COPYCENSE

This question has been batted around in the press for the past week. In a way, the fact that the question is being posed at all is remarkable, because it signals that the digital rights management debate has begun moving into wide public discourse after a long period in which only geeks and lawyers even knew the proper meaning of the acronym DRM. This article outlines the rise in DRM’s Q Score among regular media consumers over the past five months, and discusses Sun Microsystems’ Open Media Commons.

Among people who follow copyright issues, DRM (or “copy protection”) has been controversial since Congress changed U.S. copyright law in 1998 to illegalize any attempt to circumvent, crack, or hack past “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [protected] work” (See Section 1201 of the Copyright Act.) Various parties have complained about the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act since they were enacted into law in 1998; the complaints continue now, as the Copyright Office as it holds its third rulemaking proceeding on the practical effects of Section 1201’s anticircumvention provisions.

Much of the DRM debate, however, has found a limited audience. Copyright lawyers discussed the issues surrounding DRM and anticircumvention because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Companies with extensive copyrighted holdings, seeking to protect their digital assets, discussed DRM as a business and security issue. Finally, scientists and computer technologists whose work was affected by DRM or the DMCA (such as Princeton’s Edward Felten) discussed such issues. But this limited audience was not nearly broad enough for DRM to become a consumer rights issue.

Read the rest of this entry »