Last weekend I gave a presentation at the 8th Linux Party by the Ecole Mohammadia d’ Ingenieurs in Rabat (see here for my slides). The students of the Club Informatique had organized everything on their own without any support by their professors. The organization was perfect. Thank you so much (special thanks to your hospitality, Amin and Youssef!). This was an unforgettable experience.

Right now I am sitting in a room of the Queen Mary University in London attending the DMP’s 17 General Assembly. Originally I was planning to present a shortened version of my Rabat speech for tomorrow’s DMP event. However, I just learned that some members suspect that my speech could be misunderstood by the attendees of the event (somebody used the ugly word ‘propaganda’). Therefore I should rather give another presentation.

Well… judge yourself if what I have to say is propaganda.

In his Comments on the European Commission’s paper on Creative Content Online in the Single Market Leonardo Chiariglione writes:

DRM is primarily a “management”, not a “protection” technology.

Creative Commons licences provide the means to distribute content preserving some rights. The very User Generated Content (UGC) phenomenon proves that there are many more ways of distributing content that does not rely on “protection” versions of DRM.

In a second comment Leonardo points out that consumers do not “wish to protect their content and suspects that they are more interested in monetising it. He writes that “Consumers want interoperability, they want to be able to play the content of their choice on the device of their choice”.

Some time ago I read the term ‘Rights Management Information‘.

The 1996 WIPO “Internet” Treaties (WCT and WPPT) define ‘rights management information’ (RMI) as ‘information which identifies the work, the author of the work, the owner of any right in the work, or information about the terms and conditions of use of the work, and any numbers or codes that represent such information, when any of these items of information is attached to a copy of a work or appears in connection with the communication of a work to the public.’

It seems that not only Leonardo but also other people (e.g. Nicholas Bentley, Henrik Ingo and of course myself) think that DRM related ‘open standards’ should be judged quite positive.

Let’s assume that DRM = RMI * Rights Enforcement:

• An open source implementation of an open standard for an RMI system has valuable uses (e.g. expressing copyright)
• An open source implementation of an open standard for a system for content Rights Enforcement is possible, but it will be possible to hack it. However, depending on the license terms, such a system could encourage or discourage users to share content
• if someone is going to use DRM, it is clearly better that they’d use an open standard – then at least there is a chance that the DRM is not a reason to make the content locked into a proprietary one-vendor/one-platform solution.

Richard Stallman would probably disagree with this opinion, saying that DRM is always a form of oppression and producing a good system of oppression is actually worse than a bad system.

I would reply that it is unlikely that a system of oppression will not be introduced becasue it’s opponents ignore it. A better strategy is to get involved with the people who design the systems (e.g. standardisation projects, standards bodies). Since copyright law provides exceptions it should be possible to design some loopholes (e.g. the ability to copy content for private use).