The simplicity of DRM
There’s a conception that DRM—Digital Rights Management—is a complex issue, and it’s certainly the case that there’s a lot of misunderstanding abound. It’s also true that, at a technical level, it can be quite complicated. It’s also true that the negotiations as to whether DRM should be deployed or not can themselves be complex.
But DRM itself—what it means and what the pros and cons can only reasonably be discussed in terms of—is pretty straightforward.
In short: DRM is the name given to a mechanism which restricts what you can do with content which you have legitimately obtained from somewhere. For example, DRM might prevent you from copying that content from one place to another, or transferring it to your computer.
DRM is often half-jokingly termed “Digital Restrictions Management”. There’s a fair amount of truth in this. DRM is quite literally entirely centred around preventing you from doing things with that content.
Where somebody says “some form of DRM makes something possible”, and that something isn’t “restricting what consumers can do”, what they actually mean is that without DRM, they don’t think they’d be allowed to distribute the content. What’s “possible” in the world of DRM-protected content is “whatever DRM doesn’t prevent you from doing”.
If there’s no DRM, you’re not prevented from doing anything. Thus, everything is possible.
When discussing DRM, it boils down to a matter of whether restricting what a customer can do through technological means (as opposed to the law) is the right thing to do. Sometimes it is—digital movie rentals simply wouldn’t be workable without it. Other times, it’s quite obvious that the only people being restricted in what they can do are those who have no intention of doing anything nefarious with it in the first place (which is in part why songs purchased from the iTunes store are no longer protected by DRM).
One important aspect of DRM is that every piece of the chain must play ball. The way DRM works is that the content is protected, and the consumer’s equipment holds the key to “unprotect” it. Obviously, it’s pretty critical that the equipment doesn’t just hand the key over to the consumer, or else they’d be able to defeat the whole DRM system. Open source software is out of the running from the outset, because you could just dive in and modify it to make the DRM worthless.
In some situations (picking again movie rentals via download as a good example), this is no big deal. You rent movie on a set-top box, you watch it via that box, it expires after a while. Where it does become a big deal is where you attempt to introduce DRM into an arena where consumers expect to be able to buy equipment from any of hundreds (or even thousands) of different manufacturers from all over the world, and it’ll just work, or where they expect to be able to manipulate the content as they see fit—provided they don’t do anything the law says they shouldn’t.
This was the case with the music industry, where high-quality digital audio (in the form of CDs) was widespread, based on interoperable internationally-agreed standards, and people could (and still do)rip and transfer music from CD to their computers or portable music players. The freedom that people had previously enjoyed was another nail in the coffin of DRM on music purchases.
DRM itself is simple. Making DRM work universally, on the other hand, is impossible. Being a conduit for content provided by organisations who demand DRM must be used varies with difficulty and complexity depending upon who you are—but when making that decision, it helps to keep in mind what the ramifications are in straightforward terms.
