LuminousVoid

Cory Doctorow, European Affairs Coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has recently posted online his paper on DRM in the developing world. Digital Rights Management: A failure in the developed world, a danger to the developing world.

Cory argues that DRM systems upset copyright policies of developing countries; may harm consumer and other vulnerable interests; don’t recognize technological realities in developing countries; and don’t even work at protecting content. Cory speaks generally about DRM schemes, and about the harms on economic and cultural development that it can cause due to strong control of content by rightsowners against the accessing public. I want to add two other points about DRM that are outside the domain of the owners/accessors balance.

DRM can allow authoritarian regimes to keep tabs on their population. Some DRM allows a central location — be it a content owner, licensing group, or even a government entity to collect information about what works are accessed and passed on. This has serious privacy implications: someone tracks what we read and when. Everytime there is access, there is a transaction, and possibly a record. There is also a neat centralized source for that information: the rights-clearing mechanism.

In countries that don’t have a strong commitment to freedom of speech, this centralization could be problematic. It could facilitate censorship, such that the government can go to a single entity: the permission granter, and find a way to disable the accessibility of the entire public.