Group: Defective by Design/New Website

"You pay for it, we own it"

What is Digital Restritions Mananagement?

Digital Restritions 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 the 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 bunings. 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 been fought for increasing access to information and democratizing media because it threatens the control which certain powers have over old technology. The printing press threatened scribes, Digital technologies have incredible potential to democratize media