Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that the technology [1] to do this simply doesn't exist. I'd say the core of the problem is that copying a digital artifact is easy, is a solved problem. You simply copy the data that represents the artifact, and now you have another copy.

*Deleting* data (and its cousin, *moving* data) is a nearly intractable problem. How can you verify that someone no longer has access to data that you gave them?

The best we have is to have some sort of ownership token that is maintained in a shared store, and build a requirement that possession of that token is required to use the data. Even this is practically nearly intractable; you have to have some sort of "trusted" hardware or software that is responsible for validating the current possession of the ownership token before using the data.

Physical media is another way of trying to solve this problem, especially if the physical media can somehow be verified and is exfiltration-proof.

[1] I say "technology" here but really I strongly suspect that this is actually impossible given reasonable theoretical assumptions around what data means.

> The problem is that the technology [1] to do this simply doesn't exist.

The technology is tort law.

This is the correct answer. The problem is that copyright law was created in a higher friction environment and it cannot adapt to the present.

If I bought a book, made a xerox of the whole thing, and then sold the book to another party, I have committed a copyright violation that is in theory actionable. This is basically unenforceable; in theory if it came to light that I had a copy of it and had sold my copy then there is an actionable claim, but nobody is going to do this. But the friction here is high so we know that we can live with this, because nobody could possibly do this at a scale that would make a difference.

With pure digital goods the friction drops to zero. For a while friction kept up with technology; when CDs were first around, making a digital copy of a CD was just not feasible. You maybe had a 1GiB hard drive and could store a single CD on it. With mp3 compression becoming mainstream that math changed, but at least games and things like that, that were not easily compressed, were somewhat safe. CD-R allowed you to break this but was high friction. Same with DVDs when they were first around.

But now storage is no longer a concern, so all of that friction has disappeared.

Streaming and on-demand content gives a possible solution to this, and that's why everything is moving in that direction -- trying to increase the friction of creating durable copies of the media. As soon as you allow backup of the content (as in the GP's post) then everything breaks, so that's the thing that you (as a content creator or distributor) have to fight.

You're trying to solve with technology a problem that lives in the abstract human world. Even the simplest possible case, you make a physical unique object that you define as conferring ownership to the person who possesses or controls it. Someone steals the object, now the person in possession of the object isn't the owner. There's this allure of trying to tie this abstract notion of ownership to a physical thing but it's breaks down immediately. It doesn't even work for physical objects.

Automated enforcement of ownership rules is completely tangential to the actual problem you're running into. You own a physical book, you make a copy then sell the book. That's a copyright violation, no "verification" or whatever nonsense needed. What happened in regards to ownership in this case is already clear. Companies sure do like DRM but it's as much a pale imitation of ownership as anything else.

In all fairness, *I'm* not trying to solve anything with technology. I'm arguing that it *can't* be solved with technology.

I hate to be that guy, but in this case I think it's appropriate to say that "Blockchain" solves this problem. The core idea behind Bitcoin and (some) derivatives is that it enables digital objects that cannot be copied and have a distinct owner. You are not wrong that from a technical perspective this is a very hard problem (digital objects are just bits of information, and there is no way to restrict making a copy of that), which is why some people felt like Bitcoin is a truly remarkable technical invention. But the practical side of it seems to problematic still (as far as I know there are virtually no successful uses of this technology in digital marketplaces outside speculation platforms)

Blockchain solves the double spend and ownership problems, but it does requires (a) that you be connected to the internet to establish or transfer ownership, and (b) that any consumer of encrypted data respect the blockchain state as well. If I have a video player and I give it a video that I downloaded with an ownership token, that player needs to either confirm that the token is still valid and deny the ability to play the video (even though it could), or it has to get a decryption key of some sort from the blockchain and use that to play the video, and further guarantee that said decryption key cannot be saved or copied.

Blockchain does not solve this problem.

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