What is Digital Rights Management, and Why You Should Care
Written by Alex Fisher
Thumbnail & Banner Photo by Iyus Sugiharto on Unsplash
Digital Rights Management, more commonly referred to as DRM, is exceptionally important in the digital age, and it affects us all on a daily basis. Most people, however, are largely unfamiliar with DRM—having only ever heard of it briefly, if at all. So what is DRM, and why does it matter?
What is DRM?
Digital Rights Management, a topic we have mentioned in passing before, is a set of tools which are designed to protect the copyrights of people or companies who have created content that is shared digitally. It can apply to a great many things, from movies and video games to proprietary software and research papers. It accomplishes its task through a variety of methods. Some forms of DRM may limit how many times a purchased software can be downloaded or activated, while others—referred to as “always-on DRM,” and most commonly used with video games—may make the software require a constant internet connection. There are many different types of DRM, and what exactly it looks like will depend heavily on who produced the digital content and what exactly that content is.
The general purpose of DRM is to prevent the copyrighted content produced by a person or company from being stolen and used inappropriately or shared without the permission of the creators (and often without them receiving any payment for their content), a practice known as digital piracy. In theory, this ensures that copyrighted content is treated fairly with respect to the content creators. It is meant to prevent created content—especially paid content—from being unfairly stolen and distributed. This sounds fantastic: creators being justly paid for the content they worked hard to make. In practice, however, DRM can be more problematic than it may sometimes be worth.
Why Should You Care About DRM?
How often have you been working on an assignment, looking for a source to support the argument that you are trying to make, when you find what seems to be the perfect one only for it to be locked behind a limited-use paywall? Or perhaps you have tried watching a movie on your favourite device, only for it to be blocked because your device doesn’t meet some unstated standard, such as HDCP? Maybe you have even tried to play a game or launch an app while on a flight, only to find an error along the lines of, “content cannot be accessed offline.”
These are all examples of how DRM can have a negative impact on you. While in some cases the problem may be very temporary and fixable, in others it may prove to be an expensive or time-consuming endeavour just to enjoy the content that you had already paid for. If you feel alone in this, or if you have not experienced it and don’t believe it to be a common experience, you can conduct a quick search on Google for any of these problems and you will quickly find thousands of results from others suffering the same issues or trying to fix them, such as this one in which one user purchased a movie but was not informed until afterwards that it could not be played on their device. As one person in the comments put it, “this is putting an electric fence around the supermarket, because there are people robbing the delivery [trucks] before they arrive.” In another case, an error with the controversial DRM software Denuvo caused a number of single-player video games to become completely unplayable.
From this example and countless more like it, it’s clear that DRM affects countless people every single day whether they truly realise it or not, preventing them from accessing the content they purchased or placing severe restrictions on how they can use it. While it is important to ensure that content creators’ copyrights are being protected and that they are being fairly compensated for the goods or services they provide, all of the complaints surrounding DRM in its various forms beg the question of whether or not it is truly worth it in some cases.
What Can Be Done?
The question of what to do about DRM is a complex one. On one hand, it negatively affects countless people each year. On the other hand, it is also an important tool in fighting digital piracy and ensuring that the content that people work hard to produce is not unfairly stolen, and to help guarantee that they are fairly compensated for all of their effort. Both arguments are completely justified, but there appears to be no ‘happy medium’ between the two. As long as DRM exists there will be unhappy customers, but without DRM content creators would likely feel as though their hard work is being uploaded just for others to steal it. It will probably take some outside force—such as long-outdated laws and government legislation finally catching up to the internet—to shake things up and establish a new equilibrium, but until then all we can do is wait and deal with DRM’s impact on our lives as best as we can.
What are your thoughts? Has DRM ever affected you, and do you think it is a good or a bad thing? Let us know on our social media pages.