DRM primer for librarians

Mike Godwin has written a great primer on DRM for librarians. Librarians are on the front lines of the DRM wars, since DRM so often interferes with lending, archiving and preserving creative works. Librarians are also a technology-savvy bunch. Accordingly, Mike's paper is thoroughgoing, smart, and highly recommended.

In a nutshell: content owners fear that once an unprotected copy of a copyrighted digital work becomes available, it can and will be distributed universally on the Internet, and its distribution will destroy, or at least severely diminish, its ability to generate revenue.

This fear often results in self-contradictory statements from content companies that seek, in various forums, legal or regulatory mandates for copy protection. On the one hand, such proposals are defended as "speed bumps" that merely "keep honest people honest" and that are not meant to be unduly burdensome to ordinary users of the content. On the other, when objections to certain kinds of mandates are raised, the advocates of the mandate frequently invoke the specter of the "one perfect copy" of the content escaping the secure system and then being distributed universally on the Internet. Policy discussions of DRM frequently oscillate between the advocacy of limited (and therefore ineffective) proposals and broad (and therefore less politically palatable) proposals. Sometimes the very same proposal may be described at one point as "limited" and at another point as "necessary to prevent Internet distribution." As a practical matter, no "limited" proposal can prevent Internet distribution of the copyrighted work.

PDF Link (via EFF Minilinks)