Group: Defective by Design/New Website
"You pay for it, we own it"
What is Digital Restrictions Mananagement?
Digital Restrictions Management is a category of technologies meant to create a damaged good. They control what you can do with digital media and devices you've paid for. DRM limits how you can use your music, movies, literature, software, or any other type of digital media. When a program you use doesn't let you share a song, or read an ebook on whatever device you want, or let you play a game without an internet connection, you are being restricted by DRM. The implications for privacy and censorship here are huge.
With DRM, a retailer of digital media has the ultimate control over every aspect of what people can do with the media they pay for: where they can use it, on what devices, using what apps, for how long, and any other conditions the retailer wants to set. DRM concentrates power over the distribution of media in the hands of already powerful media giants. For example, DRM gives ebook sellers the power to remotely delete all copies of a book and to keep track of what books readers are interested in and, with some software, even what notes they take.
What do we want?
DRM creates the potential for massive digital book burnings. Book burnings for any kind of media (literature, music, video, anything) on a scale we have never even come close to, even in the most fascist and authoritarian regimes. Has this already started to happen? Yes. Amazon remotely deleted all copies of 1984 distributed throught the Kindle store, something that would never have been possible with printed books. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111487759
Every new technology for distributing information has increased access to and further democratized media, but they are always fought at first because they threatens the control which certain powers have over old technology. The printing press threatened scribes, the record industry threatened live music, the radio and later home taping threatened the record industry, film threatened live performances, and vhs threatened film. Digital media distributed over the internet is the final stage of media convergence with the power to ultimately democratize information. If history is any indication, it is not the media giants who wish to control every aspect of how we interact with our media, but those who champion these new technologies who will lead us into the future.
DRM is designed to reduce all of the incredible possibilities enabled by digital technologies to features that users must pay to unlock. Imagine if automobiles had devices that prevented you from filling your gas tank all the way, or going above a certain speed, or any other feature that it was fully capable of doing, and you had to pay to unlock that feature. If we want to avoid a future where information is controlled by companies that sell us media encumbered with DRM, we must fight for it.
