Here’s a plan for copyright laws¹: I can listen to any music that I own a license to; I can watch any of your movies on your DVD player. I can also give you my license as a gift, or lend you my license (which could automatically return to me after a specified amount of time).

This is becoming more feasible as more devices come with some sort of wireless communication. Your license database stays in sync with all your devices using a common protocol; there’s no problem there. Using the license as the decryption key would keep you from listening to another’s music.

The weakness is in license copying and selling. International laws will have to be made that disallow you from giving away a license without removing it from your database. You would also have to be legally authorized to sell a specific license. Once this rather large obstacle is overcome, I think the scheme would work very well.

Footnotes

1. I got the beginning of this idea from Dr. Chuck Knutson [↩]

Saturday, April 12th, 2008 @ 1:55 pm professional
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