Recap of DRM and TPM

In Wednesday’s class, Professor Kristen Eschenfelder spoke with us at length about Digital Rights Management. From our readings and her lecture, there are a lot of different kinds of tools, or Technological Protection Measures (TPMs), used to control digital rights. These can range from digital watermarks to IP address authentication, to clickthrough license agreements to the use of special software decoders. Professor Eschenfelder describes these measures as either “hard” or “soft” measures. “Soft” measures are vey common and are intended to create friction against unauthorized use, but are not foolproof and can be circumvented with relative ease; an example of this would be a digital watermark. “Hard” measures are less common but create significant challenges for the unauthorized user to overcome. Overcoming a “hard” measure involves relatively sophisticated technology or know-how.

Circumventing Technological Protection Measures can come at a high price! Unauthorized use made by cheating the TPMs is illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), section 1201. Fortunately there are some exemptions to this law; every three years the Library of Congress creates new exemptions to the DMCA Circumvention provision, presumably to protect rights of fair use and make sure that people are not being penalized for acceptable behavior. One important exemption currently in place is the E-book accessibility exemption, which allows people to circumvent TPMs if necessary to make the e-book accessible to the visually-impaired. This is helpful considering some e-book publishers have sought to disable text-to-speech for their books in the past. Another exemption allows media studies faculty and students to circumvent TPMs on DVDs for educational purposes. This allows individuals in the academic context to use clips from DVD films for purposes that would ordinarily have been protected under “fair use” doctrine. This is interesting because, although fair use should always apply to these kinds of copyrighted materials, with the DMCA prohibition against circumventing TPMs, making a copy of a DVD would be illegal, even if the copied material was being used for fair use purposes. This exemption tries to fix that, though by only extending these rights to academics, everyone else is stripped of what arguably are their fair use rights.

DRM and TPMs are controversial because of the limits they place on materials and the friction they create for users. As Professor Eschenfelder stated, however, these tools should not be hated too much because they protect libraries from liability as well.