DRM – or Digital Rights Management – is arguably one of the most controversial technologies in the digital age. It allows copyright holders, be it e.g. hardware manufacturers, publishers or game developers, to limit what their customers can do with the product they purchase (or in the case of software: license). DRM, for example, stops people from keeping downloads of shows they might download with the BBC iPlayer software, and it also prevents people from playing audiobooks they buy on Audible on as many devices as they want. In theory, DRM is meant to protect the intellectual property of the rights holders and prevent piracy. In practice, DRM is often easily circumvented and DRM-free copies of most things are widely available to those who are willing to look for them (which we do not condone, downloading of such material is illegal and “you will face the consequences“): ultimately it is only a hassle to honest consumers who spend their hard-earned money on a product.
Photo by Justin Baugh (source)
DRM isn’t all that new a technology: when the DVD was invented in the mid-1990s, the movie industry successfully lobbied manufacturers into including a way to prevent people from buying a film in, say, Europe and watching it on a player in the United States. These geo-restrictions became known as “region codes”, which divide the world into eight zones (from 1 to 8), with two region codes (0 and ALL) that allow worldwide playback. If you went on holiday in Australia and bought a legal DVD of ‘Iron Man’ set to region code 4, you could not legally watch that film on your player in the UK when returning home, because that is set to region code 2. Tony Stark might be able to fly around the world in his suit without a passport, but we non-prodigies can’t watch the same DVD on two different continents. Of course, the DVD encryption was cracked a long time ago and there are countless ways to watch any disc from any country on your computer – again, we don’t condone this because it is illegal, but it goes to underline how much of a failure these measures always turn out to be.
There is currently an ongoing effort by the entertainment industry to incorporate DRM into HTML5, and thereby making digital rights management an integral part of the web. A well-known supporter of these efforts is Netflix, and while we love the company for bringing back Arrested Development, we’re afraid it just blue itself: we are very much of the same opinion as Cory Doctorow, one of the foremost advocates against digital rights management. Doctorow wrote an in-depth article for the Guardian a few months ago on why integrating DRM into the very markup language that runs the web is a terrible idea.
“I swear by my pretty floral bonnet, I will end DRM.”
– Mark Chatterley, The One in Charge *
It could easily be argued that with multinational corporations lobbying to include DRM on one side and booksellers that fail to understand what DRM actually is on the other side, the fight is already lost. But the battle is still very much happening, and it is far from having been decided. Some publishers have already completely abolished DRM from their publications, such as Tor, known for bestselling novels such as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Their senior editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, proclaimed optimistically that Tor would not be the last publisher to stop using any digital rights management on e-books. The music industry has already largely moved on, too, with the Apple iTunes store selling MP4 audio files that are watermarked with the customer’s Apple ID but have no restrictions on them. This is arguably a good middle-ground: if a customer would decide to share their music library via BitTorrent, then they could be easily tracked down, but at the same time they can play the file on as many computers or burn them onto as many CDs as they want.
We at In Ear Entertainment strongly believe that using any kind of DRM is the wrong attitude to have towards our fantastic customers, which is why you get a normal MP3 file when you purchase one of our audiobooks or download our free podcasts. We trust our customers not to distribute our audiobooks via BitTorrent or make them available for free on a website – instead we believe that happy customers mean they will recommend us to their friends and return for more great content that they can listen to anywhere from their Linux computer (for which there is no native support from Audible) to their iPod to their smartphone without having to install any proprietary software.
What are your thoughts on DRM? Do you think there is a case to be made for publishers to use it, or do you believe the customer experience should be the easiest and most straightforward it can be?
* This may not be an actual quote by Mark.
