DRM: Digital Restrictions, Digital Rights

When you place a pod of ready-to-brew coffee into one of Keurig’s squat, iconic machines and press the ‘go’ button, you can be sure of a steaming cup in seconds. Or at least, you could’ve been before June of last year. Early in the summer of 2014, Keurig employed an anti-counterfeiting system developed by the US Mint to add Digital Rights Management (DRM) software to their coffee machines. This software scanned intruding coffee pods for the proper credentials, and refused to use them if they weren’t the official Keurig “K-cup.”

The move came in response to knockoff pods peddled by competitors that cut into Keurig’s $1 billion K-cup market, which comprised over 70 percent of the company’s profits in 2014. DRM for coffee is just the latest development in this astronomically exploding field of technology. Consumer printers have refused competitors’ ink for years. Apple has been sued worldwide for its heavy-handed restrictions on iPhones and music. And even CatGenie, a high-end litterbox manufacturer, equips each of its specialized cartridges of cleaning solution with a chip that prevents you from refilling it with substitute cleaners. What unites these disparate examples is the company’s urge to control products after they have been sold.

But in practice, DRM can have a negative effective on markets, consumers and even the businesses that impose it. This restrictive system is reminiscent of the factory towns of the late 1800s, such as the Pullman neighborhood of Chicago, where the Pullman Palace Car Company was the sole employer, the provider of utilities and the owner of local homes and supermarkets. The digital equivalents of these towns exist today because of the concentrations of power around DRM. With influential, oligopolistic companies such as Apple, you can end up in a closed loop: buy DRM-loaded software, buy DRM-loaded apps and music on that software, buy DRM-loaded devices to store those purchases, repeat. You’ve experienced this whenever you’ve tried to drag music onto your iPhone but been told you need it “managed” by your specific licensed version of iTunes.

This facet of 21^st century capitalism rings a lot like that of 200 years ago. Partly, it has to do with an unfettered private sector. Many free-market advocates support wide rights for private entities to engage in whatever practices they want. For instance, Microsoft limits the number of computers on which you can install Microsoft Office, even claiming a consumer-centric motive in trying to “reduce counterfeit software” and ensuring that users receive the “quality that they expect.” The company made almost $24 billion off this scheme between June 2011 and June 2012. Similarly, Amazon makes it impossible for e-books in the Kindle format to be used on other e-readers without illegally breaking DRM, which is partly how they keep the extortive, $2 billion Kindle factory town running. The wide privileges that private entities enjoy, central to the DRM movement, justify long, dense legalese—and restrictive code—effectively redefining copyright law for each new software license agreement.

The government has encouraged and codified this trend in copyright protection. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1996 law based off the WIPO treaty, enshrines criminal penalties for those who write programs that strip DRM from software. They define such action as tantamount to copyright infringement, whether the developers are competitors, consumers or concerned citizens — and then strike people with hundred thousand dollar lawsuits. This kind of reasoning chills innovation and provides undue protection to large corporations. The definition of infringement is loose and these penalties can fall on groups like cyber-security researchers at Princeton. In this case, the researchers found themselves on the wrong side of Sony while investigating its buggy products and got threatened with a DMCA lawsuit before successfully winning the right to publish their findings. The law can target customers as well. If an authentication server is down, even a paying gamer must wait until DRM-compliant ownership can be verified. And, worst of all, the laws that dictate this behavior are doled out and redefined with caprice. The (unelected) Librarian of Congress, because of an obscure provision of the DMCA, has the ability to make and define exceptions to the DRM provision of the law in a review that happens every three years. Unlocking iPhones offers an infamous example. The practice of separating phones from their preprogrammed carrier has changed legal status several times over the past decade.

Thankfully, people are fighting this trend on the policy side. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the premier digital freedom think tank (of which this author is a member), wants to “Eradicate DRM Everywhere.” They are working with industry stalwarts to make legal, moral and practical cases for freeing the use of software. In some sense, this fight may be won before it has begun. According to Bruce Shneier, a well-known cryptography expert and writer, DRM-reliant companies “want a practical way to make copying hard enough to save their existing business. But they are doomed to fail.” This echoes the music industry’s attempts to limit CD and tape copying — a futile effort in response to a changing economic climate.

Some unlikely executives have relented in the face of this pressure, including Jeff Raikes, ex-president of the Microsoft Business Division, who stated: “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else.” Other gaming providers, like Valve, claim that making money in the digital age is a “service issue,” and that consumers will pay for easy-to-download, DRM-free, well-curated game-buying experiences. But some stalwarts of free Internet have dishearteningly succumbed to DRM pressures. Mozilla, the open source browser, will now support DRM because it has “little choice” in the face of ubiquitous DRM usage among major media providers.

Don’t lose hope though. Apple relented and took DRM off its music after years of consumer pressure. Keurig suffered a 12 percent drop in brewer sales after its disastrous roll out of DRM, as consumers balked at a brewing system designed to make their formerly functional pods (and cheaper competitor pods) useless. Spotify and other subscription services have arisen to provide the ease-of-use that keep people paying for electronic content. If consumers and policy advocates remain relentless, we can prevent the promise of the digital age from being lost in a factory town.