Holger’s weblog

DRM – a threat to our culture? [Updated]

May 5th, 2006

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is finding its way into more and more areas of our everyday life. At first it was used to protect downloadable music and video, then it found its way into applications for document management and was added to all sorts of documents. The broadcast flag discussion clearly shows that TV is the next big area that it will find its way into. DVDs have it, CDs try to have it and future media formats like BlueRay and HD-DVD won’t be available without it. But what rights does DRM actually protect and who is it protecting them from?
There are two main issues I have with DRM: its imbalance between the rights of the content provider being protected and the rights of the consumer being taken away and the question of what it will do to our cultural heritage in the long run. Let me go into the first point for just a moment. The way it is at the moment, DRM is a one-way street. The content owner sets the policies and the consumer puts up with them. And that actually favors the content owner in several ways – it’s quite a ridiculous situation, if you think about it, that the consumer can be charged multiple times, for example if he already owns a digital recording on their iPod, but can’t transfer it to another digital music device they got to replace the iPod because the DRM only works with that one device. The consumer has no right to even request a re-issue of the recording for his new device and I guess even if he did, the service charge would probably be a convenient 99 Cents. Just imagine what will happen in a few years time, when your DVD player breaks and you can’t get a new DVD player anymore because nobody makes them – do you think you can ask the media companies to trade in your DVDs for whatever the latest platform of the year is? Of course you could probably go and copy the contents of those DVDs to the new format… but wait no, that would be illegal. So in the end, you end up paying yet again to be able to view movies you already own. If they are even available in the new format…
That’s where we get to the second point. Once upon a time, in a DRM-less world, people would make a movie. They would make it on good old film reels and release it to the movie theaters. After that, it would sit in some archive for many years to come, until some movie lover discovered it and decided it would be a nice thing to show it on television. The television showing made it popular and so it would eventually be released on video, let’s say a VHS tape. If you bought this VHS tape, you would probably copy it to DVD at some point because your VHS player is showing signs of ageing and you could go on copying it to whatever the latest format is going to be until the end of your time on earth. Now imagine the same situation in a DRM world. A movie is made and released on digitally coded, watermaked film reels. Shortly afterwards, it’s released on DVD. The TV showing of it has the broadcast flag set that prevents you from recording it, but you go and buy the DVD. Only few others do because it was an artsy movie and not wildly popular, so when the next format rules the world and DVD players are history, the studio decides it’s not going to make a XYZ-Disk version of it. The digital formats it was saved in are no longer available, the DRM codes long forgotten when a historian remembers the movie and wants to look at it… but he can’t.
We know what the world was like 100 years ago because people preserved movie recordings, music recordings, photos etc. – and we know it because these recordings and photos can still be looked at and listened to today. There was no rights management and no encryption and no laws that prohibited us from breaking them in order to preserve them. What will our children and grandchildren be able to know about the world of today? What the media companies allow them to know? Because even if a movie enters the public domain after several decades (soon it will certainly be centuries…), what use is there if the bits and bytes we hold in our hands make no sense because we don’t have the code to actually view them?
There is a third danger that just came to my mind. Sooner than we think, we may be living in a world where TV brand A only shows a part of the political spectrum because that’s what its DRM allows you to see. If you want to see other opinions, you may have to get a second TV from brand B, that has the DRM used by other networks. But maybe brand B is much more expensive because brand A is actually favored by the powers that be… maybe I’m getting paranoid here, so I’ll leave that thought hanging. Just think about it for a moment – it’s not just about the money, it’s about culture and ultimately about freedom. How far will we allow the media companies to go with these decisions that impact our future and that of our children? Maybe it’s time to remember that they serve us and not the other way round…

Update May 10, 2006: Some interesting followup links worth checking out:

ZDNet on an article by Pamela “PJ” Jones of Groklaw
Blog of Helios on Linux and the mainstream, with a look at DRM and TC
David Berlind on ZDNet on the Warner/BitTorrent deal

Technorati : DRM, DVD, culture, freedom, heritage, media

Entry Filed under: Technology