The Real Purpose of Digital Rights Management

I know  the issue of DRM isn’t on a lot of people's radar, but it is one more brick in the wall that corporations and government are building together to limit consumer’s rights and choices while enhancing corporations’ opportunities for extending their income streams.

Just in case you aren’t familiar with the term, DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. DRM is the code attached to digital media to limit the ways in which it can be used by the consumer of that media. For example, if you buy a song from the iTunes Music Store, it has Apple’s music DRM (misleadingly labeled “Fair Play”) attached to it. The “Fair Play” DRM limits the number of computers you can transfer to and play the song on as well as the number of times you can burn a playlist containing the same DRM’ed songs to a CD. And many pundits consider Apple’s music DRM to be more generous to the consumer than many others’ implementations of DRM.

Ostensibly, DRM is intended to protect copyright holders from piracy of their digitally distributed works. Of course, if you really want to get around someone’s DRM a bit of googling will turn up loads of hacks and programs to do just that. So they are really inconveniencing honest consumers while doing very little to prevent piracy. That being the case, why the rush to attach DRM schemes to virtually any digital media you can purchase these days?

Ed Foster’s Gripe Line Weblog at InfoWorld. recently looked at this issue and one reader weighed in with some insight on that question:

‘Does DRM fit the crime, or is copyright crime just an excuse for DRM? The suggestion by some in a recent discussion that various forms of digital rights management are necessary to protect copyright holders met with a strong rebuke from one reader.

The reader wrote:
“While many things like copy protection and DRM are incorporated as purported anti-theft measures, the real objective is to limit the rights of legitimate users. Copyright law has a doctrine of first sale—basically, the copyright holder has only very limited rights to control what you do with something that is copyrighted after you have purchased it. While some of this is about your fair use rights—in reality copyright holders only retain those rights explicitly granted by copyright law—they do not own copyrighted works, they own the copyrights. Copyright holders do not want you to be able to record TV shows and play them later, rip your own music and play it on your computer or in your iPod, or cell phone, or at least they do not want you to be able to do those things without paying them even more.”

“Contrary to popular belief, most of the efforts of the entertainment industry are not targeted at stopping criminals but at preventing and criminalizing ways of using content you purchased that no one has even thought of yet. As to (those who) rant about criminals, there is no more crime today than 25 years ago. A significantly larger percentage of the population is spending a significantly longer amount of time in jail for less and less significant offenses—the retail industry would advocate capitol punishment for shoplifters if it could, despite the fact that more retail theft goes out the back door than the front.”

“Do not misunderstand me—criminals need to be punished for their crimes, but blaming criminals for all kinds of changes that are targeted at finding new ways to bilk more money from honest people, is itself dishonest. Further what is wrong with corporate responsibility? Despite rhetoric to the contrary, product liability verdicts against well-designed products by reputable manufacturers are rare. The real threat is large verdicts against companies that market dangerous junk,or that decide the cost to fix a problem that kills or maims people is higher than the cost of killing and maiming.”’

technorati tags:drm, copyright, corporations, freedom

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