Ciarán’s free software notes

Oct 3rd: http://DRM.info was launched today. The aim is to make an information portal where people can see real world uses of DRM, how it affects a variety of sectors, and who is together in rejecting it.

Here’s the press release. If you want to raise awareness of DRM, probably the easiest thing you can do is to link to this site and point people to it. DRM.info is a collaborative effort. FSFE also has its own DRM page.

There seems to be almost unanimous dislike of DRM in the free software community, but people are less unified on how to tackle it. One suggestion is that we can defeat DRM by not buying DRM’d hardware. This is often called "vote with your feet", but it is not enough. Relying on it alone would be certain failure.

People who put forward this idea usually mention "free market", but they ignore that people can participate, not just purchase things, in the free market. Here are four hurdles to tackling DRM by "vote with your feet" tactics:

1. Not many people are aware of DRM, and not many people see the value of their freedom. DRM.info is an effort to address this.
2. Purchasing decisions are not very granular. They lump together varied aspects such as price, style, compatibility, recyclability, and respect for freedom to control the software. This makes it hard to send a signal to manufacturers since a drop in sales could be attributed to one of many factors.
3. The options offered to purchasers – what you can "vote" for – are set my a someone with a special interest. If the hardware manufacturers have an interest in locking down users with DRM, they can stack the options to make it inconvenient for users to choose DRM-free hardware.
4. Those with an interest in locking down technology users can leverage other markets, such as the entertainment market. Monopolies or cartels can be set up so that the public’s technology purchases also decide what entertainment they have access to.

To effectively defeat DRM, we must not only reject DRM’r hardware that locks us out, but we should also participate in the drafting of related legislation (FSFE does this), participate in policy forming, participate in international treaties (FSFE does this too), and use our licences to say that our software cannot be a stepping stone for using DRM against people (GPLv3 does this).

Some people have expressed a worry that if we are unfriendly to Tivo, as GPLv3 is, they will stop contributing to our projects. This may be true, but we never relied on their contributions, and their practice of preventing tinkering is losing us contributors too. Fewer tinkerers equals fewer contributors.

The British Library seem to understand the problems of DRM. (It’s unfortunate that they used the term "Intellectual Property". That term works against them by encouraging oversimplified thinking.)

Georg Greve also has a blog entry on DRM.info.