DRM Manifesto
p2p news view / p2pnet: Until recently, Digital Rights [read Restriction] Management (DRM) was a phrase well-known on the Net, but unfamiliar to most people without online accounts.
But now, thanks largely to Sony BMG and the spyware it tried to weasel onto customers’ computers through music CDs they’d innocently bought, DRM is fast becoming a term familiar to everyone.
“I’ve been trying to come up with a list of what ought to be the principles of ‘Responsible DRM’,” says Wendy Grossman. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Digital Rights Manifesto revealed
By Wendy M. Grossman – The Inquirer & NewsWireless.net
It’s strange, but it turns out that Sony, with its damn-fool rootkit attempt at digital rights management, might actually turn out to have done the world a huge favour. Until that story broke in November, DRM was such an arcane subject that only weirdos like us wanted to talk about it much. After all, anyone who was against DRM was a thief and a pirate by nature, surely.
Then Sony did its evil deed, and the next thing you know, DRM is in the headlines and all of a sudden everyone cares. Even the National Consumer Council, which this week called for legislation to regulate DRM use in testimony given to the All Party Internet Group, which has just finished accepting comments as part of its consultation on DRM. It’s wonderful.
Then, this past Tuesday I was asked to talk about “Should ideas be free?” at the Café Scientifique in Brighton. Imagine: 60 people, or thereabouts, showing up to sit around and argue about intellectual property law and what it should be. I once met a lawyer who had studied intellectual property law something like 20 years ago; the entire group of people interested in it in his graduating class could have fit in a broom cupboard.
So what with one thing and another, I’ve been trying to come up with a list of what ought to be the principles of “Responsible DRM”. Herewith.
DRM should not violate the user’s computer. This ought, you would think, to go without saying, but the Sony rootkit fiasco has taught us that apparently it doesn’t. By “violate”, I mean the software should not: hide its presence, send back information about either the user or the computer without permission (and what gets sent should be fully auditable by the user), or do other things that, if Sony were a teenaged hacker dressed in black working out of a back bedroom would send it to jail. A company whose DRM breaks the law ought to be fined and treated exactly like a wanton environmental polluter. – DRM should respect the public domain. That means it should automatically expire, leaving the content freely accessible, on the date when the work enters the public domain. While this is a long way off in the case of a movie released in 2006, it is not a long way off for, say, a novel written in 1923 whose author died in 1937 (life plus 70 years, work reaches the public domain in 2007) or a 50-year-old recording (at least in the EU).
When a work is in the public domain, companies wishing to claim copyright in the design, formatting, typography, layout, and graphics they include in something like an ebook should be required to make it plain in their clickwrap licenses that the public domain work is not included in the copyright, and should be required to design the product so that the raw text may be copied or circulated freely. The same goes for public domain movies and songs released on DVD/CD.
DRM should not be allowed to apply more restrictions to a work than that same work would have in the analog world. This actually would be a difficult one to put into force. For example, it’s straightforward to say it means that if you can loan a book to a friend you should be able to loan an ebook to a friend, and your TV shouldn’t be spying on you to find out how many friends are watching that DVD in your living room, but less so with respect to backups, say, which no one had with dead tree libraries.
Circumventing DRM should not be a crime (as of course it is under the US’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in and of itself. For one thing, because taking things apart to understand how they work is an important part of learning. For another, because if there is harm to rightsholders and artists, removing DRM is not the cause, merely a contributing element. Finally, because making removing DRM a crime puts too much control in the hands of a relatively small set of companies; copyright law has always been about balancing the public interest with the need to create incentives for artists and creators, and DMCA-like laws tip the balance too far. What matters is what is done with the copies once they’re opened. While I am tolerant of file-sharers, the young Chinese woman who came down my street the other day wearing a backpack and offering “cheap DVDs” for sale was unquestionably committing a crime; so are the fraudsters that swamp eBay with so many counterfeit DVDs that I won’t buy there any more.)
Rightsholders who do not incorporate features to allow disabled access should be required to allow third parties to do so.
When a new format is adopted and new work begins being released on it, the technical specifications for how to build a reader (and a copy of the player) should be filed in the copyright libraries.
How’s that for a start?
Grossman’s web site has an archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. She also has an intermittent blog.
January 25th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
DRM is a wrong solution to the right problem. The intention of the copyright law is to protect royalty payments to the content creators, but few of them are interested in limiting the content distribution as such (providing the payments are made). DRM is protecting mostly the existing content distributors (e.g. record companies) who are bound to loose most if alternative distribution channels become legal and gain popularity. However, the copyright law should not be used as an excuse to protect distributor’s business model and stiff progress.
At the core of DRM concept is to limit the user’s ability to make copies of the content (“distribute”). There are valid cases when DRM may be much desired: confidential content is the most obvious one. One may also imagine “limited edition” creations that derive part of their value from their relative scarcity. Nevertheless, most authors do not mind if their creations: books, music, videos, software, etc. are widely distributed. Quite contrary, they would be happy if their productions become more popular and they can benefit financially from it. DRM works against the best interests of the content authors, since it blocks the most efficient, peer-to-peer (i.e. word of the mouth) distribution of their work. It only benefits distributors since it forces users to go to central servers or buy physical media.
In the ideal world, DRM should be replaced with a different system that enforces royalty payments when the content is consumed. Copying of the content admitted for a wide distribution should be unlimited and free. Only the use of the content should carry a fee. As a software designer, I can imagine many systems that would fit this description. Eventually, such a system can stimulate the use of digital content, much like credit cards stimulated shopping. (Note that credit cards made it easier to acquire the item by eliminating the need to pay upfront, and rejection of DRM may have the same effect.)