Society | DOI: 10.1145/1516046.1516052
Content Control
Entertainment businesses say digital rights management prevents
the theft of their products, but access control technologies have been
a uniform failure when it comes to preventing piracy. Fortunately,
change is on the way.
By no W, thE
CD sales are falling. Digital music sales are growing, but have not offset the
loss. The music business
story is familiar:
is struggling to adapt to a new technological era. It’s not the first time. At the
turn of the 20th century, for instance,
as the phonograph gained popularity,
the industry’s model of compensation
and copyright was suddenly thrown
into question. Previously, composers of popular songs relied on the sale
of sheet music for their income. After
all, musicians needed sheet music to
learn and perform a work, even if individual performances generated no
royalties. Once performances could be
recorded and sold or broadcast on the
radio, however, the system grew less
appealing to both groups of artists,
who were essentially getting paid once
By putting copyrighted books online, Google Book search may soon revolutionize book publishing.
Leah Hoffmann
for something that could be consumed
thousands of discrete, different times.
Eventually, collection societies were set
up to make sure each party had a share
in the new revenue streams.
Today, musical copyright is most
prominently embodied not by sheet
music but by audio recordings, along
with their translations and derivatives
(that is, their copies). Yet computers
have made light work of reproducing
most audio recordings, and the industry is unable to prevent what many
young fans are now used to—free copies of their favorite songs from online
file-sharing networks like BitTorrent
and LimeWire. Legal barriers, like
the injunctions imposed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
against copying protected works or circumventing their digital protections,
are unpopular and difficult to enforce.
(The industry’s John Doe suits have
touched a mere fraction of file sharers,
and their effect on the overall volume
of illegal downloads is questionable.)
Technological barriers, like the widespread security standards and controls
known as digital rights management
(DRM), have been even less effective.
DRM attempts to control the way
digital media are used by preventing
purchasers from copying or converting them to other formats. In theory, it
gives content providers absolute power
over how their work is consumed, enabling them to restrict even uses that
are ordinarily covered by the fair use
doctrine. Purchase a DVD in Europe,
and you’ll be unable to play it on a DVD
player in the U.S. because of region-coding DRM. What’s more, according
to the DMCA, it would be illegal for
you to copy your DVD’s contents into a
different format, or otherwise attempt
to circumvent its region-coding controls. To take a musical example, until
recently songs purchased in Apple’s
PhotograPgh by moLLy kLeinman