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

 

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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