WHAT IS DRM?

In simple terms, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is any technology that
is built into an electronic product or service with the aim of limiting its
range of uses after purchase. It is designed to prevent customers from using
digital technology in ways that do not correspond to the business agenda of a
content provider or device manufacturer.

This technology often restricts individuals from doing things that are
perfectly legal, so we might not be able to make a backup of a file we paid for
or we cannot do things that are fully acceptable and commonplace in less
technologically developed environments, such as putting together a mix of music
files we bought legally, or lending a movie to a friend. Restrictions
management technology removes basic rights and freedoms in the digital world.
Digital Restrictions Management systems come in different shapes and sizes, but
what they share is businesses' complete control over how often we can listen to
the songs we bought, if we can watch the movies we paid for and what kind of
files we can read on an ebook reader.

DRM essentially removes the property right of the customer over the physical
product that they paid for and penalises them for using a legal copy of the
content they want to use on the device (illegal copies usually come without
those restrictions). This is a severe infringement upon our right as citizens
to property.

Even if we find a way to circumvent DRM and free us of these restrictions, the
European Copyright in the Information Society Directive makes it illegal. This
Directive and similar laws help preserve the outdated business models of
publishers (of news, literature, music, film and other information), for
example by limiting the right to private copying, in a world where virtually
everyone has multiple media devices and may want to use the same content on all
of them. This directly limits our fundamental right to liberty.

Electronic goods are therefore often built to be defective, forbidding the full
capacity of the technology to be used, forbidding uses that were entirely
uncontroversial before technological progress gave businesses the means to
prohibit them.

DIGITAL RESTRICTIONS OR CITIZENS RIGHTS?

There is a dizzying range of Digital Restrictions Management technologies on
the market. As their whole point is limiting the use of digital products, it is
no surprise that the different DRM technologies are incompatible with each
other, making it even more difficult for citizens to use legally purchased
content.

If we buy movies from Apple, we have to buy Apple devices and use Apple
software to watch our collection and we are no longer free to choose competing
products and services. Competition is weakened, innovation is crushed. After
spending your money on digital movies, would you like to copy your films from
one device to another? Would you like to make a backup on a DVD? Would you like
to lend a copy to a friend? Digital Restrictions Management systems place
restrictions on your right to do all of these things. To make a bad situation
even worse, if the vendor goes bankrupt, or no longer maintains a particular
Digital Restrictions Management system, your films or e-books may simply stop
working from one day to the next. DRM also keeps us from converting our content
to another format. It is obviously inconvenient and infuriating after buying an
e-book not to be able to read it on another device than the one it was designed
for. For people with disabilities, however, it is outright discrimination when
DRM prevents them from changing the format of their content to a format that
they can use despite their disability. For example, book publishers protested
against the capacity of Amazon's ebook reader, to electronically convert text
into speech. Amazon bent to the publishers' will and deactivated the
text-to-speech feature for many books which means blind people will simply not
be able to read those books.

Digital Restrictions Management also changes how laws and regulations are
applied from being flexible to being applied strictly mechanical without
exceptions. Copyright legislation allows for such exceptions; for example, it
enables people to quote copyrighted material. DRM systems cannot know what the
purpose of a copy is, so they restrict any kind of copy, also the ones that are
meant to be used as quotations. This means that instead of making use of the
technology and being able to use copy-and-paste for quotations, we have to type
each word manually and as DRM systems become more advanced, even that may be
prevented. This means that in reality, DRM systems eliminate any fair use
exception that might theoretically exist in copyright legislation.

LOSING DIGITAL HERITAGE

Our oldest written sources date back hundreds or even thousands of years. But
digital files are written on perishable material, such as CDs or flash memory.
These devices often wear out after only a few years. If Digital Restrictions
Management systems chain our contemporary culture (whether books, music or
films) to those devices and media, they will be lost with the medium they are
stored on. While locked in culture is already a big problem for private use, it
is a much greater issue for libraries, archives, museums and other institutions
that store and disseminate our records, which are becoming increasingly
digital. In an attempt to preserve our contemporary culture, those institutions
buy publications that are locked into specific devices. DRM systems only last
as long as the companies that sell them. When a DRM system disappears, however,
the content is by no means freed; it stays locked forever. While libraries and
archives once preserved our cultural knowledge for centuries, they are now
forced to spend significant sums of public money on material that will become
unreadable in a few short years; a wealth of cultural, historical and
educational sources will become unreadable and forgotten. Unable to read
today’s work, future researchers might wonder why today’s society locked away
its own culture from itself.

THE SPY IN YOUR POCKET

In order to control how we use digital media, Digital Restrictions Management
technology provides device makers, software companies and media publishers with
access to our devices, even long after we paid for the device and the content
in full. The companies receive their customers' consent to spy on them through
‘take it or leave it’ terms and conditions of the soft- and hardware. Those
terms and conditions are often very lengthy and are designed to not be
understood by ordinary citizens, so many people never read them; but even if
they do, it is usually very difficult to return an item to the store because
you, the customer, disagreed with the terms and conditions. Digital
Restrictions Management tools even let companies take control of our computers,
our music players and our ebook readers. For example in 2009, without informing
users, Amazon electronically intruded into its customers’ ebook readers to
delete books that they had sold by mistake. And which book was among the
deleted ones? George Orwell’s 1984, a book about a dystopian world that has a
device called ‘memory hole’ in which the government 'disappears' unauthorised
material forever. Amazon later promised that even though they would keep the
deletion 'feature' active, but they would not use it again, unless ordered to
do so by a government. The irony of that situation could hardly have been
clearer. Vendors can track what music we listen to and which books we read. We
have no way to prevent this, as we have no control over where this data goes
once it leaves our devices.

CREATIVITY UNCHAINED

Today, we have access to an unprecedented amount of knowledge in digital form.
As our cultural heritage continues to build on the work of previous
generations, this has led to a boom in researching and documenting even more
knowledge. In this exciting new world of access to knowledge, DRM is an attempt
to preserve a dying business model and to restrict competition. This
restriction on competition undermines innovation. Restriction-free projects
like Wikipedia and phenomena like Free Software (a market leader in many areas), prove what we
can achieve when we set knowledge free. DRM, on the other hand, is a rearguard
defence of businesses that seek not only to maintain the control they had
before the digital era, but to create new restrictions over leading-edge
technology and to establish legal authority over its private use.

Copyright laws also have not quite been able to keep up. Publishers and
citizens alike are calling for copyright reform, but with different intentions.
Citizens and policy makers need to decide whether the interests of a small but
vocal group of corporations should be accommodated, allowing businesses to
determine where the limits are for our sharing of knowledge and culture, or
whether the moral and social implications of restrictive legal barriers for
ordinary citizens are too serious to ignore.

UNLOCK THE HANDCUFFS

There are plenty of devices and media that preserve our freedom and dignity. We
can choose to live without digital handcuffs. We can buy media that we can use
forever, in any format of our choice. We can avoid buying devices that lock us
in. A little research before buying something often goes a long way here.

On a political level, we need to decide whether the copyright system should
serve only publishers, or also society as a whole and future generations.
Should legislation support access to culture or increase restrictions
to it? Rather than focusing exclusively on preventing digital reproduction, we
need to encourage the creation of business models that respect our fundamental
rights to liberty, security and privacy. We need to build a copyright system
that benefits everyone, not just narrow business interests. Getting rid of
provisions that limit citizens’ use of legally purchased content would be an
important first step.

Learn more about about DRM and how you can be free in the digital world.

Have a look at these resources: Defective by design
http://defectivebydesign.org drm.info http://drm.info Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management EDRI
http://edri.org/search/note/DRM EFF https://www.eff.org/issues/drm APRIL:
Synthesis sur les DRM
http://www.april.org/publication-april-synthese-sur-les-drm