Smart Cow Problem
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Smart Cow Problem describes how, when a group of individuals is faced with a technically difficult task, the method for surmounting this task only needs to be discovered once. Having been solved once, an easily repeatable method may be developed, allowing non-technically proficient entities to accomplish the task. The Smart Cow Problem is usually stated as "It only takes one smart cow to open the latch of the gate, and then all the other cows follow." [1]
This has recently been applied to Digital Rights Management (DRM), where, due to the rapid spread of information on the internet, it only takes one individual to defeat a copy protection scheme or rights restriction to render the method obsolete. [2]
