Digital copyright infringement

Copyright is basically a right an author has to control the distribution of his works. This right is being abused over and over today by people making copies and putting them on web sites or making them available through P2P file sharing.

But artists do need to be paid, and we have to find a solution acceptable to society. (It might not be so acceptable to the greedy moguls that profit from current copyright protection such as Studios and Publishers, and I would cheer for that!)

What we want to do is quite simply pay artists for their work and our enjoyment of it.

Laws or Technology

Do we need new laws to solve the problem or new technology?

It seems to me that no new law can solve the problem of copying and making available on P2P any digital work (book, film, music...). Law makers are struggling with this and getting nowhere, except to annoy people. And Studios and Publishers are prosecuting the very people they call their customers.

But maybe technology can offer a solution.

We all make a lot of fuss about DRM. But this is a fuss only about the DRM that is imposed by copyright holders. Which is pretty bad in a couple of ways, it is not uniform but specific to the publisher, and it removes some of our consumer rights (like lending and fair-use).

What if the DRM was imposed by you? So that anything you own could not be duplicated in a way that would let another person could use it? Unless you let them, by lending or giving. In which case your DRM is changed to their DRM.

How could this be done?

I may suggest it could be done with electronic signatures (public key cryptography) where when you purchase an item is encrypted with your personal public key. So that only you can decrypt it with your private key. Then if you wish to lend it, your encryption could be exchanged for another's public key and then only they could decrypt it.

The question is can this be done?

1 We all would need keys. And for that we need a trusted authority to issue them, and we need somewhere to keep them. Job for government and job for smartcards.

2 We need a standard program, or piece of hardware which will manage the decryption, to watch the movies, and re-encrytion with a different public key to lend it.

Next?

Now in the past you would lend things pretty much only to people you know. But with this scenario you could offer to lend an item to any anonymous person, just by re-encrypting with their public key, and they could pass it on and on. What is the solution to this?

This kind of technology solution may solve the problem of multiple copies abounding, but not everything. What are the other possible difficulties?