What Every Citizen Should Know About DRM, aka - Public Knowledge

V. Conclusion: Can ThereBe a “Humane” DRM?models for distributing content, within the constraintsof copyright law.B. For Technology Makers: It must maintaintechnology companies’ ability to create a widerange of innovative non-infringing products,and to design, build, and maintain those productsefficiently. It must maintain the ability tochoose between open-source and closed-sourcedevelopment models. It must enable technologymakers to come up with robust, interoperable,relatively simple technologies that are fault-tolerantand easy to maintain.C. For Citizens and Ordinary Users: It mustmaintain access to a wide variety of creativeworks, both past and present, including bothpublic-domain works and works still protectedby copyright. It must maintain access to advancingconsumer technology for uses not related tocopyright. It must continue to allow for maintainfair use (including time-shifting, space-shifting,archiving, format translation, excerpting, and soon) and also must be flexible enough to allow fornew, innovative fair uses (e.g., uses of home networkingand other kinds of fair use we haven’tyet imagined or discovered).These are, of course, difficult criteria to harmonize.I cannot imagine, for example, a governmentbasedregulatory framework that might create this,starting at square one.I can, however, imagine a way that a truly freemarket in DRM-protected works might get us atleast closer to these combined goals. The key tocreating that market is not only to remember andvalue the great creative works that are already inthe public domain, but also to use DRM platformsas a way of revitalizing and redistributing publicdomainworks.Consider: Almost all DRM development nowadays— at least when it comes to copyright — isdesigned primarily to protect works that are currentlyalso within their term of copyright protection(e.g., most movies, recent books, and so on).Remember Stephen King’s novella, “Riding theBullet,” discussed back in Part I of this essay? It wasan electronic book, all right, but in many ways itwas more difficult to use (and to copy from) than itwould have been if it had been published on paper.In general, we expect computers to make informationeasier to get access to, not harder, so the limitationson “Riding the Bullet” and on many othere-books are frustrating. (One couldn’t, for example,cut-and-paste a passage from King’s novella into ahigh-school essay on the subject — the sort of thinga student would love to be able to do with a digitalbook — nor could one print it out, since thatoption was disabled.) This is due primarily to therestrictions traditional publishers place on e-bookpublishers — or, if they are within the same company,on their e-book publishing divisions.The practical outcome of the restrictions onproprietary e-book formats is that these formatsare dead in the marketplace — e-books are unpopular,considered clunky and burdensome, and, atbest, an idea whose time has not yet come. Designersof e-book platforms have been cogitating aboutthe “right” combination of content protection andflexibility, but in the meantime the whole conceptof e-books has been languishing. In a world withnot enough trees in it — a world in which computerdisplays are now good enough to give us abook’s worth of readable text — this is an unacceptableresult.E-books and the Public DomainSuppose, however, that some enterprising companyset out to take public-domain works and editions ofworks and make them available on e-book platforms— with all the DRM copy protection turnedoff. That company could sell the e-books at a nominalprice over the Web, but might even expresslyallow that these e-books may be freely copied,excerpted, subjected to cut-and-paste, and so on.Such an e-book — perhaps a lesser-known MarkTwain work, or Constance Garnett’s translations ofa Russian novel — would have all the advantages ofbeing based on a digital platform and none of thedisadvantages (you could even print out your copy,if paper were the only thing that would satisfy you).Suppose, further, that DRM-disabled digitalformatpublic-domain works became widespread— perhaps even via peer-to-peer file sharing. (Forschool districts this availability might signify a wayto save textbook acquisition costs even as they32