A reminder about DRM and why it's bad

I thought I may as well make a blog post, given that the International Day Against DRM is coming up. You can go read the Defective By Design team's writeup, if you want to skip mine.

Essentially, DRM is a technology that was originally designed as a copyright protection measure. This sounds... not terrible, at least at first.
The problem is that it inherently is designed to take control and capabilities away from the actual users (now usually "consumers") of the copyrighted work. Fine. You're not a pirate, you weren't going to share the latest movie produced by a certain mouse-themed company, right?

Well, there's a problem there. You're granted rights to own "backup" copies of a work under, IIRC, the Fair Use clause/law/whatever. You can't actually do that, though, because it would require circumvention of the DRM, which is highly illegal. You can't even wait for the copyright to expire, since the DRM would still need to be circumvented (if it's still available by then, since almost everything is treated as disposable and you'd need to break the DRM to make the backups...) and that never expires. Those disks you own, that nobody sells anymore because subscriptions are worth a lot? You can't easily get new ones, since any given show is usually a limited run, and you can't copy them to make a backup, or even to convert it for fair use on another format...

Some publishers (usually textbook publishers, of course) are actually arguing that their digital books should "wear out" after being lent out a mere handful of times, claiming that this happens to physical copies (although I've never seen a library book degrade as quickly as they claim, which should surprise no one) so they should get more of that delicious library money from lent E-books too. They're enforcing this against the libraries themselves via DRM that enforces the self-deletion, while a physical medium would be untracked and likely, ironically, a lot longer-lived. I feel especially disgusted by this one, since libraries need that money to maintain an up-to-date catalogue of all those books, movies, and CDs that are constantly being released. They might be partially government-funded, but they're also usually under-funded, and any increases would just raise your taxes to feed some of the most greedy companies in existence.

Worse, DRM doesn't just apply to media, books, music, and so forth. Back when encryption was first invented, there was an interesting court case that ruled that software (the encryption algorithm) was not an invention (thus a national military secret) but instead an intellectual work, subject to copyright and under the control of the authors, who saw its uses and thankfully shared it with us. This has provided us with internet security and privacy (although that too is under attack), but it has also allowed DRM to be applied to the software of products you own, since that's now a copyrightable work.

As a result, it is even illegal to make software that integrates with other software unless you're specifically allowed, simply because that's making a "compilation" or "parody" of the original software without permission. One would think that at least the machine code (closer to math than a creative work, now) sold as part of a product is actually a "part" of, say, a tractor or car that can be fixed, modified, or upgraded like any other, but that's not actually the case. And an increasing amount of the functionality of any system (and often even its repairs) is all done via software methods.

Modern computers and especially smartphones actually have DRM support at the OS and hardware levels. There are entire parts of your CPU, GPU, and memory that you can't use because they're dedicated to DRM software that actively works against your interests. In a literal sense, in some cases. Because of its high level of access, large size, and hidden nature, it's a prime target for vulnerability brokers and security researchers alike to hack into your devices and run botnets or steal personal data. The Sony Rootkit was merely the tip of the iceberg (ironically, they also violated the copyright on a number of tools that they used to detect anyone stealing from them)!

Even worse, a lot of physical hardware manufacturers are hiding behind DRM. John Deere, Apple, and recently Samsung are getting particularly bad with this. They'll happily call you an incompetent who'd break their (intentionally, in most cases) delicate products while denying you the information you'd need to access the hardware safely and locking all their firmware or software behind legally-enforced DRM gates.

There's a reason that Right to Repair is getting more prevalent. Tractor and phone owners are discovering that their products have intentional "features" that break the product if DRM-based software locks aren't reset when a part is replaced (look up iPhone part replacement maintenance tests for some of their most recent phones. They'll introduce "bugs" that break completely unrelated features to make it look like the repair shop broke your device when they merely don't have the secret unlocking tool)!

It's even illegal for security researchers (the people who make sure no one was dumb enough to introduce a bug that lets anyone read arbitrary personal information by posting a sequential user ID to an API... oh, wait) to take a look inside any protected software without a special exemption that has to be renewed every three years. In fact, most normal activities you might make on a computer, like just playing a DVD, installing a different computer OS, or unlocking/rooting a phone, actually require one of these exemptions that lawyers have to continually re-argue in front of the Library of Congress.

The funny part is, sometimes they actually have a point. There are some really draconian laws related to customer data protection, so companies can't have customers tampering with the wrong parts of their software (even on endpoints like vehicles) and introducing bugs that could allow someone to hack their networks. Other laws require emissions control systems that usually make vehicles perform worse and break down more often, especially in the case of diesel engines (complex systems tend to do that). But in the latter case, at very minimum, it's already illegal to make defeat devices for emissions control, and copyright is hardly the method they should be hiding behind for protection, anyway.

That said, media streaming companies absolutely deserve it. They are using DRM to make your movie or reading experience worse, to yank back purchased content should the publisher leave their contract, or to lock you to their ecosystem. With streaming getting increasingly expensive and ever lessening in actual content and quality, please consider dropping it in favor of other media or companies that respect your rights and your value as more than a wallet. Purchase your media from a place that gives you physical copies that can't be revoked, or (if possible) buy it without DRM so you can take that legally-owned media and make backups or transcode it so it's always in a readable format.

You can help if you read E-books too. Learn how to find out if a book has DRM, and only purchase those without it. I assure you there's tons of quality reading material out there that can be freely converted and read on all of your devices, and which can never be taken from you.
Heck, you're on this site. It's a good place to start, but if you wanted something published, though, Amazon's books have a "simultaneous device usage" field that usually shows up on no-DRM books, and Kobo will outright tell you at the bottom of the page (at least if you're using a browser).

A Disney executive (again, IIRC; it may well have been Microsoft) noted that DRM has succeeded when customers don't know it's there, much less that it exists. Let's drag this back into the light and make companies aware that it's not right and that it's not something we want.