Group: Defective by Design/New Website

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We are a participatory and grassroots campaign revealing DRM-encumbered devices and media for what they really are: Defective by Design. We are working together to eliminate DRM as a threat to freedom, privacy and democratization of media. Our actions involve identifying and targeting defective products, pressuring media retailers and hardware manufacturers to stop supporting DRM, exposing the immense concentration of power over media distribution and interaction created by DRM, and raising awareness of DRM to libraries, schools, and individuals around the world.

What is DRM?

Digital Restrictions Management is technology that controls what you can do with the digital media and devices you own. When a program doesn't let you share a song, read an ebook on another device, or play a game without an internet connection, you are being restricted by DRM. In other words, DRM creates a damaged good. It prevents you from doing what would normally be possible if it wasn't there, and this is creating a dangerous situation for freedom, privacy and censorship.

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get involved

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about_defectivebydesign

We are a participatory and grassroots campaign revealing DRM-encumbered devices and media for what they really are: Defective by Design. We are working together to eliminate DRM as a threat to freedom, privacy and democratization of media. Our actions involve identifying and targeting defective products, pressuring media retailers and hardware manufacturers to stop supporting DRM, exposing the immense concentration of power over media distribution and interaction created by DRM, and raising awareness of DRM to libraries, schools, and individuals around the world.

We oppose DRM

Through various campaign, actions, and events, we are at the forefront of the struggle against DRM. Most people think their computers should obey them, but with a plan media and technology companies call "Trusted Computing", our computers will obey those companies instead of you. This Treacherous Computing is now inside most new computers and devices, and is the bedrock upon which much DRM is being built. If we want to avoid a future in which all information is controlled by just a few companies and our devices serve as an apparatus to monitor and control our interaction with media, we must fight for the alternative. That's why we're here.

Get involved

Contact us -> contact

History

Defective by Design is a campaign of the Free Software Foundation started in 2006. After months of campaigning, Defective by Design declared Tuesday October 3rd 2006, an international "Day Against DRM". With more than 10,000 technologists having joined in the campaign and pledged to take direct action to stop DRM, and with more than 200 "actions" planned across the globe on October 3rd, we had achieved our goal of raising public awareness to the threats posed by DRM.

Now we are moving from mere awareness of DRM to rejection of DRM. DRM technology is still a growing problem being used to restrict individuals' use of their own copies of published works. To enforce these restrictions, DRM software, and now hardware, must monitor and control a computer users' behavior, and we are here to fight back.

what_is_drm

DRM is about restritions, not rights

Industry supporters of DRM refer to it as 'digital rights management' as if they are the ultimate authority to grant us our rights, the ones who should have comeplete and total control over how we use and interact with our media. We should own our media, not be at the mercy of media companies. What they are really doing is managing the restrictions they impose on our media and devices that we would normally have control over in the absense of DRM. For that reason, we refer to it as 'Digital Restrictions Management'.

What is Digital Restrictions Mananagement?

Digital Restrictions Management is technology that controls what you can do with the digital media and devices you own. When a program doesn't let you share a song, read an ebook on another device, or play a game without an internet connection, you are being restricted by DRM. In other words, DRM creates a damaged good. It prevents you from doing what would normally be possible if it wasn't there, and this is creating a dangerous situation for freedom, privacy and censorship.

DRM is designed to take all of the incredible possibilities enabled by digital technologies and place them under the control of a few, who can then micromanage and track everything we do with our media. This creates the potential for massive digital book burnings and large scale surveillance over people's media viewing habits. These digital book burnings may target any media (literature, music, video, anything) or group of people on a scale we have never come close to in all of human history, and it's already started to happen. In 2009, Amazon remotely deleted copies of 1984 distributed through the Kindle store, something that would never have been possible with printed books.

If we want to avoid a future in which all information is controlled by just a few companies and our devices serve as an apparatus to monitor and control our interaction with media, we must fight for the alternative.

DRM gives media and technology companies the ultimate control over every aspect of what people can do with their media: 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 a few companies. For example, DRM gives ebook sellers the power to remotely delete all copies of a book, to keep track of what books readers are interested in and, with some software, even what notes they take in their books.

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.


Unfinished

You pay for it; we own it

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).

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