Legalities of DVD Copying - Intro to DRM

Page 3

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