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What is Digital Restrictions Mananagement?

Digital Restrictions Management is a category of technologies that control what you can do with the 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. In other words, DRM creates a damaged good. It prevents you from doing what would normally be possible if it wasn't there. 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. Digital media has many advantages over traditional analog media, but DRM attemts to make every possible use of digital goods something that must be granted permission for. This concentrates all power over the distribution of media into the hands of retailers at the expense of consumers. 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 in their books.

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 the car was fully capable of doing, so that you had to pay to unlock that ability. 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.

What do we want?

DRM creates the potential for massive digital book burnings and large scale surveillance over people's media consumption habits. Digital book burnings may be 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 against at first because they threaten 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.

What do we do?

The best way to fight DRM is to abstain from participating in its use: boycott companies that use it.

Ebooks flyer

Stop Digital Book Burnings

Did you know that Amazon remotely deleted all eBook copies of George Orwell's 1984 from customer's Kindles? They can do this to any book that has been purchased through their store. This is the kind of control made possile by Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).