Digital Rights & Digital Wrongs

Worryingly, it seems the day of reckoning has arrived. I’m talking about the proliferation of so-called “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) – the base technology for controlling access to digital media. By “arrived” I don’t mean it’s brand new- anyone who’s ever bought music online will have likely experienced it in one form or another. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with copy protection in some form or another (in many cases, it is mandatory), the implementation is almost always flawed. Rather than Apple’s iTunes store liberating users from some of the restrictions of audio CDs, it actually took several steps backwards in some cases- anything bought from the iTunes store can be used on up to 5 authorised computers. Aside from the breach in privacy this presents (Apple could track behavioural information about a person with this system) it also means, for example, that you cannot simply lend music to a friend, and that there is no option to sell unwanted tracks on the second-hand market. As a result, consumer frustration has been slowly mounting.On the film side of things, the situation has not been much better. The MPAA insisted on a ridiculous “Region-coding” system of DVDs, meaning that a DVD bought in the US could not be played on any player bought in Europe. I used the word ridiculous here, but feel free to replace that with “arrogant” or “xenophobic” – the underlying connotation is that territorial boundaries somehow relate directly to levels of poverty, and by extension “how much we can squeeze Joe Public for the cost of DVDs”, that and the archaic theatrical distribution system: film distributors won’t typically pay for extra prints for non-US audiences (which is why simultaneous international releases are rare, and worse, why if you watch a film outside of the US it’s likely it will covered in dust and scratches). The system is a joke- even to the distributors themselves: I remember at least one studio exec who was over in London complaining that he couldn’t play any of the DVDs he’d brought over for a presentation because they were Region 1.

The promise of digital cinema could have made all of this go away, with the possibility of simultaneous world-wide release dates with consistent picture quality. Instead, it seems to have fallen by the wayside, and things are getting worse. Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats both use new, more complicated DRM schemes to prevent copying. Both of these are already redundant, as a hacker compromised them over a year ago… so all it really does is increase the cost of production and reduce accessibility.

Article continues at Surreal Road