Digital Rights Management and Culture

Monday, June 12th, 2006 | Personal

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is all the craze these days, as companies are vying for ever more control over how we consumers use their products. Imagine those non-skip-able parts on your new DVD movie. You know them: the anti-copying schtick, the promotional advertisements for other movies you probably don’t want to watch, because you’ve already seen them a dozen times. Now imagine it was illegal to get a player that allows you to skip them. That is part of what DRM is about.

The world of television is soon moving to digital broadcasting, where those same DRM rules will apply. Let us presume that the broadcasting companies get a special flag added to the digital stream that says “you must not change channel now” and use this flag while sending commercials. This means that if you got a digital TV that allowed you to change channel despite of this flag then you would potentially be violating DRM laws. Philips has already sought a patent for doing exactly this.

In the audio world, CD publisher Sony was happily distributing a DRM system with some of their newer CDs to make sure that their CD wasn’t copied. It did this by adding what is called a filter driver to your CD-ROM device, among other things. This filter driver, apart from containing bugs, was always active, regardless of whether your Sony CD was in the drive or not. So what does it do? It tries to interfere with burning software so you might find yourself unable to burn that CD with your backups because you listened to a Sony CD sometime earlier. Apart from this there was no indication of this software, nor any way to uninstall it. Worse, this DRM that kindly allows Sony to “protect” their interests contained a bug that allowed any website to execute arbitrary code on your machine. In human terms that means Sony just opened a door for a hacker to control your system. After public outcry over this how was this corporation punished? Oh wait, they weren’t. They magnanimously promised customers who contacted them about their DRM CDs to get free non-DRM CDs. That was it.

The games industry has been doing this for year with various copy protections. One of the worse ones is the StarForce DRM software that in many cases renders the system completely unstable. Most people just attribute it to Windows being bad.

These are just a few examples of DRM things that have come up in recent years, and this will just be the beginning. We are moving to a world where it is not the laws of your country that defines what you are allowed to do. No, in the future it may very well be companies who can define how you may use your digital equipment: you may not use a CD burner once you’ve listened to this CD, you may not watch this DVD on two different players, you may not copy the song you bought online to another device than your iPod.

Do we really want companies to be able to control in detail how we may use what we buy? Would it be alright if publishers told us that it was illegal to lend a book to a friend? Let the laws define what we may, not the corporations, and don’t let the corporations write the laws. Our culture is too important to be turned into nothing more than profit on the bottom line.

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