Will Digital Rights Management Hurt the Public?

Digital rights management (DRM), the collection of software, hardware and encryption systems that ensures the integrity of copyrighted material via the Web, wireless data networks and other media, could actually be bad for consumers, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. EPIC sent a letter outlining its concerns to the House Judicial Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. The subcommittee wants to protect digital content from spreading far and wide without compensation, which happened when Napster and other peer-to-peer networks were at their height.

Among EPIC’s concerns:

• Consumer privacy: EPIC argues that individuals are free to explore different ideas presented in books, music and movies anonymously. “DRM encroaches on this right by allowing copyright owners, such as music labels and movie studios, to monitor private consumption of content,” EPIC says. “This occurs because users have to identify themselves through encryption and authentication software to access the content. These systems create records that enable profiling and target marketing of individual’s tastes by the private sector. Law enforcement can also gain access to these records by subpoena or by simply purchasing them.” The group’s argument is timely: Hoping to catch terrorists, the FBI in June visited local libraries around the United States to determine wether anyone has checked out certain books.

• Fair-Use Rights: The fair-use tenet allows the courts to mediate the tensions arising between law and new technologies. Fair use includes libraries’ and educators’ rights to provide content to students and other users, and allows the sale of physical copies of content that one acquires lawfully, such as copying pages from a purchased book to share with a friend. DRM, according to EPIC, “doesn’t afford users these rights.”

• Open Source Software: Open source software developers rely on reverse engineering to write programs that can interact with hardware. This practice is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, EPIC says. That law defines “tamper-resistant” such that “it makes open source implementation non-compliant.”