Digital Rights Management (DRM): For or Against?

tiger.jpgYou’re either Republican or Democrat. Prolife or Prochoice. But where are you on the DRM issue? For or against. Some background in case you haven’t made up your mind (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Pro-DRM: creators of digital works should have the power to control the distribution or replication of copies of their works, and to assign limited control over such copies. Without this power, there will be a chilling effect on creative efforts in the digital space.  DRM is one means by which creators of digital works may obtain this power.

Anti-DRM: The presence of DRM infringes private property rights and restricts a range of normal user activities. A DRM component would take control over the rest of the user’s device which they rightfully own (such as an MP3 player) and restricts how it may act, regardless of the user’s wishes (for example, preventing the user from copying a song). The use of DRM may also be a barrier to future historians, since technologies designed to permit data to be read only on particular machines may well make future data recovery impossible – see Digital Revolution.

There’s also something called conditional DRM but I haven’t gotten my mind around that.

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