legal dangers of code-based fair use enforcement

J.S. ERICKSON, D.K. MULLIGAN
2004 Proceedings of the IEEE  
Digital rights management (DRM) mechanisms, built upon trusted computing platforms, promise to give content providers the ability to reliably and deterministically impose rules on end-user experiences with information resources ranging from literary works and scholarly publications to a vast array of entertainment content. These mechanisms are able to constrain the user's local interaction with content by ensuring that only a predefined range of content behaviors may be invoked, by only
more » ... ed agents in only authorized hardware, software, and network environments. DRM represents just the first wave of a class of technologies that aspire to not only implement copyright-protecting usage controls on computing devices, but increasingly to take on the enforcement of a broader set of organizational and public policies. When technical mechanisms for policy enforcement are strengthened by laws and other governmental controls that stipulate their use-and penalize their avoidance or circumvention-end-user freedoms are at risk of being controlled at their most granular level exclusively by parties who write the policies and control their means of enforcement. This paper focuses on policy enforcement in the specific context of content use. It reviews the concepts and architecture of policy specification and enforcement, citing examples from the special case of DRM, and provides a detailed discussion of how usage control policies are evaluated in DRM systems. Since the expression and interpretation of policies is only one "layer" of the general problem of persistent policy enforcement, we will consider the role that trusted computing systems will play in ensuring that computing agents interpret policies in reliable and deterministic ways. Finally, we will consider the challenges inherent in the construction of technical mechanisms that mimic social policies.
doi:10.1109/jproc.2004.827365 fatcat:bjebl2flnfcurnm3wel3brg4ya