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Digital rights management

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Digital rights management (DRM) is the umbrella term referring to any of several technologies used to enforce pre-defined policies controlling access to software, music, movies, or other digital data and hardware. In more technical terms, DRM handles the description, layering, analysis, valuation, trading and monitoring of the rights held over a digital work. In the widest possible sense, the term refers to any such management.

The term is often confused with copy protection and technical protection measures (TPM). These two terms refer to technologies that control and/or restrict the use and access of digital media content on electronic devices with such technologies installed. There are technical measures that could be used not to restrict use or access, such as to monitor use in order to record rights of a content consumer, DRM critics argue that the phrase "digital rights management" is a misnomer and the term digital restrictions management is a more accurate characterization of the functionality of DRM systems. Some digital media content publishers claim DRM technologies are necessary to prevent revenue loss due to illegal duplication of their copyrighted works. However, others argue that transferring control of the use of media from consumers to a consolidated media industry will lead to loss of existing user rights and stifle innovation in software and cultural productions.

The European Community is expected to create a Recommendation on DRM in 2006, phasing out the use of levies (compensation to rights holders charged on media sales for lost revenue due to piracy) given the advances in DRM/TPM technology.

Introduction

DRM vendors and publishers coined the term digital rights management to refer to the types of technical measures discussed here. As the name implies, it applies only to digital media (and analog media that was at one point digital). Digital media have gained in popularity over analog media both because of technical advantages associated with their production, reproduction, and manipulation, and also because they are sometimes of higher perceptual quality than their analog counterparts. Since the advent of personal computers, digital media files have become easy to copy an unlimited number of times without any degradation in the quality of subsequent copies. Many analog media lose quality with each copy generation, and often even during normal use. The popularity of the Internet and file sharing tools have made the distribution of copyrighted digital media files simple.

The availability of multiple perfect copies of copyrighted materials is perceived by much of the media industry as a threat to its viability and profitability, particularly within the music and movie industries. Digital media publishers typically have business models that rely on their ability to collect a fee for each copy made of a digital work, and sometimes even for each performance of said work. DRM was created by or designed for digital media publishers as a means to allow them to control any duplication and dissemination of their content.

Although technical control measures on the reproduction and use of application software have been common since the 1980s, the term DRM usually refers to the increasing use of similar measures for artistic works/content. Beyond the existing legal restrictions which copyright law imposes on the owner of the physical copy of a work, most DRM schemes can and do enforce additional restrictions at the sole discretion of the media distributor (which may or may not be the same entity as the copyright holder).

DRM is an extension of Mandatory Access Control (as opposed to Discretionary access control) wherein a central policy set by an administrator is enforced by a computer system. The well-studied theoretical problems of Mandatory Access Control apply equally to DRM. DRM is vulnerable to an additional class of attacks due to its need to be run on tamper-resistant hardware (DRM systems that do not run on tamper-resistant hardware cannot ever be theoretically secure since digital content can be copied on a hardware level).

DRM is an acronym for Digital Rights Management, a broad term used to describe a number of techniques for restricting the free use and transfer of digital content. DRM is used in a number of media, but is most commonly found in video and music files. There are many who argue that DRM is a misnomer, since it deals with use issues rather than the rights of the consumer. They therefore reinterpret DRM to stand for Digital Restrictions Management.

The case for DRM is that without a strong system in place to ensure only paying consumers can access media, piracy will run rampant and cut drastically into profits for producers and distributors. With declining sales, so the argument goes, creative input will also drop and the overall quality of media produced will decline.

Advocates for civil liberties argue that the use of digital technology should be unfettered, and that the shift of control to producers even after sales will ultimately hurt creative expression and damage consumer rights. Most media are protected by copyright, but have a fair use clause which allows for unhampered use in certain situations. All existing DRM technologies fail to adequately make concessions for fair use, leading many civil advocates to argue that they restrict the legal use of content.

One of the first and most widely contested DRM systems was the Content Scrambling System (CSS) used to encode DVD movie files. This system was developed by the DVD Consortium as a tool to influence hardware manufacturers to produce only systems which didn’t include certain features. By releasing the encryption key for CSS only to hardware manufacturers who agreed not to include features such as digital-out, which would allow a movie to be copied easily, the DVD Consortium was essentially able to dictate hardware policy for the DVD industry.

Very quickly after the CSS DRM was implemented, its algorithm was broken. Tools such as DeCSS became available for making copies of CSS-encrypted movies and playing them on systems that otherwise would not be able to, such as some alternative operating systems. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States makes it illegal to use systems such as DeCSS to bypass DRM limitations. Similar acts have since been passed in many countries. Many advocates in the computer science world see the DMCA as a major blow against creative freedom because of its overly harsh restrictions.

While DRM is most frequently used for movies, it is gaining more widespread use in other media as well. Audio files purchased through many online stores, such as Apple’s iTunes Store, have various DRM schemes built in to limit the number of devices they may be played on. Many producers of eBooks are using a similar implementation of DRM to limit how many computers a book may be viewed on, and even how many times it may be viewed. In mid-2005, a number of content producers for television began requesting DRM of their shows via the popular TiVo system.

Security issues, fair use issues, and issues of creative expression are all at the forefront of the DRM battle, and DRM technologies will undoubtedly be fought over for many years to come. While many within the media industry believe DRM is the only way to save their existing business model, predicated upon the idea of collecting a fee for each use, a number of innovators have begun exploring alternatives, anticipating an ultimate defeat for DRM.

DRM controls are sometimes proposed to be enforced through so-called trusted computing. However, trusted computing creates the prospect of a computer system which cannot be trusted by its owner, but rather its behavior can be remotely manipulated at any time, regardless of the legal merits of such manipulation. Most opponents have little faith that the courts or legislatures will be able to limit such manipulation to only that which does not infringe the legal rights of the media owner (eg, backups) or computer owner / administrator.

Several laws relating to DRM have been proposed or enacted in various jurisdictions (State, Federal, and non-US). Some of them would require all computer systems to have mechanisms controlling the use of digital media. (See Professor Edward Felten's freedom-to-tinker Web site for information and pointers to the current debate on these matters).

An early example of a DRM system is the Content Scrambling System (CSS) employed by the DVD Forum on movie DVDs. The data on the DVD is encrypted so that it can be only decoded and viewed using an encryption key, which the DVD Consortium kept secret. In order to gain access to the key, a DVD player manufacturer was required to sign a license agreement with the DVD Consortium which restricted them from including certain features in their players, such as a digital output which could be used to extract a high-quality digital copy of the movie, as well as alternative menu and content organizing schemes. Since the only market hardware capable of decoding the movie was controlled by the DVD Consortium, they hoped to be able to impose whatever restrictions they chose on the playback of such movies. A more restrictive and less commercially successful variant of this scheme is DIVX which is no longer marketed (not to be confused with DivX, the popular lossy video compression method).

To date, all DRM systems have failed to meet the challenge of protecting the rights of the copyright owner while also respecting the rights of the purchaser of a copy. None has succeeded in preventing criminal copyright infringement by organized, unlicensed, commercial pirates.

Flaws of some well known systems include:

  • Physical protection: Uses separate hardware to ensure protection. Examples include hardware dongles that had to be attached to the computer prior to using the content, and USB and smart card devices working in a similar fashion. Physical protection methods consistently failed in consumer markets due to compatibility problems and extra level of complexity in content use; however, they did enjoy limited success with enterprise software.
  • DIVX: Required a phone line, inhibiting mobile use. To take a work for which unlimited plays had been purchased (called DIVX Silver) to a friend's home, it was necessary to carry a 14 kg (30 lb) DVD player as well as the light and compact disc; or to telephone the DIVX service and have the player of the friend transferred to the account of the purchaser of the work, and then call again to have it switched back. The system prevented certain legal uses such as the creation of compilations, by the purchaser. Under copyright law, the owner of a legally-obtained copy of a work may create compilations, or re-sell the copy in the secondary (used goods) market. By using these technical measures, the DIVX system was able to thwart the buyer's right of first sale and other fair use rights. DIVX is a form of physical protection of the content (see above).
  • CSS: Restricts fair use and first purchaser rights, such as the creation of compilations or full quality reproductions for the use of children or in cars. It also prevents the user from playing CSS-encrypted DVDs on any computer platform (although this restriction can be easily circumvented). Recently, the advent of DeCSS and cryptographic analysis of the CSS algorithm have demonstrated flaws in this system which can be exploited to allow users to recover some of their fair-use rights. Full quality digital copies can now be easily made, making fair use by normal consumers easier. Although it has been argued that programs like DeCSS make copyright infringement easier, this system has never been effective in preventing illegal mass copying of DVDs by criminal gangs, even before the system was found to be flawed. CSS is an example of certificate-based encryption.
  • Product activation: Invalidates or severely restricts a product's functionality until the product is registered with a publisher by means of a special identification (activation) code. The process often uses information about the specific configuration of the hardware on which the software runs, hashing it with the identification number specific to the product's license. Microsoft was the first company to use this method in its Microsoft Reader product. Activation was later used with Windows XP and then with Office XP. Ultimately, workarounds which bypassed the product activation system have been developed. In 2003, Intuit's use of a flawed product activation scheme angered thousands of customers who were denied legitimate use of the product, resulting in a formal apology by Intuit and discontinuation of the use of the mechanism.
  • Digital watermarking: Allows hidden data, such as a unique disc ID, to be placed on the media. Then, the name and address of the purchaser would be taken at the location of sale, and entered into a database along with the unique media ID. This does not prevent copying, but it ensures that any copies made of the media will bear the same hidden information—so if the content appeared on (for example) P2P networks, the ID number could be easily extracted and the purchaser prosecuted. This scheme is flawed primarily because authenticating the buyer as the infringing party is nearly impossible: The buyer may give a false name and address or present false identification at purchase, the infringing party may be someone who purchased or otherwise obtained the media second hand, the media may have been borrowed or stolen from the original purchaser before the infringement occured, etc.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed in the United States in an effort to make the circumvention of DRM systems illegal. It was passed without debate, and without even token opposition, Congress being lobbied by the content industries and apparently under the impression that it was a "technical" enactment, without significant public policy implication. It has been widely imitated by governments elsewhere.

Despite the passing of this law, which has since received substantial opposition on Constitutional grounds, it is easy to find DVD players which bypass the limitations the DVD Consortium sought to impose. John Hoy, president of the DVD Copy Control Association, in testimony to the Library of Congress in 2003 stated "furthermore, if a consumer in the United States desires to view a DVD disc that has been region coded only for Europe, then that consumer is free to purchase a DVD player (either hardware or software) that is coded to play European DVDs. No legal restrictions apply – either through the CSS license or otherwise – to the importation and use of non-U.S. region players in the United States". (reply comments, comment 28, page 4, PDF document).

There has been a widely publicized arrest and arraignment of a Russian programmer, Dmitry Sklyarov, for violation of the DMCA. He did the work cited for his employer, Elcomsoft, while in Russia, where it was and remains entirely legal. The product allowed those who were in possession of a password, presumably lawfully obtained along with the encrypted copy of the work, to make copies without encryption locking them to use on a single computer. Sklyarov was arrested on a criminal warrant during a lecture visit to the US, and spent several months in jail until a compromise was reached. The ensuing criminal case against Elcomsoft (for whom Sklyarov did the work) resulted in acquittal. See Professor Edward Felten's freedom-to-tinker Web site [1] for some observations on the DMCA, its proposed successors, and their consequences, intended and unintended.

The DMCA is also causing a chill in the activities of many prominent computer scientists. Professor Felten, of Princeton, has had difficulty publishing papers he and his students have written; they were related to a contest sponsored by a security software company inviting investigation of a product design. (See Internet postings in Felten v. RIAA). Alan Cox, the Englishman who was Linus Torvalds' chief deputy throughout almost the entire first decade of the development of Linux, has resigned his position due to his concern that a criminal charge might be laid against him as a result of some code in the Linux kernel. He has even declined to post explanations of some changes made in the kernel (the changelog is fundamental to the project) because of his concern about his exposure to prosecution and penalty under the DMCA; such explanations might be seen as a DMCA "disclosure". He has also declined to attend US software conferences for similar reasons. Other initiatives propose associating every line of open source code with an audit trail to an author, to prove the negative- that it was never restricted - in contrast to the established history of computer programming. Niels Ferguson, a Dutch cryptography expert and security consultant, discovered a flaw in an Intel security protocol, told Intel about it and was told that Intel had no objection to his publishing a paper about the problem. He has nevertheless decided not to publish due to concern about being arrested under the DMCA.

New and even more controversial DRM initiatives have been proposed in recent years which could prove more difficult to circumvent, including copy-prevention codes embedded in broadcast HDTV signals and the Palladium operating system. A wide variety of DRM systems have also been employed to restrict access to eBooks. See the TCPA/Palladium FAQ [2] maintained by Cambridge Professor Ross J. Anderson for a clear discussion of two prominent proposals.

Opponents of DRM, as envisioned and as currently implemented, note that by delegating control of computer access (or control of the ability to execute some programs, or to execute programs only with certain data) to anyone except the user and the machine's administrator(s), there is a very considerable risk of problems caused by such third party interference which go well beyond the enforcement of copyright.

For instance, due to a bug (or misdesign, or misadministration of an otherwise "reasonable" design) the control software (eg, in a trusted computing system) implementing the local part of a DRM scheme may prevent a computer user from using his computer at all, or from using programs (or using data as an input to a program) when such use is actually completely legitimate and not a violation of any copyright holders' rights. Or, for another example, a legally obtained copy of a DVD might be blocked or crippled because it is being used on equipment which doesn't include the DRM function permitting access to it, or which if included, doesn't interoperate correctly. Currently, DVDs legally purchased in some places are not playable in other places for exactly these reasons, although in this case it is marketing considerations, and not "security", which is the reason for the restriction. DRM provisions have appeared in released versions of some subsystems of the Microsoft Windows operating system (e.g., Windows Media Player) and are scheduled in more as Palladium is implemented in currently planned, not yet released, versions of Microsoft Windows.

Security protocol, software implementing security protocols, and cryptography have historically proven extremely difficult to design without vulnerabilities due to bugs or design mistakes. This has been true of designs from experienced and well respected professionals; the record is abysmally poor for those inexperienced in cryptography and security protocols.

While DRM systems are ostensibly designed to protect an author's right to control copying, this protection is only half of the bargain between the copyright holder and the state. The other half of the bargain is that after a statutorily-defined period of time the copyright work becomes part of the public domain for anyone to use freely. DRM systems currently employed are not time limited in this way, and although it would be possible to create such a system (under compulsory escrow agreements, for example), there is currently no mechanism to remove the copy control systems embedded into works once they enter the public domain, after the term of copyright expires.

Furthermore, copyright law does not restrict the resale of copyrighted works (provided those copies were made by or with the permission of the copyright holder), so it is perfectly legal to resell a copyrighted work provided a copy is not retained by the seller—a doctrine known as the first-sale doctrine in the US, which applies equally in most other countries under various names. Similarly, some forms of copying are permitted under copyright law, under the doctrine of fair use (US) or fair dealing (many other countries). DRM technology restricts or prevents the purchaser of copyrighted material from exercising their legal rights in these respects.

Moreover, the scope of legal rights cannot, in principle, be fully encoded in technical access/copying restrictions. For example, a photograph generally falls under the copyright of its photographer, and may not be reproduced in an unlimited way by other persons. A photographer wishing to enforce her copyright might attach some DRM codes to a digital version of her photograph that indicate "may not be copied." However, the photographer might subsequently sign an agreement with another party authorizing such duplication (either for monetary payment, or to serve some other public or private purpose). Under law, the moment such an agreement is signed, copying (under the terms set forth) becomes legal; but the DRM software cannot know that people with pens affixed their name to the contract, and thereby changed legalities.

An oft-cited example of DRM overreach is Adobe Systems' release in 2000 of a public domain work, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, with DRM controls asserting that "this book cannot be read aloud" and so disabling use of the text-to-speech feature normally available in Adobe's eBook Reader.

DRM has been used by organizations such as the British Library in its secure electronic delivery service to permit worldwide access to substantial numbers of rare (and in many cases unique) documents which, for legal reasons, were previously only available to authorized individuals actually visiting the Library's document centre at Boston Spa in England. This is an interesting case where DRM has actually increased public access to restricted material rather than diminished it.

An early example of a DRM scheme is one that is currently being used on textbooks required in some American Dental Schools including http://www.nyu.edu/dental/ New York University's Kraiser Dental School. The textbooks are available only on DVD and students are forced to purchase the DVD. The DVDs are readable only on an authorized computer and only for a limited time, after which the DVD "expires" and the information in the "DVD book" becomes unavailable. Some of these books are not available on paper at all.

DRM advocates

Some DRM advocates have taken the position, in essence, that the operational contexts and design goals of DRM, security, and cryptography are sufficiently well understood, and that software engineering is also sufficiently well understood and will be so practiced, that it is already possible to achieve the desired ends without causing unrelated problems for users, their computers, or those who depend on either.

Others have taken the position that creators of digital works should have the power to control the distribution or replication of copies of their works, and to assign limited control over such copies. Without the power to do these things, they argue, there will be a chilling effect on creative efforts in the digital space. DRM is one means by which they may obtain such power.

A similar view states that DRM's advent is the first time large-scale digital distribution has been reasonably achievable, which proponents claim to be a benefit both to content creators and their customers that far outweighs typical problems with such systems. This argument cannot be applied to physical media, however.

Furthermore, advocates of DRM believe that its opponents advocate the rights of hardware and media owners, but at the expense of the privileges of copyright holders. Consumers of hardware and media voluntarily and knowingly agree to the grant of limited use of the content exhibited using their physical media.

DRM opponents

Many organizations, prominent individuals, and computer scientists are already opposed to DRM in its various currently proposed forms. Two notable opponents are John Walker in his article, The Digital Imprimatur: How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle[3], and Richard Stallman in his article/story The Right to Read and in public statemennts "DRM is an example of a malicious feature - a feature designed to hurt the user of the software, and therefore, it's something for which there can never be toleration"[4]. Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University heads a British organization which has been quite active in opposing DRM and similar efforts in the UK.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and similar cyber civil rights organizations, including http://boycott-riaa.com and http://www.ihatedrm.com, also hold positions which are characterized as opposed to DRM.

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure criticizes DRM's impact as a trade barrier from a free market perspective.

The first draft of the GNU General Public License version 3, released by the Free Software Foundation, prohibits using DRM to restrict free redistribution and modification of the license-covered works, and has a clause stating that the license's provisions shall be interpreted as disfavoring usage of DRM.

In France, in order to inform the consumers about the DRM threat, the citizen group StopDRM is regularly organizing protests in general stores (like Virgin or La Fnac) in different cities .

The use of DRM may also be a barrier to future historians, since technologies designed to permit data to be read only on particular machines may well make future data recovery impossible - see Digital Revolution. This argument connects the issue of DRM with that of asset management and archive technology.

The use of DRM is a key part of implementation of corporate compliance policies such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, protecting corporate documents from unauthorized tampering and creating an audit trail which can be used to determine liability at board level within corporations for misdemeanors. This level of control is obviously unwelcome at certain levels.

DRM opponents argue that presence of DRM infringes private property rights and criminalizes a range of normal user activities. A DRM component would take control over the rest of the user's device which they rightfully own (e.g. MP3 player) and restricts how it may act, regardless of the user's wishes (e.g. preventing the user from copying a song). All forms of DRM depend on the device imposing restrictions that cannot be legally disabled or modified by the user. In other words, the user has no choice.

DRM and Internet music

Most internet music stores employ DRM to restrict the usage of music purchased and downloaded online. There are many options for consumers buying music over the internet, in terms of both stores and purchase options. Two examples of music stores and their functionality follow:

  • The iTunes Music Store, the industry leader, allows users to purchase a track online for under a dollar, to burn that song to an unlimited number of CDs, and transfer it to an unlimited number of iPods. The purchased music files are in encoded as AAC, a format supported by iPods, and DRM is applied through FairPlay. Many music devices are not compatible with the AAC format, and only the iPod itself can play iTunes' protected files. Apple also reserves the right to alter its DRM restrictions on the music a user has downloaded at any time. For example, Apple recently decided to restrict the number of times a user can copy a playlist from ten to seven. Songs can be played on only five computers at a time, and users cannot edit or sample the songs they purchased. Despite these restrictions, the iTMS DRM is often seen as quite lenient, and can be easily bypassed through programs such as Hymn. Apple provides iTunes software for copying the downloaded music to iPods in AAC format or to conventional music CD (CDDA format). No copy restrictions are recorded onto the CD and many programs can read and convert music from CD to other music formats, such as MP3 used by competing digital music players.
  • Napster, which offers a subscription based approach to DRM alongside permanent purchases. Users of the subscription service can download and stream an unlimited amount of music while subscribed to the service. But as soon as the user misses a payment the service renders all music downloaded unusable. Napster also charges users who wish to use the music on their portable device an additional $5 per month. Furthermore, Napster requires users to pay an additional $.99 per each track to burn a track to CD. Songs bought through Napster cannot be played on iPods.

The various stores are currently not interoperable, though those that use the same DRM scheme (for instance the various Windows Media DRM stores, which include Napster) all provide songs that can be played side by side through the same program. Almost all stores require client software of some sort to be downloaded, and some also need plug-ins.

DRM and Libraries

Denver Public, Cuyahoga County and San José Public libraries join Cleveland Public Library, [5], King County Library System [6], Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County, [7], Wright Memorial Public Library [8] and many others who enable the downloading of best-selling eBooks 24/7 from their library website using the OverDrive service. The service features a growing collection of best-selling eBooks from popular authors and publishers including HarperCollins, Time Warner, McGraw-Hill, Zondervan, Scholastic, John Wiley and Sons, and more. These audio books are dowloadable in the WMA DRM format.[9]

See also: Digital distribution

Controversies, consequences, and examples

Several DRM schemes have been implemented. Many see them as "abuse" of copyright (called eSlavery in Europe); DRM proponents have seen them as a "reasonable balance of consumer concerns and artist rights."

Examples include:

  • Digital imprimatur
  • Inclusion of commercials on the "unskippable track" on DVDs reserved for the copyright notice;
  • Using the DMCA to restrict access to items that do not qualify for copyright, such as garage door openers and printer ink cartridges;
  • Adding restrictions on text-to-speech conversion in the EULA of eBooks;
  • Using Copy Control schemes to thwart the existing exceptions to copyright (e.g. fair use);
  • The possibility of dominant DRM-inclusive recording and playback technology being used uncritically by users unaware of the dangers and consequences thereof, and potentially later locking them out of their own creations, as with SCMS in consumer-grade DAT equipment;
  • Preventing academic publication and distribution of information relating to flaws in computer security in the absence of the permission of the creators of said technologies;
  • Silencing individuals who have found serious flaws in software used in electronic voting;
  • Restriction of medical records and personal financial information using DRM to protect consumer rights. Insurers, lawyers and loan companies have strongly objected to the use of these technologies to prevent patient, hospital and practitioner records being more freely accessible due to copy and forward restriction applied to patient or customer records.
  • As of 2005, in American dental schools students are required to purchase textbooks on DVD. The DVDs are readable only on an authorized computer and only for a limited time, after which the DVD expires and the information in the "DVD book" becomes unreadable. Some of these books are not available on paper at all. The New York Association of Copyright Stakeholders have protested and documented this at http://fairuse.nylxs.com with the help of NYLXS.
  • Stopping or making archival of the content, even allowed such like in libraries, hard or impossible to do due to practical and technical reasons - especially when considering that the content should still be accessible even if the publisher disappears (bankruptcies etc).
  • TiVo 7.2 OS adds content access restrictions, blocks transfers, and auto-deletes some shows
  • The 2005 Sony CD copy protection controversy
  • Aesthetic objections to onscreen DRM threats interfering with relaxing and watching a movie.

Copyright law has been defined in terms of general definitions of infringement in any concrete medium. This classic approach focussed such law on whether or not there is infringement, rather than focus on particular engineering techniques. Critics of DRM assert that detecting and prosecuting infringement within the social and legal system avoids a legacy of outlawing generic, universal, popular, widespread, useful, and possibly uncontrollable engineering techniques in response to specific misuses.

Consumer vs. Professional equipment

In every copy protected medium, there are two grades of equipment, consumer, which may include copy protection, and professional, which by necessity, allows access in a way that is above copy protection. The issue of who professional equipment is sold to and the patent and license terms involved stands in contrast to the notion of outlawing physical properties of electricity and digital mathematics.

European dialogues on DRM concerns

In Europe, there are several dialog activities, that are uncharacterized by its consensus-building intention:

  • Workshop on Digital Rights Management of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), January 2001. [10]
  • Participative preparation of the European Committee for Standardization/Information Society Standardisation System (CEN/ISSS) DRM Report, 2003 (finished). [11]
  • DRM Workshops of DG Information Society, European Commission (finished), and the work of the DRM working groups (finished), as well as the work of the High Level Group on DRM (ongoing). [12]
  • Consultation process of the European Commission, DG Internal Market, on the Communication COM(2004)261 by the European Commission on "Management of Copyright and Related Rights" (closed). [13]
  • The INDICARE project is an ongoing dialogue on consumer acceptability of DRM solutions in Europe. It is an open and neutral platform for exchange of facts and opinions, mainly based on articles by authors from science and practice. [14]
  • The AXMEDIS project is a European Commission Integrated Project of the FP6 [15]. The main goal of AXMEDIS is atomating the content production, protection and distribution, reducing the related costs and supporting DRM at both B2B and B2C areas harmonising them.

Inclusion within GNU General Public License version 3

Wikinews has related news:

The first proposed draft of the GPLv3 (released on 2006-01-16) contains language intended to prevent the use of GPLed software to implement DRM. Although the draft in no way prohibits the use of GPLed code in DRM systems, the GPL draft requires that GPLed binaries are distributed not only with source code, but also all of the cryptograpic keys and other tools necessary to modify the software and still have it interoperate, and contains language intended to disqualify GPLed DRM code from the scope of the DMCA anti-circumvention law.

Quotes

  • "If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed," says Peter Lee, an executive at Disney. Economist
  • "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" the head of Sony BMG's global digital business, Thomas Hesse, told National Public Radio. ABC News
  • "The technology in question is an example of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)--technology designed to restrict the public. Describing it as "copyright protection" puts a favorable spin on a mechanism intended to deny the public the exercise of those rights which copyright law has not yet denied them." Richard Stallman letter to Boston Public Library condemning DRM in audio books.
  • "There is a cost associated with DRM, and that is lost sales of content," Dave Goldberg (VP, GM Yahoo! Music) stated at Music 2.0 in 2006. E-Commerce Times
  • "DRMs' primary role is not about keeping copyrighted content off P2P networks. DRMs support an orderly market for facilitating efficient economic transactions between content producers and content consumers." Dan Glickman, Motion Picture Association of America, to BBC NEWS

DRM implementations

Examples of existing "digital rights management" and "copy protection" systems:

Software that removes DRM

Devices that use DRM

Lobbying organizations

Further reading

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