Tuesday 18 July 2017

DRM needs to protect people other than the rights holders

I'm all for people being able to protect the content they've created from being abused, but DRM
(Digital Rights Management) is frequently used for less noble purposes.  I'll go into this in this week's Wednesday post.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and partcularly its director Tim Berners-Lee (yes, that Tim Berners-Lee) recently decided to ignore numerous objections by W3C members and the internet-using public in general to go ahead with its plan to incorporate DRM into the web's body of standards.

There are numerous problems which I'll talk about tomorrow (or you can read the text of the EFF's apppeal against the decision here).  For now, read the EFF's appeal to get a sense of who and what we're fighting.

Creators deserve protection but publishers shouldn't get to decide how consumers use the content they've bought or how resarchers investigate the security of DRM systems or which innovations are allowed to succeed. This is the battleground. I'll write more about it tomorrow.

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