Permission, Please: Copyright in the Digital Era

Internet Law Digital Copyright Case Studies Digital Rights Management

DRM: Digital Restrictions

In the analysis section, I wrote that perhaps the worst form of copyright restrictions has yet to come in the form of Digital Rights Management technologies, or DRM. By shifting digital media such as e-books, compressed music and video files, and such to DRM-protected technologies, media companies will be able to effectively write their own copyright law, because they are the sole provider of copyrighted works.

E-books

An example of fledgling DRM technology can be found in the many e-books sold on Amazon.com. Many such e-books cost just as much as their analog counterparts, yet afford the consumer much fewer rights as a result of DRM. For example, DRM disables the ability for users to copy text from the book via cut and paste and turns off the ability for users to print or copy portions of the book. With a regular book, on the other hand, you are able to copy parts of the book under fair use guidelines, or transcribe the book manually at your will.

A particularly striking example of the restrictions of DRM is shown above on Amazon's description page for an e-book of Plato's Republic. Despite the fact that the Republic was never copyrighted and that Plato has been dead for 2500 years, Amazon tersely tells the customer, "This title cannot be printed." With DRM, even the "unrestricted" public domain works can be locked down and held under force by the DRM protection clause in the DMCA.

Vendor Tie-In

Glancing through the many requirements needed to read this e-book reveal further problems with DRM. Because the ebook software used to read this book, Microsoft Reader, is available only on the Windows platform, you are stuck if you build up a large digital media collection and wish to migrate to another operating system such as Mac OS X or Linux. If you do decide to migrate, you have paid for a large amount of e-books that you can no longer read because of your use of a different operating system. Contrast this with the analog book: no matter where you go, you can always throw it in your knapsack, and you will always be able to read it.

A similar situation occurs if you purchase and download a song from Apple's iTunes Music Store: because of Apple's proprietary FairPlay DRM scheme, you can only play iTunes files on Apple iPods. If you amass a large collection of digital music from the iTunes Store and later wish to stop using the iPod, you have potentially lost access to hundreds or even thousands of dollars' worth of songs on the road.

Thus, utilizing DRM-protected formats can not only reduce your "fair use" rights, but also ties access to media that you have paid money for to a retailer or large media company. If you decide to switch formats or your retailer goes out of business, the digital media you paid for is locked up forever and your investment wasted. Such was the situation for customers of Barnes and Noble's e-book store, who had only 90 days to back up their E-book licenses after the book retailer got out of the eBook business. Since the DMCA makes it illegal to modify the reading software in any fashion to circumvent the licensing protection, Barnes and Noble e-book users would not be able to read their e-books after that 90 day period if they lost their licenses irrevocably (such as through a hard drive crash).

More Case Studies from the EFF

The DMCA's restrictions form a volume of case studies online. Many have created whole websites, papers, and books on just this one law alone. Of these, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's review of the past five years under the DMCA is particularly lucid. It points to many additional case studies in which free speech, creativity, and research have been hampered due to this ill-advised law.

Creative suppression | The future