Geodog

Microsoft Office 2003 offers self destructing documents

According to an article in NewScientist.com:

Office 2003 features new versions of Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint, along with various usability tweaks and new functionality. But the software also comes with the ability to let users control the way other people use the documents they create. This can be used to prevent other people forwarding, copying or even printing a protected email message or document.

"It should work," says Simson Garfinkel, a computer forensics expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). '"But it could be defeated by a hostile user. There's no way you could prevent someone from taking a digital picture of the screen." ... The rights control feature in Office 2003 depends on having an intermediary computer system with Windows Server 2003 and a software package called Rights Management Service installed.

A protected email message sent between two users is encrypted and the recipient's version of Outlook will check with the server to see if the user is allowed to edit, copy or forward the message. A time-stamp can also be applied to make the message unreadable after a certain date.

While I suspect that people will quickly figure out how to break this first generation DRM with the equivalent of a magic marker or using the shift key, and of course the expired documents will still be on the (Windows) server, this is probably a pretty good indicator of where governments and corporations are headed, and Microsoft has a history of successfully iterating products. While others debate DRM, Microsoft is creating facts on the ground. Not an encouraging development.