Digital Rights Management
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Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a generic term for technology used to control access to digital content.
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Summary
DRM should be allowed provided that consumers are notified of the restrictions of the product by a warning label.
Trusted Platform Modules
A Trusted Platform Module (TPM or "Fritz chip") is a microprocessor capable of securely generating cryptographic keys and limiting their use, "remote attestation" (ensuring that the computer is in a "desired state") and "sealed storage". A TPM can be used by DRM and by operating systems to ensure that the system is "trusted".
TPMs can be used in the implementation of DRM and other software restrictions, but can also be used for beneficial purposes (e.g. BitLocker). Thus only software or content that uses TPM to restrict the user's freedoms should be labelled with a warning.
Forum topics
- Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) (last post on December 8th, 2009)
Votes
Manifesto Ratification 2010
The manifesto ratification vote ran from March 6th to March 16th, in which 160 of approximately 650 members participated. Two questions regarding DRM were asked.
The first question was:
- We want a 'government health warning' on products containing DRM technology
- "Digital Restrictions Management" is a set of technologies employed by content distributors which aims to limit access, copying and format conversion of media by end-users.
- Any EULA that attempts to circumvent this would be voided.
The options and results for this question were:
| Option | Votes | Percent of vote |
|---|---|---|
| A "government health warning" on products containing DRM | 114 | 60% |
| A ban on products containing DRM as unfit for sale in the UK | 61 | 32% |
| No health warning | 15 | 8% |
The second question was:
- DRM Circumvention
- We believe there should be a legal right to circumvent Digital Rights Management technology and access content that you have paid for.
The options and results for this question were:
| Option | Votes | Percent of vote |
|---|---|---|
| Always legal to circumvent DRM | 158 | 83% |
| Only legal to circumvent DRM when the underlying data is out of copyright or where the unlocking company/mechanism no longer unlocks the data | 32 | 17% |
In both cases, the winner was the option with the largest proportion of votes.
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