Caring about Sharing: DRM Explained

This week, the focus has shifted to our move into an "information society". This is the perfect context from within which to discuss digital rights management. After-all, digital rights management is concerned primarily with limitations on the use of digital information. So without further ado, let's delve into the intricacies of digital rights management, which, for the sake of space (this blog post's) and time (namely, mine) I will hereby refer to as DRM.

DRM is a sort of catch-all term that is used to refer to a pretty broad range of technologies. What these all share, however, is that they exist largely to control access. This can mean hardware technology or software technology which serves to prevent or allow people to do certain things with certain digital content and/or devices. These DRM technologies make it so that end users are limited in their access, conversion, or replication of specific digital information.

This has become an increasingly difficult job. Early on, the technology available to individuals when it came to copyrighted content was fairly limited. Sure you could play a VHS tape with one VCR and record onto a blank tape with another, but you could not host a torrent tracker and share that same movie with millions of other people at zero cost to you. The later example shows that DRM is essentially up-against in this increasingly digital age.

If there is one group who has done the most in the development and implementation of DRM technology, it is the group with the most to loose: the entertainment industry. This week's topic is our transition into a digital information society, and no one has felt this more acutely than the entertainment industry. In the world we live in today, most everything we can, we reduce to bits and bytes. We reduce literature, music, art, and conversation to strings of 1's and 0's so that it can be stored, data-based, and shared through computers.

The entertainment industry traditionally dealt with a number of different mediums through which their products existed. Everything from audio cassettes to radio waves, to canvas paintings. These mediums were different than digital code, because replication was not only more difficult, but quality was usually lost. Meanwhile, in digital form, content can be replicated an unlimited number of times without any degradation. In fact, it can now even be converted and changed at will. You can take a song, burn it to a cd, then convert it to an MP3, then compress it into a zip file and send it out embedded in an email, all within 15 minutes. Another topic mentioned in this week's readings was that of the organizational structure of business being better understood through analysis of it's strategies. Well this sea-change in terms of the the entertainment medium has drastically changed the business strategies and the organizational structure of the entertainment industry.

In the past a record company could spend years and lots of money investing in a single break-out star who goes on to sell millions of CD/records throughout their career. These days, artists tend to come and go much more quickly, and revenue from cd sales must be heavily subsidized with revenue from other avenues such as live shows and merchandise. One of the major factors in these changes has been the difficulty in implementing effective DRM technology that people can't easily circumvent. It is this lack of effective tools to stop copyright violations that have caused the entertainment industry to reorganize in order to focus more on technologies which are harder to turn into digital information.

As our society becomes one in which our most monumental technological innovations have involved the use of technology to disseminate, organize, store, and create information, companies have taken larger strides to protect information upon which their bottom line is dependent. As we move forward I will introduce some of the specific examples of DRM technology, but this should give a reasonable overview of what DRM is, and why it is so important; and when it comes to this information, you are more than welcome to share.