Perspectives on DRM: Between digital rights management and digital restrictions management

✍ Scribed by Rafal Kasprowski

• Publisher: American Society for Information Science and Technology
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 164 KB
• Volume: 36
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0095-4403
• DOI: 10.1002/bult.2010.1720360313

✦ Synopsis

igital rights management (DRM) is commonly defined as the set of technological protection measures (TPM) by which rights holders prevent the use of digital content they license in ways that could compromise the commercial value of their products. Restrictions on such uses as downloading, printing, saving and emailing content are encoded directly in the products or the hardware needed to use them and are therefore in immediate effect. This automatic deployment challenges the fair use provisions of copyright law, which protect certain uses and let judges determine the outcome of a dispute.

This report of a panel session organized by the author at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) presents the DRM issue in four contexts: use restrictions in libraries, the anti-circumvention rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), commercial and academic licensing and DRM-free software alternatives. The four panelists were Kristin R. Eschenfelder, associate professor at the School of Library and Information Studies of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and recipient of multiple grants for her work on DRM; Kevin L. Smith, J.D., scholarly communications officer at Duke University and author of the highly regarded web log Scholarly Communications @ Duke; Bill Burger, vice president of marketing at the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), a leading provider of content licensing solutions for corporations and academic institutions; and John Sullivan, operations manager at the Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes the development and use of free software and campaigns against DRM. The session was recorded in October 2008 and is complemented in this report with a 2009 update to the DMCA legislation.