Digital rights - who owns your download? |
Written by 3K Admin |
Wednesday, 18 August 2010 03:23 |
Think you really own the movies, eBooks and video games you've bought or downloaded? Think again.
Updated:22 Jul 2010Author:Ben Bridges 01.Digital Rights Management Consequently, copyright owners have become more anxious to prevent copying and other unapproved uses; Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the way they attempt to do so. What is DRM and how does it work?DRM puts coded information into the data that makes up a media file. This is then read by your media player or computer to decide what you’re entitled to do with it, sometimes by checking an online authentication server. As a result, it may prevent copying or force you to sit through advertisements, and may limit the lifetime or number of times you can play the file. It’s difficult to argue with the intention behind DRM. It’s an attempt to protect the rights of content owners – in particular, to minimise profit loss to people who would rather copy than legitimately purchase a product. However, DRM mechanisms can often impinge on a consumer’s ability to use their purchased product. Up until now, the emphasis has been to protect the product first, with the needs of consumers a poor second. Why is DRM flawed? Some of the restrictions imposed by DRM go beyond the protection of rights. The regional encodings of DVDs, for example, prevent players in Australia showing DVDs bought in another country (or from overseas through Amazon or eBay), often effectively denying access to foreign titles altogether here. The same restraints apply to electronic games. In 2005, Sony sought to prevent the use of “mod-chips” – devices that allowed PlayStations to play games with different regional codes. The Australian High Court ruled against Sony, asserting that playing a game on a PlayStation did not involve copying it, so copyright law was not breached. Other dubious side effects to some attempts to impose DRM: in 2005, Sony BMG produced some music CDs that surreptitiously installed two programs onto consumers’ computers – one to limit copies to three, and the other to send a message to a monitoring server every time it was played. While the former was arguably trying to protect Sony’s rights, the second clearly went beyond this. More seriously, the existence of the software was not disclosed, and because it was installed as a “rootkit” (a form of software that exercises administrative control), it created an exposure to viruses that would not be easily detected. After the resulting uproar, Sony recalled the CDs and offered free tools to remove the software, though it took several attempts to get that right. A brief history of copyright
The surge in popularity of eBooks has seen a further growth in the use of DRM, preventing purchasers copying them from one device to another and limiting lifetimes. Amazon, which has DRM built into its Kindle eBook reader, deleted a number of titles from its repertoire upon discovering that the providers of the text did not, in fact, have rights to it. Unfortunately, this happened without notice, and consumers who believed they’d bought eBooks legitimately woke up to find that not only that their copies had disappeared from their Kindles, but so had their own notes and annotations. Ironically, the books concerned were George Orwell’s classic dystopias Animal Farm and, rather appropriately, 1984 – the famous dissertation on what our future could become if we let overzealous controls go unchecked. Instances such as these have led opponents of DRM to refer to it as “digital restrictions management”, as it often seems to restrict the rights of users rather than protect those of copyright holders. CHOICE verdict Under the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty of 1996, it is illegal in most countries (including Australia since 2007) to attempt to circumvent the copyright protections built into DRM, even when these measures go beyond the protection of legal rights. If you wish to have true ownership over the products you buy, and use them how and when you want to, ideally you would buy products that have no DRM at all. But this remains difficult for movies, games and eBooks, and because of the value of these products and the way they’re consumed, it may be a long time before the precedent set by music works its way through to other media. |
Last Updated on Wednesday, 18 August 2010 03:36 |