(by Georg Greve, FSFE)

So what is all this Digital Restrictions Management? Can't you explain this more simple?

A good way for you to understand DRM could be the following story in which an ordinary book behaves as if it had Digital Restrictions Management:

Imagine you are going to the store and buy a paperback you've been looking for for a long time. Coming home with your newest purchase in the bag, an urgent biological call requires a visit to the bathroom. Because you simply cannot wait, you start leafing through the book in the bathroom. When leaving the bathroom, you realise that the book refuses to be taken out of the bathroom. You just discovered the first restriction:

The book can only be read in the place it was first opened!

This angers you somewhat, but you have a comfortable bathroom and it might be nice to have some literature lying around for guests, so you calm down and accept the situation as it is. The next weekend, a few friends come over for dinner and inevitably one of them needs to visit your bathroom, where she discovers the book. Being curious in nature, she opens it, but is shocked when the book emits a shrill siren sound and informs her that the police has been informed of license violation. You just found out the next two restrictions put in place:

The book can only be read by whoever opened it first, for which it spies on its reader. It also informs its owner who subsequently alarmed the police.

You manage to convince the police that this really only was a misunderstanding and that you weren't aware of the licensing terms of your book, so they give you a stern warning and leave. This whole affair leaves you somewhat disgruntled. The evening rapidly finishes itself as all your friends hastily leave and one of them mumbles something about "piracy" to you.

Angrily you storm back into the bathroom to have a look at the first pages where it said something about the author of the book, with whom you would like to share some feelings caused by his book. But what's this? The first pages will not open. None of the pages that you already read will. Instead, there is a credit-card swiping device that suddenly lights up on the back of the book so you can recharge the book and regain access to the first pages. You discovered yet another restriction:

The book can only be read once, additional readings come with a renewal fee.

This is about the time when you very thoroughly lose all interest in the book and swear to only rent books without DRM from the library in the future. The book itself is stowed somewhere behind your bathroom mirror, which explodes two weeks later when the book auto-destructs. You found the last restriction:

The book comes with a limited lifetime, either because it was built in, or because the company producing the DRM stopped maintenance.

When you tell this story to your friend, who happens to be a copyright lawyer, he tells you that you got lucky. If you had tried to take the book out of the bathroom by force, had pried open the pages, or handed gloves to your friend so she could read the book, you would have been guilty of circumventing a Technological Protection Measure (TPM). This is a serious offense and punished with jail time in some parts of the world, so all things considered, you got off light. Lucky you.

Reality check

Granted, this is a hypothetical story. First because it is unlikely that paperback books will ever behave this way, although it would be trivial to build electronic devices that do. But secondly (and more important) because today no case is known in which a DRM system really combines all these "features". Individually almost all of these can be found already:

• The book cannot leave the bathroom
  A very primitive form of Digital Restrictions Management is the DVD region coding, which says that certain DVDs can only be played on DVD players approved by Hollywood, which will generally only play DVDs of one region, generally the one you are living in.
  Because this DRM system is quite old and primitive, people were able to find out how it works. So from a technological viewpoint, are able to play your DVDs on any player and computer and make backups of movies you own. Although copyright law and common sense says that you should be able to do these things, they are illegal because you would have to circumvent the DVD DRM system, which is called CSS. Thanks to global treaties like TRIPS, this is forbidden. So even though there is software called "DeCSS" that would allow you to read your own DVDs on any computer, you cannot do so because the recording industry took legal steps against the person who wrote this software and threatened everyone who distributed it.
• The book can only be read by its licensee and controls that only the licensed reader reads it
  This is one of the most common restrictions today. There are multiple schemes that seek to bind DRM'ed material to a specific person or player, especially when it comes to music. If you are interested in a comparative analysis of what is being used today, check out the EFF's "The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User's Guide to DRM in Online Music".
• The book intimidates its reader
  Many people who watched a recent DVD knows the little intimidation clips in the beginning, or the legal notes displayed on web sites and pop-ups. In some countries, people have even seen spots on TV that threatened young people with jailtime for sharing their music.
• The book "phones home" and informs its producer
  This restriction exists in some devices, for instance the TiVo, which reports the viewing habits of its users back to the company, or the copy protection that SONY shipped on its CDs. Manufacturers generally do not advertise these functionalities. SONY even actively denied in public that its copy protection phoned home. Only when proven false did they admit it, but then came back to say that they didn't use this data in any way. As such restrictions are generally kept secret and highly proprietary, it is not clear which DRM systems do or do not have provisions for this.
• The book auto-destructs
  Limited lifetime restriction comes in various forms, and generally without any influence or choice on the side of the customer. Be it that Apple iTunes decides you can only burn your playlist 7 times instead of the 10 they originally promised, or be it that Microsoft changes their DRM for the new player, which is incompatible with their old "PlaysForSure" system.
• The book destroys the mirror
  This image was the attempt to capture what happened to SONY customers who tried to remove the secretly installed DRM software from their Microsoft Windows PCs: They suddenly found their DVD/CD player broken and had to reinstall their systems.
  In fact: Should you still believe that the spying on users or exploding mirror are overdone, you are recommended to read the writeup of the SONY rootkit by Bruce Schneier, an internationally renowned security guru.

The only point in the story that was truly without real-life example was the part where the DRM system manufacturer alerts the police. We have no knowledge that this ever happened -- and we hope it never will.

So overall the example was extreme, but mainly because it put all the components together that today usually exist in separate systems and applied this to an object as mundane as a book. But there were things that were not yet mentioned, as well:

• Children to jail?
  Children are growing up with new technology and find the use of electronic devices very normal. They are among the largest groups for sharing of music, and they are being sued by the RIAA in the United States. You can read more here.
• Let DRM define whether you are a family
  The Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) CONTENT PROTECTION & COPY MANAGEMENT (CPCM) is still under development. Cory Doctorows writeup for the EFF, titled "Europe's Broadcast Flag" is well worth a read: "CPCM defines new terms, "Authorised Domain" and "Local Environment." The definitions of these terms effectively set the boundaries of what a valid family is ("Authorised Domain") and how far apart two devices are allowed to be in order to interact ("Local Environment")."
• Criminal sanctions for infringement
  Despite a plethora of existing legislation to extend copyright and increase the sanctions for violations, the industry is still asking for more. The latest are criminal sanctions for copyright and patent infringements, which already exist in some countries. Now their plan is to introduce them on the EU level. Read FSFE's writeup on IPRED2 for more information.