What Every Citizen Should Know About DRM is a primer on digital rights management (DRM) technologies and their relationship with copyright law. This report was written by Mike Godwin, Senior Technology Counsel at Public Knowledge

I. A Brief Introduction To DRM and its Relationship to Copyright Law

What is “DRM,” and How Did It Get Here?

Most broadly, DRM (an acronym for “digital rights management”) is a collective name for technologies that prevent you from using a copyrighted digital work beyond the degree to which the copyright owner wishes to allow you to use it.

You should care because you have something personal at stake both in the balances built into our copyright law, and in the technologies, such as personal computers and the Internet, that might be restricted or controlled in order to protect copyright interests. The choices we make now about copyrighted works and about technological protections for such works will affect us for a long time to come. This is why, as we work through our understanding of DRM, we need to make sure we understand copyright as well. Although there is a tendency on the part of some people to equate copyright interests with other kinds of ownership and property interests, under our legal system copyright is actually significantly different.

How Copyright Is Different From Other Rights

Here’s one important difference: copyright law frequently allows other people (sometimes teachers, reporters, or scholarly researchers) to quote a copyrighted work without the copyright owner’s permission.

We don’t normally make the same kinds of exceptions for unauthorized uses of other kinds of property — for example, you don’t get to use your neighbor’s car just because he’s not using it this afternoon, and you happen to have an urgent need for transportation.

Copyrighted works are different in several other ways. They remain the owner’s (or her heirs’) “property” only for a limited time period, unlike other, older kinds of property. The family manor may have belonged to your and your ancestors for centuries, perhaps (if you’re the kind of person who grew up in a manor), but the copyright interests of your grandfather may, at some long period after your grandfather’s death, cease to be anybody’s property. We often refer to this final stage of the legal protection for a copyrighted work by saying it has “become part of the public domain” — a kind of “property” still, but one that belongs to everyone and can be used by and copied by anyone without restriction.

Copyright protection of certain kinds of creative works is built into the Constitution. We infer from the language of the Constitution that the Framers saw value in granting artists and authors (or the people to whom the artists and authors gave their rights in their creations) a kind of “exclusive” right in the created work. This means that copyright law allows the copyright owner to “exclude” other people from copying it, at least so long as the legal term of protection of the work lasts, and so long as their copying or other use of your work doesn’t fall within one of the specific exceptions, such as “fair use,” that are allowed for in our copyright scheme. ...

Download What Every Citizen Should Know About DRM

PDF version, 1.5MB, 42Pages.

What Every Citizen Should Know About DRM, a.k.a. “Digital Rights Management”

By Mike Godwin
Senior Technology Counsel, Public Knowledge

Acknowledgements:

This “DRM primer” would not have come about without the author’s having worked with an informal “Risks of Copy Protection” expert group that includes Ed Felten, Matt Blaze, Phil Karn, Steve Bellovin, Bruce Schneier, Alan Davidson, John Morris, Hal Abelson, and Bill Cheswick. Two members of the group — Ed Felten and Matt Blaze — deserve special thanks for framing a number of copy-protection technology issues with such clarity that I have to some extent reproduced that clarity here. Phil Karn similarly deserves special thanks for his discussion of the extent to which peer-to-peer file-sharing is a feature of the Internet’s fundamental design. Andy Moss and Aaron Burstein each made a wide range of helpful comments and observations on earlier drafts of this primer.

I’m particularly grateful to my boss, Gigi Sohn, for giving me the opportunity to explore the landscape of digital rights management and to develop further some of my ideas about the directions in which DRM may take us. I’m also thankful for the support and feedback of my other fellow staff members at Public Knowledge — Sarah Brown, Alex Curtis, Ann Deville, and Nathan Mitchler. I consider myself fortunate to be backed by such a knowledgeable and resourceful team; each of my colleagues contributed in many ways to the development of this project, and all of them read this paper in various stages of development and offered helpful corrections and suggestions.

Any mistakes, however, remain my own, as do my reasoning and conclusions; my colleagues and friends should not be blamed for any wrong turns I have made.

Public Knowledge is a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group working to defend citizens’ rights in the emerging digital culture.

Comments (0)

Name

Email

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment