4th May 2012 – International Day Against DRM

Yes, our world these days is littered with three letter acronyms and days. Today’s target is DRM or Digital Rights Management, aka Digital Restrictions Management.

DRM is applied to media by media companies and vendors to restrict their portability and reuse. While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can’t freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them. They’ve even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission; in an ultimate irony, users of Amazon’s Kindle had copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm deleted! It continues to be a major issue in the area of movies and video too.

Find out more at Defective by Design and reading Richard Stallman’s The Right to Read.