DRM explained

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John Perry Barlow’s right when he says DRM breaks the system. Essentially DRM was originally touted as a copyright protection system but what it does is it controls access to digital files, movies and music, etc, that you want to play on your digital systems. DRM you can think of as a digital lock behind which resides the file that you want to play. Some people like to think of it as a digital fence or a digital straightjacket and the digital file, the movie or the music or the book or whatever is locked inside this.

To be able to get access to it you need to have a player which contains the key to the lock which will enable you to open it and play the file. So for example, a DVD comes with a content scrambling system, DRM, and licensed DVD players have the key to unlock that lock so that you can play the DVD on your system. That’s why, for example, if you get a DVD, buy a DVD in the US you’ll find it often doesn’t play on a UK player because it doesn’t have the right key.

Now, this issue about DRM preventing copying, it never actually did prevent copying, what it does is control access via the key system that I was talking about. Commercial pirates can still copy on an industrial scale DVDs, music, books, etc, which have got these digital locks attached, and they can distribute them on an industrial scale, they just copy them locks and all.

And the people that lose out as a result of the DRM system, which essentially doesn’t work, are consumers and the companies whose reputation gets damaged as a result of things going wrong with them. So consumers get inconvenienced when the thing doesn’t work properly or they don’t have the right file or they don’t have the right key, or software gets updated so they can’t get access to stuff they’ve already bought, and companies’ reputation gets damaged when things go wrong.

So for example, you had the notorious Sony DRM Rootkit fiasco in 2005 I think it was, when millions of CDs were sold with a digital lock system which caused security problems on people’s computers when they played them on the computers.