Dear all,
also from my side, a huge Thank You for participating and working with us in Gothenburg!
On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 02:44:08PM +0100, Matthias Kirschner wrote:
= DRM booklet =
Several people worked on the DRM booklet. With your help Karsten was able to send it out this week.
TODO: Karsten will let you know about the final result.
We made quite a bit of progress with the DRM booklet in the Gothenburg session. As the editing business goes, there were many more rounds afterwards during which we refined the text, and slightly re-ordered it. But without your work on that day, it definitely wouldn't have become as nice as it is now!
Please find below the text that I sent to EDRI yesterday. I'll let you know when the booklet comes out. Hopefully, there will be a PDF online for re-use elsewhere.
Thank you all so much!
Best regards, Karsten
===
* = page 1 =
*Digital Handcuffs*
How device makers, software companies and the media industry take away your fundamental rights, and what you can do about it.
* = page 2: Know your rights =
Privacy, liberty, and security are fundamental rights the European Union is built on. Yet we don't always enjoy these rights. Sometimes, technology takes them away from us. When we buy an electronic book, we may not be able to lend it to your friends. When we buy music on-line, we may not be able to listen to it on all our electronic devices.
Digital media and electronic products are often damaged right out of the box. Built defective by design, they restrict what we can do with them. The technology that causes this damage and takes your rights away is called Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).
* = page 3: Rights replaced by restrictions =
DRM is designed to keep us from using digital technology in ways not intended by the content provider or device maker. This often restricts us from doing things that are perfectly legal, such as making a backup, putting together a music mix, or lending movies to a friend. It takes away our freedom in the digital world.
Digital Restrictions Management systems come in different shapes. What they all have in common is that with DRM, the vendor is in control. They, not us, determine how often we can listen to the songs we've bought, whether we can watch those DVDs that we brought home from our vacation, and what kind of files we can load onto your ebook reader.
Even when it is possible to break these restrictions, the European Copyright Directive makes it illegal. This helps to preserve the outdated business models of publishers, the movie and music industries. But it directly hurts our fundamental rights to privacy, liberty and security.
* = page 4: DRM vs consumers rights =
There are many DRM systems out there. Most of them are incompatible with each other. If we have bought all our music from Apple's iTunes, then we have to buy Apple devices to listen to our collection -- we're no longer free to choose.
Would you like to copy your tracks from one device to another? Burn them to a CD? Give your friend a copy? DRM puts strict limits on all of this. And if the vendor goes bankrupt, or no longer maintains this particular DRM system, your media might simply stop working.
DRM also keeps us from shifting our media to another format. This is perhaps merely inconvenient when we would like to read an ebook on another device than the one we bought it for. It is outright discrimination for a blind person, when DRM prevents them from using text-to-speech technology -- in this case, they will simply not be able to read the book.
* = page 5: The spy in your pocket =
In order to control how we use digital media, DRM provides device makers, software companies and media publishers with a backdoor into our devices. It lets someone else take control of our computer, our music player, or our ebook reader. For example in 2009, Amazon remotely deleted a book from its Kindle ebook readers without informing users. Ironically enough, the book was George Orwell's "1984".
The vendor will be able to track what music we are listening to, and which books we are reading. We have no way to prevent this, and we have no control over where this data goes once it leaves our devices.
* = page 6: Are we losing our memory? =
Our oldest written sources date back hundreds or even thousands of years. But digital files are written on much more fleeting media, such as CDs or flash memory. Such devices often break after only a few years. If DRM chains your music, books and movies to those devices, you will lose your collection along with them.
If this is a problem for us as individuals, it's a much greater issue for libraries. They are buying publications that are locked down. DRM systems only last as long as the companies that sell them. Libraries used to preserve our cultural knowledge for centuries. Now, they are spending lots of public money on materials that will become unreadable in a few short years, taking our cultural memory with it. Unable to read today's works, future researchers might well believe that we lived in a Dark Age.
* = page 7: Creativity unchained =
Today, we have access to an unprecedented amount of knowledge in digital form. As we all stand on the shoulders of giants, this has led to a boom in the creation of even more knowledge. Projects like Wikipedia and phenomena like Free Software (now a market leader in many areas) show what we can achieve when we set knowledge free. Copyright laws have not quite been able to keep up. In the reshaping of knowledge, DRM is a rearguard action, fought by a few companies that are desperately trying to preserve a dying business model.
We need to decide whether we want to accommodate this small group, or whether we want to let everyone benefit from the huge opportunities of knowledge in the digital world. Rather than asking how we can prevent copying of digital information, we need to ask how we can encourage the creation of business models that will respect our fundamental rights to liberty, security and privacy.
* = page 8: Let's 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 here often goes a long way.
Beyond this, we need to decide whether the copyright system should serve only publishers, or all of us. We need to build a copyright system that benefits everyone, not just a few companies. Getting rid of the provisions that make it illegal to break DRM is a good first step.
Learn more about about DRM, and how you can be free in the digital world. Have a look at these resources:
- defectivebydesign.org
- drm.info
- APRIL: Synthesis sur les DRM [http://www.april.org/publication-april-synthese-sur-les-drm]
- Wikipedia: DRM [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management]