What is DRM? DRM consists of access control technologies or restrictive licensing agreements that attempt to restrict the use, modification, and distribution of legally-acquired works. Examples include encryption technology used on DVDs, keys (or passwords) with video games or copying restrictions on ebooks. 

DRM goes against the spirit of open sharing

Most creators who choose CC licenses probably don’t want DRM — they want wide distribution, use, and reuse of their content. Generally, we encourage creators to share their content in “downloadable” and “editable” formats (i.e. DRM-free — without any technical restriction to download, copy, or modify) to make it easier for others to benefit from and use the content, including for educational and socially beneficial purposes. We likewise discourage sharing CC-licensed content on platforms, sites or channels that add DRM to the shared content. That way, the spirit of open licensing is upheld and the legitimate expectations of the public regarding the freedoms associated with using openly-licensed content aren’t compromised. 

DRM does a disservice to the public: it blocks legitimate access to openly licensed content, thereby posing a threat to the universal, fundamental rights of access to knowledge, science, culture and education.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: standing up against DRM is incredibly important for many communities in the open movement, particularly open education. Of particular importance is the ability for educators and learners to “retain” content and “to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage).” 

DRM poses a dire risk to the principles at the foundation of the open movement. DRM often constitutes an unnecessary obstacle preventing access to and use of content for legitimate purposes. When used in connection with openly-licensed content, DRM does a disservice to the public: it blocks legitimate access to the content, thereby posing a threat to the universal, fundamental rights of access to knowledge, science, culture and education. We at CC will continue to advocate against it.

The post We’re Against Digital Rights Management. Here’s Why. appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today is the annual #DayAgainstDRM, a global campaign to raise awareness about the harms of digital rights management (DRM). DRM consists of access control technologies or restrictive licensing agreements that attempt to restrict the use, modification, and distribution of legally-acquired works.

There are serious problems with attaching DRM to creative works: not only does it frustrate legitimate users in enjoying the content they’ve paid for in the ways they wish, it also limits access and interaction with these works for educational and socially beneficial purposes. For example, DRM applied to a software program would likely prevent researchers from conducting an independent security audit on it. Alongside the DRM applied to products and services in the private sector, laws have been adopted around the world that criminalize most workarounds. These regulations are quite broad, and usually prohibit the act of breaking the DRM, telling others how to circumvent, or creating and sharing technical tools that assist in the workarounds. These restriction apply even if a user has lawful access to a work.

A major negative feature of digital rights management is that the technology is agnostic as to the purpose a user would want to circumvent the restriction technology. These technologies are flying blind, and aren’t responsive to a particular user who would want to get around copy protection in order to exercise their fair use rights in the underlying content. Aside from a few enumerated exemptions published by the U.S. Copyright Office every three years, DRM continues to trump user rights, and in the process can limit educational activities, freedom of expression, and innovation.  

DRM has also been discussed in the context of the copyright reform in Europe. Some of the new provisions having to do with limitations to copyright tabled by the Parliament contain clauses that would forbid not only contractual restrictions, but also technological protection measures (another phrase for DRM) from overriding the exercise of the users’ rights. So, for example, this would mean that a researcher could freely conduct text and data mining on a collection of scholarly works to which she already has legal access, and the journal publisher or other rightsholder would be forbidden from enacting contractual barriers or DRM that would thwart the researcher’s work. These additional user protections are important to include so that the rightsholders cannot simply sidestep the law through the application of private contracts or technological restrictions.

CC has always attempted to minimize the negative effects of DRM. All the Creative Commons licenses forbid users of CC-licensed works from adding any DRM or other technological measures that would restrict others from using the work in the same way.

Last year we wrote about the troubling (and increasingly common) trend of including DRM provisions within international trade agreements. Negotiators of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pushed for anti-circumvention rules that would sit parallel to to the effective enforcement of copyright laws. That would mean that rightsholders could pursue criminal penalties against a user who attempts to circumvent DRM even when the purpose of the circumvention has nothing to do with copyright infringement. We can only assume that negotiators for NAFTA will be pressured by the entertainment and publishing industries to include a similar provision as a part of the “modernization” of the agreement.

DRM is an ongoing threat to users’ abilities to use and manipulate the technologies and products they legally own. We need to end DRM. Digital freedom depends on the right to tinker, the right to access information and knowledge, and the right to re-use our shared cultural commons.

The post Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad DRM appeared first on Creative Commons.

We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

Today’s topic for Copyright Week is “You Bought It, You Own It, You Fix It”, which means that copyright law shouldn’t interfere with your freedom to own your stuff however you see fit: to repair it, tinker with it, recycle it, use it on any device, lend it, and then give it away (or re-sell it) when you’re done.

Many rights holders are saddling their content with digital rights management (DRM) or restrictive licensing agreements that attempt to limit the use, modification, and distribution of copyright-protected works. In some instances, copyright law being misused in service of controlling access and use of legally-acquired content.

One recent example concerns the agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere. John Deere attempted to use U.S. copyright law to restrict access to the software code on their tractors. Specifically, the company contended that provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows them to limit farmers’ ability to inspect and modify software code to fix or enhance the equipment they already own.

Every three years the Library of Congress entertains arguments from stakeholders wishing to receive an exemption from the anti-circumvention rules of the DMCA. If the exemption is granted, the farmer would be able to legally (within their technical limitations,) bypass the DRM in order to examine and fix their equipment. However, the Library of Congress process is far from ideal. The list of categories of exemptions is quite limited, and requires interested parties to submit new evidence every three years in order to be granted a renewal.

But the principle behind “You Bought It, You Own It, You Fix It” extends beyond our ability to repair, tinker, and fix the technologies to which we have legal access. We see a parallel in the policy work and advocacy that publicly funded resources should be openly licensed resources. Just as we need rules that protect people in accessing and using content and technologies they’ve already paid for (like a John Deere tractor), we need public policies that guarantee access and re-use rights to things we pay for together, like scientific and medical research, educational resources, job training materials, and public sector data.

There are multiple benefits to the public of requiring open licenses on publicly funded resources. For example, it enables collaboration between researchers because the materials are legally “open” for working together, and for continuous improvement. It makes access easier and cheaper over time because the materials are shared widely instead of being locked down under copyright and proprietary licenses that benefit only a small number of rights holders. It increases the efficiency and overall impact of the grant funds stewarded by government agencies.

There are already implementations of the principle that publicly funded materials should be openly licensed materials. One specific example is a grant program at the U.S. Department of Labor. It’s a big program funding up to $2 billion for the creation and dissemination of education and training materials. The difference between this grant program and those that have come before it is that grantees must agree to license and publish the digital content they create under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (Note, the open licensing policy has been extended to apply department-wide). This way, the public, and anyone around the world, are free to re-use the materials for any purpose, as long as they give credit to the author of the materials.

Outside of government, we know that philanthropic foundations are learning toward adopting similar policies for their grantmaking. For example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation adopted a liberal open licensing policy (which went into effect as of January 1, 2017) for its science funding programs whereby all peer-reviewed published research and underlying data sets must be published immediately (meaning: without embargo) under a CC BY license.

Tomorrow for Copyright Week: “Transparency and Representation”. Copyright policy must be set through a participatory, democratic, and transparent process. It should not be decided through backroom deals, secret international agreements, or unilateral attempts to apply national laws extraterritorially.

The post We Bought It, We Own It, We Fix It: Building Open Policies for Digital Public Goods appeared first on Creative Commons.

Today is the International Day Against DRM, a global campaign to raise awareness about the harms of restricting access to legally-acquired content using digital restrictions management (DRM). DRM consists of access control technologies or restrictive licensing agreements that attempt to restrict the use, modification, and distribution of copyright-protected works. Defective by Design says, “DRM creates a damaged good; it prevents you from doing what would be possible without it.”

CC has always attempted to minimize the negative effects of DRM. All the Creative Commons licenses forbid users of those works from adding DRM or other technological measures that would restrict others from using the work in the same way.

More and more creators have been removing the digital locks from their works and experimenting with new business models. At the same time, we see copyright law being misused in service of controlling access and use of legally-acquired content. For example, last year the agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere attempted to use U.S. copyright law to restrict access to the software code on their tractors. Specifically, John Deere said that provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows them to limit farmers’ ability to inspect and modify software code to fix or enhance the equipment the farmers already own. This is just one example of how DRM has been used to restrict user rights. Luckily the Library of Congress has again adopted a set of exemptions to the DMCA rule that forbids the circumvention of access controls. This way, users can bypass DRM and take advantage of the rights granted to them under the law. However, the list of categories of exemptions is quite limited, and requires interested parties to submit new evidence every three years in order to be granted a renewal.

Another worrying trend is the inclusion of DRM provisions within international trade agreements. And negotiators are pushing DRM anti-circumvention separate from any connection to the effective enforcement of copyright laws. For example, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) adopts criminal penalties for circumventing digital rights management on works, and treats this type of violation as a separate offense regardless of any copyright infringing activity on the underlying content. It is a threat to users’ abilities to use and manipulate the technologies and products they legally own.

We need to end DRM. Get involved in the International Day Against DRM! You can find an event, write a blog post, create a video, translate graphics, and join the discussion. Digital freedom depends on the right to tinker, the right to access information and knowledge, and the right to re-use our shared cultural commons.

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Today is Day Against DRM. If you don’t already, you should know that DRM stands for Digital Rights Management (or probably more accurately, Digital Restrictions Management), and that we have blogged about this day before for good reasons, including,

• DRM causes problems regarding fair use, lack of competition, privacy and security breaches, forced obsolescence, and more… (Read the Wikipedia article on DRM.)
• CC provides tools to make it easier for creators and owners to say what rights they reserve and permissions they grant — maximizing sharing and collaboration. This is in stark contrast with DRM that uses technology to make it harder to share and collaborate.
• CC licenses do not allow users of CC-licensed works to use DRM to prevent other users from taking advantage of the freedoms already granted by the license.

In addition, Defectivebydesign.org notes that,

While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can’t freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them. They’ve even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission.

See all blog posts on Day Against DRM here, where you can also access banners and pledge to take action.

The post Day Against DRM 2012 appeared first on Creative Commons.

• Selection of blog posts from Day Against DRM 2011
• Posts on the Creative Commons blog about DRM, going back to 2004.
• DRM article on English Wikipedia

Although DRM seems to no longer be the red hot issue it was a decade ago, it is still very much present, causing problems regarding fair use, lack of competition, privacy and security breaches, forced obsolescence, and more. DRM is often now involved in distribution of movies and books, to the great consternation of some librarians. Not listening to librarians puts our freedom and safety at risk.

A few things about DRM specific to Creative Commons:

• CC licenses do not allow licensees to use DRM to prevent other licensees from taking advantage of the freedoms the licensor granted. Sounds good, but a license isn’t necessarily the place to put everything good — and the wisdom of this condition has been hotly debated in in years past. We decided not to change it in version 3.0. With discussion of version 4.0 upcoming, should we think about refining the language?
• Read our FAQs regarding DRM and CC.
• DRM puts CC’s values in stark relief. DRM attempts to use technology to make it harder to share and collaborate; we want to use technology to maximize sharing and collaboration. DRM is anti-social, CC is pro-social.
• In the long term, DRM will lose if collaboration and sharing win. This will take decades, or perhaps not so long if you get involved in open culture, education, government, science and our older cousins in the free software movement (who have spearheaded this Day Against DRM).

The post DRM (a day against) appeared first on Creative Commons.

The microformat will essentially encapsulate AP and member content in an informational “wrapper” that includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online and which also supplies the critical information needed to track and monitor its usage.

While Creative Commons is very sympathetic to the difficulty of explaining technical concepts in a short press release, we’re worried that the AP’s explanation, and in particular their reference to the Creative Commons’ Rights Expression Language (ccREL), might well be confusing.

The reference to Creative Commons appears in the AP’s microformat, hNews, which introduces hRights, a supposed “generalization” of ccREL. hRights is presumably the “digital permissions framework” that the AP diagrams as a box/wrapper around news content in order to “track and monitor usage.” Unfortunately, as Ed Felten points out, this claim doesn’t add up. Microformats and other web-based structured data, including ccREL, cannot track, monitor, or generally enforce anything. They’re labels, i.e. Post-It notes attached to a document, not locked boxes blocking access to the content.

When Creative Commons launched in 2002, we were often asked “is Creative Commons a form of DRM?” Our answer: no, we help publishers express their rights, but we don’t dabble in enforcement, because enforcement technologies are unable to respect important, complex, and often subjective concepts like fair use. Thus, ccREL is about expression and notification of rights, not about enforcement.

And when you think about it, there’s really no other realistic way. If the AP actually wants a “beacon” that reports usage information back to the mothership, then every endpoint must be programmed to perform this beacon functionality. Before it delivers content, every server must check that the client will promise to become a beacon. Which means the AP wants  an architecture where every cell phone, computer, or other networked device is locked down centrally, able to run only software that is verified to comply with this policy. That’s another reason why we don’t dabble in enforcement: the costs of Digital Rights Enforcement (or its politically correct equivalent, Digital Rights Management) to publishers, users, to our culture and to our ability to innovate are astronomically high.

Then there’s the issue of “RSS syndication” compatibility. We simply don’t see how the AP’s proposed system would allow both widespread beacon enforcement and compatibility with existing formats like RSS. Compatibility means that current RSS tools remain usable. Obviously, these tools do not currently perform the AP’s rights enforcement, so how could they magically be made to start phoning home now?

That said, there is an interesting nugget in the AP’s proposal, one which we encourage them to pursue: tagging content with rights, origin, and means of attribution is a good proposal. When Creative Commons began the work that led to ccREL, there were no established or open standards for expressing this type of structured information on the web, so we had to lay down some new infrastructure. When we published ccREL, we made it easy for others to innovate on top of ccREL: we included “independence and extensibility” as the first principle for expressing license information in a machine readable format. We based ccREL on RDF and RDFa to enable this standards-based extensibility.

The AP could, rather than reinvent a subset of ccREL using an incompatible and news-specific syntax, simply use ccREL and add their own news-specific fields. By doing this, they would immediately plug into the growing set of tools that parse and interpret rights expressed via ccREL. We would be happy to help, but we built ccREL in such a way that we don’t need to be involved if the AP would prefer to go it alone. And, of course, the AP can use ccREL with copyright licenses more restrictive than those we offer, if they prefer.

The post Rights Expression vs. Rights Enforcement: clarifying the Associated Press story appeared first on Creative Commons.

CC evangelist and acclaimed author Cory Doctorow announced today the release of his new book, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. Content is exactly what it claims to be – 28 essays on “everything from copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the nature of futurism, the necessity of privacy in a digital world, the reason to love Wikipedia, the miracle of fanfic, and many other subjects”. If that wasn’t inciting enough, Content also boasts an introduction from EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow and book design by acclaimed typographer John D Berry.

Like his other novels, Doctorow has chosen to release Content both as a print book for sale and as a free-to-download CC BY-NC-SA licensed PDF. In his essay, “Giving it Away” (originally published in Forbes, December 2006 – republished in Content), Doctorow describes his decision to use CC licences and the benefit he has seen as a result:

When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons license that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my site (and those downloaders were in turn free to make more copies). Three years and six printings later, more than 700,000 copies of the book have been downloaded from my site. The book’s been translated into more languages than I can keep track of, key concepts from it have been adopted for software projects, and there are two competing fan audio adaptations online.

Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free ebook as a substitute for the printed book — those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the ebook as an enticement to buy the printed book. They’re gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I’m ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a million copies of my book has cost me nothing.

The post Cory Doctorow Releases "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future" appeared first on Creative Commons.

“(Recently) I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM,” said David Hughes, who heads up the RIAA’s technology unit, during a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood conference. “Any form of subscription service or limited play-per-view or advertising offer still requires DRM. So DRM is not dead.

CC using record label Magnatune just announced a DRM-free subscription service.

Another jewel from the same News.com article:

Fritz Attaway, executive vice president at the Motion Picture Association of America said: “We need DRM to show our customers the limits of the license they have entered into with us.”

If you needed DRM to show users the limits of a license, CC licenses would require DRM. Instead, CC licenses repudiate (known forms of) DRM. No, the only thing the RIAA and MPAA are showing their customers is disrespect.

Of course this is a really old story.

We need Digital Asset Management tools that help our computers help us manage content, not DRM that turns our computers against us.

Via TechDirt.

The post Zombie DRM appeared first on Creative Commons.

In light of these problems, Creative Commons licenses stipulate the following:

When You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work, You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.

This is not an outright prohibition of DRM on works distributed under terms of any CC license, but it does rule out existing DRM schemes that would clearly restrict the ability to exercise the rights granted in any CC license.

However, use of Digital Rights Expression, also variously known as Digital Rights Description and Rights Management Information, has always been a core part of Creative Commons’ strategy. The point of DRE and other information describing creative works is to describe works, not to facilitate restrictions imposed by your own computer. Computers should help users find and manage content, not help content owners manage and expose users.

We’ve only begun to exploit the ability of machine-readable code describing works and licenses to make media more valuable rather than less. Look for a paper on what we’re now calling ccREL — CC Rights Expression Language — coming soon.

ccREL has nothing to do with DRM, but this hasn’t stopped many people with DRM implementations or schemes from approaching us about making CC licenses work with their DRM. Nearly all of these conversations have been very brief as they were clearly futile.

The only exception to that certain futility rule has been Sun’s Project DReaM team. While it is far from clear that they have succeeded, theirs is perhaps the first honest attempt (at least outside academia) to specify a DRM system that supports CC licensed content and fair use — which we consider a requirement for supporting CC licenses.

The project has produced two white papers outlining potential support for CC licensed work and fair use, which are now open for comments: DReaM-MMI Profile for Creative Commons Licenses (pdf) and Support for Fair Use with Project DReaM (pdf). A forum has been set up to collect comments.

An introductory post from Susan Landau sets forth the challenge:

This is just to say that we welcome comments on the DReaM-MMI fair use document and the DReaM-MMI specification for implementing Creative Commons licenses. We’re not unaware of the inherent contradiction of a DRM’s support for fair use and Creative Commons licenses. What we are seeking to do in DReaM is develop an open-source DRM system, and include in it the things that ought to be part of any DRM system: support for fair use — and Creative Commons licenses.

We are very happy that Project DReaM has taken this step to encourage open discussion, which is certain to generate intense criticism, as anyone familiar with the DRM debates will immediately recognize. However, open criticism by many legal and computer security experts is the only way to properly evaluate a DRM system that aspires to support public licenses and fair use.

There is some existing literature on DRM and fair use. One starting point is a 2003 special issue of the Communications of the ACM on the theme “Digital Rights Management and Fair Use by Design.” Unfortunately these papers are not open access, but abstracts and exceprts are available at Cover Pages. Another is the DRM page of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, which features several downloadable papers on DRM and fair use. In brief, there are two extremely difficult problems to overcome for a DRM system to support fair use: determining what constitutes fair use or trusting users and privacy.

Even if Project DReaM has successfully specified support for CC licensed works and fair use with DRM, there would probably be other hurdles to deploying truly non-defective DRM. The good news is that in the last year many more people have realized that DRM is not good for business or consumers, particularly in the music industry. However, attempts to make DRM work will probably be with us for some time. If it can be shown that it is possible to design a DRM system that supports fair use, consumers and advocates can demand that all DRM systems meet that standard. If not (and admittedly, we suspect this is the case), all the more reason to hasten the abandonment of DRM and the hindrance it poses to innovation, and to embrace technologies that make content more useful and empower users.

The post Is it possible to design non-defective DRM? appeared first on Creative Commons.