Science Quote by Edward Felten

Felten’s sentence lands like a lab result delivered with a raised eyebrow: not “hard to fix,” not “needs improvement,” but “can’t be resolved.” The phrasing is deliberately modest - “I think,” “there are problems” - yet the conclusion is absolute. That’s the scientist’s version of a mic drop, and it signals a deeper conflict than a buggy implementation. He’s pointing to structural contradictions baked into the idea of compact disc copy protection itself.

The intent is technical, but the subtext is political. Copy protection on CDs has to live in an impossible space: it must be strong enough to stop copying, yet permissive enough to play reliably across a chaotic ecosystem of drives, players, operating systems, and edge-case hardware. It has to assume cooperation from the very device whose job is to output the music, and it has to survive contact with users who can route audio through analog outputs, rip in software, or simply wait for the next exploit. Any scheme robust enough to “work” tends to break compatibility or degrade the user experience; any scheme gentle enough to be invisible tends to be trivial to bypass.

Context matters: Felten emerged as a prominent voice in early-2000s DRM battles, when the industry tried to retrofit scarcity onto digital media and, in the process, treated security research as a legal problem. So “can’t be resolved” isn’t defeatism; it’s a warning about misaligned incentives. DRM doesn’t just fail technically. It fails socially, because it punishes legitimate customers first and dares attackers second.