Enjoy this column while you can. You never know when I might decide to revoke your license to read it.

Over the years when UCITA was looming, I often talked about how its "electronic self help" provisions could allow a software publisher to unilaterally deprive customers of the right to use products they had purchased. While UCITA might now be toast, the spirit of electronic self help is very much alive with something called "license revocation" - a kind of electronic self help for content. And, particularly if Microsoft has its way, license revocation could make for a very strange world.

License revocation is not just a Microsoft thing. Not surprisingly, where it is really starting to become visible are the pay-per-tunes music services. Music services have no choice but to attach some form of DRM (Digital Rights/Restrictions Management) to the music tracks they sell in order to get the record companies to sign up with their service. But for at least some of the services, part of that devil's bargain is to let the copyright holder take back licenses to play those tunes whenever it so chooses. "Your copy of the Software and your access to certain applications that communicate with it are subject to restriction and/or revocation (such as being shut down) for security purposes or according to consistently applied Content-protection policies," reads the Napster 2.0 EULA, for example. "You understand and agree that this would likely result in Content that was previously available for use being unavailable thereafter."

It's ironic that the files being sent to your computer from the new Napster will therefore include lists of revoked music files. And, as Napster is one of those music services that's employing Microsoft's DRM, its users will now come under Microsoft's Windows Media Player license agreements and privacy policies for those lists. "A list of revoked software is sent to your computer whenever you acquire a license," reads one relevant portion of the Media Player privacy policy. "Microsoft will not retrieve any personally identifiable information, or any other information, from your computer by downloading such revocation lists. The only way to avoid receiving revocation lists is to not acquire licenses for secure content."

Of course, just as Microsoft's DRM ambitions aren't restricted to music, its plans for license revocation go much further. Recently I wrote about Microsoft's Information Rights Management (IRM) technology that builds DRM capabilities into Office 2003 applications. Microsoft counts license revocation as one of the attractive features that IRM brings to Office 2003 on its website. For some time now, Microsoft has been talking about how license revocation will work with IRM, even warning that "revocation is a fairly large hammer" to use to eradicate individual documents.

Microsoft explains in some detail how licensing revocation can be used with its overall Rights Management technology. "When a license creator builds a publishing license, she can specify that, in order for the publishing license to be valid, the content consumer must obtain a revocation list from a specified URL at a regularly scheduled interval," notes notes one document for potential developers. "This revocation list is a signed list of content IDs, use license IDs, public keys, or other identifying information that specifies principals that are no longer valid. Therefore, if a company has terminated an employee and wishes to revoke their access to sensitive company files, or if a content key associated with a particular encrypted film has been compromised and made available on the Internet, the licenses granted to that employee or for that content ID can be revoked after use licenses have been granted."

Now, that's interesting to think about. How tempting will a Hollywood studio find the capability to revoke all licenses it sold to a movie when it decides it's time to re-release it to the theatres? Those sensitive company files that an ex-employee can be barred from accessing might include his original employment contact, for example. Or perhaps documents revealing company misdeeds that a whistleblower was about to leak to the press could suddenly disappear for all time. Would there be such a thing as false advertising when any traces of the misleading ad can be made to disappear?

A world in which all content is DRM'd and subject to license revocation is a world in which history can constantly be rewritten by the powers-that-be. But it does give me a good idea about the logical business plan for the GripeLog to adopt. Hey, GripeLog of Hall of Shame denizens, how much would you pay to make those columns about you disappear?

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