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.
Digital Rights Management Cases
- 2006 DMCA RulemakingEFF did not file for DMCA exemption requests in 2006. Instead, we explained why the rule-making process is fundamentally broken and unable to protect consumers.
- RealNetworks v. DVD-CCA (RealDVD case)On September 30, 2008, the day Real was to formally launch its RealDVD product, the motion picture studios filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles and asked for a temporary restraining order (TRO) to block the launch. The same day, RealNetworks filed a lawsuit in San Francisco asking the court to declare that distribution of RealDVD is lawful.
- US v. ElcomSoft Sklyarov
- Sony BMG Litigation Info

- Macrovision v. SimaIn 2005, Macrovision sued Sima to block the sale of the Sima CopyThis! (CT-1, CT-Q1, CT-100, CT-2, CT-200) and GoDVD (SCC, and SCC-2) products, which are designed to digitize analog video, such as the analog video outputs of DVD players and analog VCRs. The Macrovision Analog Copy Protection (ACP) signals often embedded in these analog outputs, however, do not survive the digitizing process, and therefore are not embedded in the outputs of the Sima devices. Macrovision argued that this violates both Macrovision's patents and the DMCA's prohibition on circumvention.
In The News
- NPR - MARKETPLACE | October 02, 2009 Publishers disconnect on e-book biz
- TECH DIRT | September 15, 2009 Sneaky UK Attempt To DRM Television
- GUARDIAN UK | July 22, 2009 Why did Big Brother remove paid-for content from Amazon's Kindles?
Other Resources
- The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User's Guide to DRM in Online Music
- Consumer Success: It Comes Down To Innovation, by Fred von Lohmann[eetimes.com]
- Cory Doctorow's Microsoft Research DRM Talk - June 18, 2004
- Death by DMCA, by Fred von Lohmann and Wendy Seltzer, IEEE Spectrum Magazine[spectrum.ieee.org]
- How Hollywood Has Been Trying to Disrupt Innovation, by Fred von Lohmann[eet.com]
Related Issues
- Analog HoleHollywood Versus The Analog Hole
- Digital RadioRIAA's Attempt to Control Recording From the Radio
- Broadcast FlagA mandate would force all future digital televisiontuners to include "content protection" (aka DRM) technologies.
- Digital VideoDigital Video Restrictions
Whitepapers
Deeplinks Posts
- November 02, 2009 DVR is TV's New BFF
- October 15, 2009 Hollywood Pressuring FCC on Selectable Output Control Again
- August 11, 2009 Judge Rules Against RealDVD
Press Releases
- July 22, 2009 Apple Withdraws Threats Against Wiki Site
- February 09, 2009 EFF Calls on Federal Regulators to Protect Consumers from DRM
- October 27, 2008 EFF Marks 10th Anniversary of DMCA with Report on Law's Unintended Consequences
Documents and Files
- February 9, 2009 Comments to the FTC on DRM[PDF, 261.10 KB]


