Digital Rights Management
Displaying Your Wedding Bouquet
The great day has come and gone, and you are now happily married. You now want to showcase your silk bouquet as a memory of the .....
As the internet progresses in both popularity and structure, DRMThe great day has come and gone, and you are now happily married. You now want to showcase your silk bouquet as a memory of the .....
is going to become very important in moving away from the early
free-for-all towards a more paid-for model. However, there is an
argument over the degree of restriction of freedom that DRM
appears to lead toward.
Copyright has always included an element of fair use, which
gives the consumer a certain degree of freedom. For example, you
are allowed to quote or criticise another persons work or, in
certain countries (not in the UK despite what many seem to
believe), copy works for personal use. Many people fear that
these are the sort of rights that would be trampled by pervasive
DRM.
On the other hand, many of those same people agree that some
form of DRM is undoubtedly required if the commerce of ideas,
concepts and abstract works is to progress.
This much-discussed problem is at least partly due to the
digital age we live in: it is now perfectly possible to make
fully functional copies of work, at a fraction of the cost of
developing it yourself.
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You only have to look at the phenomenal number of illegal musicRhapsody music, from RealNetworks is one of several reputable legal digital services for legal music downloads. These .....
files and software packages available on the internet to realise
what an issue this is for people who make a living from
something that can be distributed digitally.
Some people get a bit hysterical when they hear the term DRM, as
they tend to assume that it means big brother style controls
on what we can see and hear on the net. But the concept of
protecting digital content and the intellectual property and/or
copyright contained within, has been around for a while. Copy
protection of CDs, software (e.g. activation on windows XP) and
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computer games are all examples of primitive DRM systems. Point and click. The new life of digital cameras gives us all the opportunity to capture images as we go .....
DRM can be taken much further than this though and be used to
control content on a more fine-grained level. For example, DRM
applied to music files could allow you to play them on the
computer you downloaded them on, and make one copy to play in
the car, but then deny further copying or playing on other
devices. Alternatively, it could allow you to hear the song once
before self-destructing. In effect, any method of distribution
and licensing that the copyright owner can conceive can in
theory be enforced.
However, here is where DRM currently falls down. The
distribution and licensing can only be enforced in theory
because in order to work, the content has to be viewed / played
on a device or with software that supports the particular
flavour of DRM that you wish to apply. For example, as soon as
you allow a file to be burnt to a standard CD, you have lost all
control of it and limitless copies can again be made.
We arrive at a strange Catch 22 situation, whereby DRM is
useless unless everybody adopts the same system, but people
wont start to adopt a system that restricts their use so
severely in the first instance.
The lack of widely available, reliable DRM is given by the
record industry as a main reason for not launching online
distribution channels themselves. But DRM wont become widely
available until the music industry adopts it for online
distribution.
As more and more intellectual property and copyright is
distributed through email and the web, there is a greater need
for a way of controlling this content. Slowly but surely, DRM
technologies will become embedded into more and more software
applications and hardware devices. As a recent example, Apple
iTunes is an online music store which embeds DRM into the songs
downloaded. Microsoft Office 2003 also embeds DRM enabling
technologies, as does Windows Media Player.
An overly restrictive DRM solution will scare consumers away
from protected content; but if content can be distributed freely
with no reimbursement for the creator, then innovation and the
development and sharing of new and exciting ideas will be
stifled.
In the end, the answer to the issues surrounding DRM will have
to be a delicate balancing act between consumers on the one
hand, and copyright owners and intellectual property creators on
the other.
This article is copyright Fire Without Smoke Software Ltd 2003.
You may reproduce with the appropriate credits intact.
About the author:
Thom is the operations director and joint founder of fire
without smoke software limited (FWOSS). FWOSS offer custom
software development and accessible website design.