The Free Software Foundation has started a “Defective by Design” campaign to eliminate DRM (Digital Restrictions Management).
DRM is intended to prevent unauthorized copying of music, movies, and software. However, it also prevents copying and use that is within fair use rights provided by copyright law. In many cases, DRM is also harmful to computers and other equipment. For instance, the Sony CDs with DRM installed a rootkit on user’s computers, even if they declined the license agreement, rendering those computers vulnerable to malware. Other CDs with DRM have been known to cause physical damage to car CD players.
Products which support DRM are thus considered to be Defective by Design, and the campaign is intended to educate the public on the problems caused by DRM. If people vote with their wallets by purchasing products that do not use DRM in preference to those that do, sales of DRM’d products will decline, and manufacturers will have more incentive to provide non-DRM products.
Media companies have been trying to get Congress to mandate DRM (beyond the existing DMCA legislation), and we need people to tell Congress that DRM is harmful.
What about simple DRM? This idea only assigns licensing to the digital content rather than prevention mechanisms. Numly.com allows each copy of a digital work to be licensed to someone under all rights reserved or creative commons copyright. A unique Numly Number is assigned to each copy for digital tracking.
I call this good drm. In the future, there is no reason not to be able to sell your purchased copy of a digital song to someone else by transfering your license. Right?
Why does a work distributed under a Creative Commons license need a unique Numly Number?
Anyhow, I read the FAQ and a few other pages on numly.com, and I don’t see how it would benefit me as either a content provider or a content purchaser.
Suppose I buy an music file protected by a Numly number. What am I going to use to play it on Linux? If an open source music player program will play it, how will the Numly number prevent an unauthorized person from playing a copy of the same music file?
I find the whole idea of DRM to be obnoxious, even if it were to be done in a way that didn’t inconvenience me very much. I buy a lot of software, DVDs, CDs, and books. The DRM on DVDs is obnoxious, and I wouldn’t have started buying them if I hadn’t been convinced that the DRM would get broken so that I actually could watch the DVDs on my PC running open source software. I should be able to access the content using any software I like. There is no good reason why I should be forced to use only the software the publishers approve of, on only the platforms upon which they deign to release that software (i.e., Windows, and maybe MacOS).