Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management and Copy Protection Schemes

Major entertainment companies are using "digital rights management," or DRM (aka content or copy protection), to lock up your digital media. These DRM technologies do nothing to stop copyright pirates, but instead end up interfering with fans' lawful use of music, movies, and other copyrighted works. DRM can prevent you from making back ups of your DVDs and music downloaded from online stores, recording your favorite TV programs, using the portable media player of your choice, remixing clips of movies into your own home movies, and much more.

To the extent DRM interferes with perfectly legal uses of digital media, it's plenty bad enough. But thanks to the lobbying of the major media companies, DRM is now backed up by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If you circumvent DRM locks or create the tools to do so, even to enable noninfringing fair uses, you might be on the receiving end of a lawsuit. The DMCA has been a disaster for innovation, free speech, fair use, and competition.

And Congress is now considering new laws that go beyond the DMCA, mandating DRM in a wide array of digital media devices and personal computers, giving entertainment industry lawyers and federal bureaucrats veto power over new gadgets.

Hollywood and the music industry have always attacked new technologies that help you get more from your media—these industries brought lawsuits against the VCR, DAT recorder, the MP3 player, and the PVR. Today, these media giants want to use DRM to take away your legitimate fair use and home recording rights, hoping to sell those rights back to you later. Worse still, recent DRM has invaded users' privacy and created severe security vulnerabilities in computers.

Fans shouldn’t be treated like criminals, and neither should the innovators who build the gadgets on which they rely. EFF has fought against many DMCA suits, including defending the makers of DVD backup software, and sued Sony-BMG for their "rootkit" CD copy protection scheme. Learn more about our efforts through the links below, and consider donating to support efforts.