The net result of engineering research underway at the University of California, Los Angeles, could be requiring you to use a password or even a fingerprint to buy a DVD or play it in your own home. And it has raised concerns over ultimate effectiveness and privacy compromise, at least for one privacy advocate.
Chris Jay Hoofnagle, who directs the Electronic Privacy Information Center's West Coast office, said consumers will see "a lack of proportionality" and themselves being portrayed as potential criminals if they’re required to submit fingerprints just to buy or watch a DVD.
"Most of us in society don't have to provide a fingerprint unless we have done something so wrong as to constitute probable cause leading to an arrest," Hoofnagle told AVN.com. "So, biometric DRM systems treat ordinary consumers as criminals, frankly."
Known as WinRFID, the idea is being able to write more data into radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which isn't doable on a DVD disc once content has been burned to it, according to research leader Rajit Gadh of UCLA's engineering department. He describes the concept as "provid[ing] the lowest layers of a middleware stack in RFID-enabling of enterprise applications where tracking/tracing/securing/, etc., is needed."
But others question whether it translates into one of the most restrictive piracy-fighting technological plans yet known, one that could make it impossible even for the owner of a prerecorded DVD disc to share it with a friend or family member.
"At the store, someone buying a new DVD would have to provide a password or some kind of biometric data, like a fingerprint or iris scan, which would be added to the DVD's RFID tag," reported Wired on May 19. "Then, when the DVD was popped into a specially equipped DVD player, the viewer would be required to re-enter his or her password or fingerprint. The system would require consumers to buy new DVD players with RFID readers."
Gadh himself has been quoted as saying his group's concern is showing the movie industry a better way to fight piracy and admitting the idea he's working on would be more restrictive than current anti-copying techniques. But he also said he's not certain how his plan would work "in the real world," where a prototype of the WinRFID program may come available by summer's end this year.
Hoofnagle said high-tech pirates are sophisticated enough that they would likely break the WinRFID system as rapidly as they cracked previous high-tech digital rights management programs — but that would still leave consumers in a bind.
"Every single DRM system that has been cooked up has been broken, and sometimes laughably," he said. "The path is just kind of littered with broken DRM systems. That's what's ultimately so troubling about DRM paired with biometrics. The pirates will break the system and the rest of us are going to be giving fingerprints."
