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DRM Advocates & Opponents
DRM advocates
Some DRM advocates have taken the position, in essence, that the operational
contexts and design goals of DRM, security, and cryptography are sufficiently
well understood, and that software engineering is also sufficiently well understood
and will be so practiced, that it is already possible to achieve the desired
ends without causing unrelated problems for users, their computers, or those
who depend on either.
Others have taken the position that creators of digital
works should have the power to control the distribution
or replication of copies of their works, and to assign
limited control over such copies (e.g. Creative Commons
license). Without the power to do these things, they
argue, there will be a chilling effect on creative
efforts in the digital space. DRM is one means by which
they may obtain such power.
A similar view states that DRM's advent is the first
time large-scale digital distribution has been reasonably
achievable, which proponents claim to be a benefit
both to content creators and their customers that far
outweighs typical problems with such systems. This
argument cannot be applied to physical media, however.
Furthermore, advocates of DRM believe that its opponents
advocate the rights of hardware and media owners, but
at the expense of the privileges of copyright holders.
Consumers of hardware and media voluntarily and knowingly
agree to the grant of limited use of the content exhibited
using their physical media.
DRM opponents
Many organizations and prominent individuals and computer scientists are already
opposed to DRM in its various currently proposed forms. Two notable opponents
are John Walker in his article, The Digital Imprimatur: How big brother and
big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle, and Richard Stallman
in his article/story The Right to Read. Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge
University heads a British organization which has been quite active in opposing
DRM and similar efforts in the UK.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and similar cyber
civil rights organizations, including http://boycott-riaa.com,
also hold positions which are characterized as opposed
to DRM.
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure
criticizes DRM's impact as a trade barrier from a free
market perspective.
The use of DRM may also be a barrier to future historians,
since technologies designed to permit data to be read
only on particular machines may well make future Data
Recovery impossible - see Digital Revolution. This
argument connects the issue of DRM with that of asset
management and archive technology.
The use of DRM is a key part of implementation of
corporate compliance policies such as the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act of 2002, protecting corporate documents from unauthorized
tampering and creating an audit trail which can be
used to determine liability at board level within corporations
for misdemeanors. This level of control is obviously
unwelcome at certain levels.
DRM opponents argue that presence of DRM infringes
private property rights and criminalizes a range of
normal user activities. A DRM component would take
control over the rest of the user's device which they
rightfully own (e.g. MP3 player) and restricts how
it may act, regardless of the user's wishes (e.g. preventing
the user from copying a song). All forms of DRM depend
on the device imposing restrictions that cannot be
legally disabled or modified by the user. In other
words, the user has no choice.
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References:
- Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, published by Basic
Books in 2004, is available for free download in PDF format. The
book is a legal and social history of copyright. Lessig
is well known, in part, for arguing recent landmark
cases on copyright law. A Professor of law at Stanford
University, Lessig writes for an educated lay audience,
including for non-lawyers. He is, for the most part,
an opponent of DRM techologies.
- Wikipedia.org
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Legalities
of DVD Copying - Intro to DRM 