Could this be another nail in the coffin for DRM?

Dr. Patricia Akester, a Cambridge Professor no less has recently published: ‘Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment.’

I’ve not read it, I don’t really have time to wade through 208 pages to be honest. However, trawling the interweb, as Clarkson calls it, apparently the paper concurs with what many of us have already concluded. Which is that DRM actually does the opposite of what it intends to do, inherently pushing people to become pirates as opposed to the heard of placid sheep that we should be.

One of the best examples quoted out there is that of a blind lady who illegally downloads The Bible because the DRM-protected Amazon version she bought won’t allow her to text-to-speech it.

There were also University lecturers who’d had to either limit or pirate their teaching material as they couldn’t transfer it to the right formats for their classes, and daily issues at the British Library when it tries to move documents to new formats for archival. In fact everybody that Prof. Akester spoke with had some problem of their own.

To DRM developers and rightsholders, though, these are just ‘edge’ cases and not worth coding into DRM schemes. Creating DRM that has any sort of security while still accommodating every legal use in every possible market is simply infeasible—though this does lead rightsholders to question the wisdom of DRM.

Shira Perlmutter of global music trade group IFPI told Akester in an interview, “You are not going to get a one size fits all DRM that will deal both with the consumer and the special interests exceptions and, in any case, you do not want to give up a system that works for 99 percent of cases because there is a particular issue with a particular kind of user when you can let the system work and then deal with that user.”

Are rightsholders willing to “deal with users” who experience problems? Some are, but Prof. Akester found that many require a legislative prod before taking any action.

The study confirms what anyone who has ever wanted to rip a DVD to their computer or iPod could have told you: DRM, coupled with anti-circumvention laws, makes pirates of us all.

It’s worth noting of course that the massive lobbying, legislative, legal, and technical effort that underlies all these DRM regimes does so little to stop piracy that it makes you wonder if it is truly worth the effort.

A step in the right direction then but it remains to be seen if the landmark paper will have any effect.

Phil Tolhurst – SEDA Publicity Co-ordinator