COPYCENSE

“Copyright holders today increasingly find their rights and responsibilities dictated not by the explicit words of the copyright statute, but instead by the powers and limitations of what has come to be known as “digital rights management” technology. In this ten-page magazine-style piece, I consider how copyright law should respond.

“My argument proceeds in two basic steps. First, I argue that, while DRM might represent a powerful restriction, the constraint will never be Orwellian. Second, if all this is true, then DRM simply makes copyright law look a lot like every other area of legal endeavor. Put differently: as I show in the piece, criminal law, trade secret protection, First Amendment jurisprudence, and indeed every other legal regime is today implemented through a combination of powerful public mechanisms and less costly but weaker private ones. DRM, I argue, simply brings copyright law into the fold.”

Douglas Lichtman. Defusing DRM. SSRN. Feb. 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.