DRM Advocates and Opponents

DRM advocates

Some DRM advocates have taken the position that the operational contexts and design goals of DRM, security, software engineering and cryptography are sufficiently well understood that it is already possible to achieve the desired ends without causing unrelated problems for users or their computers.

Others have taken the position that 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, they argue, there will be a chilling effect on creative efforts in the digital space. This has been and remains the underlying argument for copyright. DRM is one means by which creators of digital works may obtain this power.

A similar view states that DRM's advent is the first time large-scale digital distribution has been reasonably achievable, which proponents claim to be a benefit both to content creators and their customers that far outweighs the typical problems that arise. This argument cannot be applied to physical media, however.

Furthermore, advocates of DRM believe that its opponents advocate the rights of hardware and media owners, but at the expense of the privileges of artists and their designated copyright holders. Consumers of hardware and media voluntarily and knowingly agree to the grant of limited use of the content exhibited using their physical media.

DRM opponents

Many organizations, prominent individuals, and computer scientists are opposed to DRM. Two notable DRM critics are John Walker in his article, The Digital imprimatur: How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle, and Richard Stallman in his article/story The Right to Read and in public statements "DRM is an example of a malicious feature - a feature designed to hurt the user of the software, and therefore, it's something for which there can never be toleration". Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University heads a British organization which opposes DRM and similar efforts in the UK.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and similar civil rights organizations, including http://boycott-riaa.com and http://www.ihatedrm.com, also hold positions which are characterized as opposed to DRM.

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure criticizes DRM's impact as a trade barrier from a free market perspective.

The GNU General Public License version 3, released by the Free Software Foundation, prohibits using DRM to restrict free redistribution and modification of works covered by the license, and has a clause stating that the license's provisions shall be interpreted as disfavoring usage of DRM. Also, in May 2006, FSF launched a "Defective by Design" campaign against DRM.

Free Creations has published a license against DRM: Against DRM 2.0.

In France, in order to inform the consumers about DRM, the citizen group StopDRM is regularly organizing protests in general stores (like Virgin or La Fnac) in different cities.

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. This argument connects the issue of DRM with that of asset management and archive technology.

DRM opponents argue that 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). All forms of DRM depend on the DRM enabled device (eg, computer, DVD player, TV, ...) imposing restrictions that cannot be disabled or modified by the user, regardless of existing rights. In other words, the user has no choice.

Tools have been created to to strip Windows Media of DRM restrictions. An example being FairUse4WM.