What Every Citizen Should Know About DRM
= a primer on digital rights management (DRM) technologies and their relationship with copyright law.
Book: What Every Citizen Should Know About DRM. Mike Godwin. Public Knowledge, 2007.
Download at http://www.publicknowledge.org/pdf/citizens_guide_to_drm.pdf
URL = http://www.asiaing.com/what-every-citizen-should-know-about-drm-digital-rights-management.html
Description
“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.”
Mike Godwin:
“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. At first glance, the increasing use of DRM by movie companies, by consumer- electronics makers, and by computer makers may not bother you very much. You may look over the increasing use of DRM and ask yourself why you should care. After all, isn’t DRM just a technical means of giving copyright owners new ways to protect the legal rights they already have? 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.” (http://www.asiaing.com/what-every-citizen-should-know-about-drm-digital-rights-management.html)