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Well.
Digital rights management, or DRM,
sucks.
I remember several situations where I've
been struggling with DRM.
I went flying on a plane and my
music wouldn't play or I
wanted to burn music onto a
C.D. and it wouldn't work
and I couldn't use it.
And I needed tools to circumvent
that. And to
hear or listen to things that were
protected and
limited,
whereas DRM come from.
And where does it go?
Well, is probably going to
give us some answers on that.
She's the campaign manager of the
Free Software Foundation
and she's giving us an overview
on DRM and also
a Klym.
So DRM is going to be implemented
and working in the future.
And what we can do to
circumvent it or two.
Yeah, try to
get rid of DRM.
Please give a really warm round of
applause to Molly.
Hi.
Hi, I'm Molly.
I just want you all to know that I'm
terrified right now, but I'm glad
I'm in a room with my friends.
And I'm saying this because even though
it's very unprofessional, I'm pretty sure
after this moment you won't be able to
tell. I'm terrified.
And I want you to know that it's OK.
OK. So another quick note about me.
I'm not a lawyer.
I know very little about the law,
actually, but I kind of
sort of know how to read policy and I
kind of sort of know how to talk to
people about policy.
And I'm really good at reading Wikipedia.
I also know that user freedom
is important.
User freedom is the idea
that we have devices and software
and technology in our lives
and that we have rights and freedoms
with response to that.
Right. However, user freedom requires
free software. It requires software
freedom.
I'm gonna have you talking a little bit
more about that sort of relationship
later on.
But I want you to go into this talk
knowing that I believe
I know that software
and technology needs to meet certain
requirements in order for you to
have the rights related to it that
you need and deserve.
So now what's this thing called DRM?
Some people say digital rights
management. I say digital restrictions,
management, because it's not about
rights.
The term digital rights management
carries this idea that that's somewhere
maybe even you have
have something that you get out of it,
out of DRM, but you don't.
Right. The only thing it does is it
restricts you and your interactions.
So how is DRM implemented?
Right.
As the technology itself?
One of the ways we see it most commonly
is that you have this piece frequently
media, sometimes other software
that's sort of wrapped up in this
encryption. This is a very technical
explanation, as you can tell.
And then somewhere down the line, you
have your device where you are required
to install another piece of software.
Usually proprietary, almost always
proprietary.
And then your software somehow
decrypt this other thing and allows you
to interact with it on someone else's
terms.
So some of the ways that we see DRM and
action is limited use.
Are there times or number of times?
So time might be.
I I'm really lucky.
I live in a place where the library
system lets me borrow
ebooks.
However, they're only valid for so long
because of the DRM on them.
So unfortunately, I don't borrow e-books.
But it's a great idea or number of times.
Something that happens in video
games especially is you're allowed to
install them.
Some number of times, three or four
maybe. And then after that, you lose
the right to keep using it.
Persistent online authentication.
This is something else we've seen in
video games to
great consternation of the public at
various points where
you can only use it.
You can only play if you also have
a connection to the Internet.
I see that this is very classist
because there are plenty of places where
people just don't have Internet
connections, and especially with net
neutrality issues coming up, which we're
not going to talk about anymore.
But we can talk about later product
keys, you know, and you get your
copy of Windows. Hopefully you don't have
a copy of Windows. But if you did happen
to get one, at some point, there would be
a product key on it that you had to put
in.
Here's my favorite example of product
keys. There was this game I loved as
a child called The Incredible Machine
and how it worked as you had to get
something from one side to the other
and you were given all these little
widgets to put it together.
The thing was, the game required you to
basically put in a product key.
It had a number of selections that came
in a book.
So I had a demo version of this game, but
I really, really liked it.
And the demo version gave you one product
key. So I used to have to stop the game
and then started again until it found the
one I knew.
And that was sad when I was five.
There's a digression here.
One of my coworkers asked me about video
games and how you're forced to follow a
certain narrative and you're punished.
And he asked me if this is DRM, because
frequently when I talk about it,
especially in response to my work,
I take this very fairly general
definition of the technology.
We can talk about that later and feel
free to ask me questions.
Cool. So why would somebody think
DRM is a good idea?
Or more specifically, why do we think it
is not a good idea?
Right.
Right. This is a conversation about their
rights in this case that there them
they is these like
creators or rights holders
rights in this case, like specifically
Ferring to who owns
this intangible thing, maybe kind
of owns it.
And then you on this other side is like
you personally here.
So their rights is this idea that the
people who either created
or purchased it from the creator.
It's like the the concept
of this thing that they've made,
that they deserve your.
They deserve your
obedience and
how you interact with it.
And then on the other hand, we're saying
that you have these rights
and that you should be the one to set
your own terms.
So what do we lose with DRM?
Right. So as the people
using it, we're losing something.
One of the things we lose is
accessibility.
Right? When you have a piece of DRM
media or material because
you can't access it.
Because you can't change it.
You can't modify it.
You can't use it on your terms.
You can't share it.
You can't share your modifications.
Like, one of the things we really lose is
accessibility in this particular
case. Accessibility refers to the ability
to change something in order to make
it more usable for people
who have different interactive
needs. Right.
So one example would be changing
something so it works better with a
screen reader. Web sites are a very good
example.
I don't know if you've ever looked at the
HMO in a given Web page, but it's usually
quite messy, at least the ones I write.
But it also refers to
maybe changing the font being
used. I've heard that
for dyslexics, a sans serif fonts
are better.
But if a Web page is presented in a Sarah
font, they would have more trouble
reading it. Color for colorblindness
is another issue.
Art. Right. We make amazing art.
People make amazing art.
I don't even want to go as far as to say
that the end of the year remixes that
come out where somebody took all the top
40 songs over the course of the year and
then put them together for one song.
I don't even want to call that remix.
Really. That is art.
That takes skill and talent and thought
and creativity.
Right. And that's something that you just
can't do when you don't have access to
that media.
There's convenience, of course, as
the Herald, whose name I forgot, I'm
really sorry I mentioned
he's been in situations where he just
doesn't have access to things that he
wants to have access to.
There's education in the United States.
At least you're allowed to use
any piece of copyrighted material.
Not a lawyer
in an educational context.
When something is DRM, though, you no
longer have the ability to bring it into
any context, especially
if you're trying to work in a place with
limited technological services or
limited Internet service.
So two quick examples I have of this
is I used to work at M.I.T.
Open Courseware, and one of the things we
would do is we would package courses
onto hard drives and send them off to
people.
One example is, was
HD a juvenile prison
in Idaho where they
just weren't allowed access to the
Internet. And another one was medical
training workshops in West Africa.
Those are places where people lack
through sort of privileges and access
that we have here,
free speech. I hope a
lot of you get this one, so I won't go
into it too much repairing
and not replacing.
We're going to talk about that a lot more
later when we talk about one of my
favorite things, which is tractors
and sharing experience in human
connection.
I don't know how many of you this is true
for. But for me, I love books
and I love reading.
And I find myself reading a book that
touches me in some way or that I think is
important or valuable.
And I want to share it with someone
because I want them to understand me
better. I want them to have this new idea
that has really affected my outlook
on the world.
You know, I can't do that.
I can't share my experience.
And we're losing this opportunity for
connection because I cannot give
them something since some company
somewhere else thinks I don't have a
right to it.
Translation's, this is kind of related to
accessibility. If, for example,
you have someone who only speaks,
you know, anyone given language like me,
I only speak English.
I need to have things translated for me.
But when you have these restrictions,
that can't be done.
So DRM causes lots of problems.
Does it solve any problems?
Because as you know, people still really
insist that it does.
It turns out it doesn't solve any of
them.
One of the things people talk about when
they talk about DRM is they talk about
pirating.
They talk about people taking things.
They talk about loss of profits.
It turns out that there's been very
little, if any, repercussions
for not having DRM media.
OK. Now we're going to talk about anti
circumvention laws, which is probably
a little bit more exciting.
Here's another quick note about me.
I'm not a legal expert, but I'm really
good at reading Wikipedia.
Thank you.
So this is some stuff I learned.
In 1996, the World Intellectual
Property Organization created this
copyright treaty.
The World Intellectual Property
Organization is a conglomeration
of nations.
One hundred ninety one.
They're not all nations.
Or maybe they are.
It's U.N. members and then some
additional territories and other
contested areas.
Who all got together and agreed
that DRM was really important
and they needed to make some some.
They needed to make policies
across the world to protect
the sanctity of it.
Right. So in the United States, we had
the DMCA, the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act in 1998.
This is a lot of stuff. Normally, I like
to read slides in case anybody
has trouble seeing them, but I'm not
going to do that right now because
there's a lot. I'm just want to highlight
that the DMCA actually does give you
permission to circumvent these
restrictive technologies.
Right. You may circumvent a technological
measure that effectively controls access
to a particular portion of the program
to achieve interoperability of
an independently created computer
program. That's really easy to
understand. Right.
So what does interoperability mean?
That was my next question.
So they have a clear definition later on.
And that same little bit of the
code like Title 17 code, which was very
useful.
Interoperability is computer, the ability
of computer programs to exchange
information and mutually use
that information.
This is actually a pretty narrow
definition.
But people are still scared of
interacting with it.
Right.
Sharing software for the purpose of
violating or encouraging others to
violate copyrights has been held illegal.
So at this point and thinking and talking
about the implications and circumvention
laws have, we're beginning
to understand that intent matters.
So when you create a piece
of technology to get around and a
circumvention laws, you're taking on a
certain level of responsibility that
it will only be used for research
or for interoperability as opposed to
people doing whatever they want with it,
like a legal services,
i.e. breaking DRM.
One of the little anecdotes here that the
U.S. has is in theory,
this is slightly less restrictive
than the E.U. policy.
One of the things that has happened in
terms of chilling effects with this is a
lot of people who would otherwise
want to be circumventing
this DRM decide not to because
the risks are too high and the damages
can be too punitive.
In 2001, the EU got on board with the
copyright directive.
I heard a laugh, thanks.
This ensures adequate legal protection
against people doing a bunch of things
for the purpose of circumvention.
Right. So. So it's it's in a slightly
different way highlighting what's illegal
here.
Right. But you're kind of allowed to do
it sometimes in the same way you can with
the DMCA, where
if people are using it for
non evil, evil,
non-legal purposes, that's fine.
Now, I want to talk about two case
studies, attractors and web standards
really quick. I think this is super cool
and I think this is important to talk
about. This was a radio made
available
in Germany in 1933.
It had a limited number of stations that
made it work or that it worked on
this limited number of stations was
actually because the dial would only
click to certain
frequencies.
So it was really easier actually to take
apart and to change that, but it was
illegal to do so.
I thought this was ridiculous and it made
me angry. And then I saw this on
Kickstarter where somebody did
the same thing but made it even more
ridiculous by putting another artificial
restriction so you can only listen to one
radio station.
I propose that we think of this as
just as device restrictions management,
where we're creating these artificial
barriers.
You are free to make up your own backroad
and for DRM.
I did.
So what I want you to understand from
that is that DRM impacts the physical
world. This is Karig.
They make these automatic.
It's this coffeemaker that uses these
little pots of pre ground coffee.
And they did a thing for a while there
where they added DRM to it so
that you could the machine would not
work. The software on the machine would
not work unless you were using
a curry designed and sold.
Little pod.
I think they call them
great. So now we're going to talk about
tractors.
Why tractors?
I love vegetables.
So I have a very deep personal investment
in farmers being successful and providing
me lots of vegetables.
Also, tractors are really cool,
right? They're like, really cool.
Look at that thing.
And we're going to talk about John Deere,
specifically. The John Deere Flicker
Group has more than 14000
members. Right.
So not only are tractors a big deal, John
Deere has this following in, at least in
the U.S. it's the standard.
All right.
So John Deere also requires.
Buyers to accept this end user license
agreement that disallows repair
activities.
So how does it disallow repair
activities? Now that we have
these computers, these scary computers
and everything that have all this
technology on them that are locked down
in different ways, you need to have
special devices to translate
what the computer inside knows to
something that, you know, in
cases of farmers specifically, you'll
see things like you have to hire repair
person who might be expensive to come
out. Talk about it.
Right. So if you want to get your own
device, it turns out it's not that
expensive, but you're voiding your
warranty when you're interacting with it.
So this Yula in this particular case
makes it so that you just can't repair
your own tractor.
This is made possible by a..
Circumvention laws.
All right. So we have a..
Circumvention laws that were created to
protect DRM, but they're actually
infringing on other user freedoms,
especially in response to technologies,
physical technologies.
John Deere has also in this protected
itself from things like crop loss or your
lost profits, because,
you know, when there's
a problem with the tractor, that's their
fault. And that you can't fix because of
something else that sort of fits into
this is this idea of precision
agriculture, which was designed around
the concept of big data,
and that when you're driving a tractor
around, you're actually creating and
generating and storing lots of data.
There's a group called Farm Hack.
This is a little shout out to them.
I think they're super cool.
They're all about creating, designing and
sharing different kinds of farm equipment
to get around these sorts of DRM issues.
There's also Web standards.
All right. Web standards are designed by
the World Wide Web consortium.
They're voted on by member organizations.
Becoming a Mangrum member organization
costs a lot of money in most cases.
And those are the things that we're using
to define how people are supposed to just
design Web pages and supposed to
share information with users
of the Web.
Right, dear. And became a Web standard.
What this means for us as
the people here, is that
now DRM is a normalized technology.
This happened pretty recently.
And once something is a normalized
technology, it's easier for people moving
forward to justify
creating even more restrictive
technologies.
And it has all the same downsides that we
see in DRM and other places, even
though it's on the Web. And you might
think, well, the Web means
I can only interact with it when it's
online or well, the web
is accessible and people can copy, text
and do all these changes.
So you can't.
And a lot of cases when media especially
is being locked down.
So why does this matter?
DRM on the Web matters because it
requires giving up computing freedom.
You're being forced to install somebody
else's software on your own computer
in order to do these things that you
should be able to do otherwise.
Where do we find here and where are the
places that we can see it?
Right. So if you want a humorous list,
check out a Cory Doctorow talk.
He gave a great one at Lieber Planet
in twenty seventeen.
He gave another one at the previous hope.
Here's a an incomplete list of some
depressing places we might find DRM
or software locked down by anti
circumvention laws, including such
wonderful things as autonomous drones
and medical implants.
And my hotel room door
DRM can be a life or death issue.
I don't know if you read that whole list.
If you did, I'm very impressed because
one of the things affected is medical
implants right
on the audience
left. That's Karen Sandler.
That's Leslie Hawthorne. They're both
wonderful people. This was taken at Falls
Down by Deb Bryant. Thanks to Bryant.
Karen Sandler is a free
software user freedom activist who has
a defibrillator. She has a medical
implant in her heart.
A little aside there, Dick Cheney
also has a has a defibrillator in his
heart. And when he was a
vice president, the United States,
the Wi-Fi, and it was turned off
the Wi-Fi in Karen Sandler's heart.
I think it's turned it.
You should listen to her talk about it.
She can. She can get into that more in
depth.
But the important part of her story in
this case is when she was in her late
30s, she was pregnant.
And one of the things that happens when
you're pregnant is you get heart
palpitations.
And when you have a device that's
designed to shock old men,
old Caucasian old white men in their 50s
and 60s when they have heart
palpitations, then suddenly you have this
woman in her 30s who's getting shocked
when she has heart palpitations.
This is uncomfortable.
It also uses the battery up more quickly,
which means you have to get your battery
replaced. And certainly the lifespan of
10 years becomes a lifespan of much
shorter. And then you find yourself
needing to have heart surgery again,
heart surgeries, invasive, however you
cut it.
We also see it in vehicles.
Vehicles are very.
Dangerous things, they kill lots of
people when you don't have control
of your vehicle, like there is
a great little video anecdote I saw on
the Internet of somebody like driving
his car and then somebody else just like
hacking into it and turning off his
brakes, which sounds pretty scary to me.
You also see it in CCTV
when you have
cops, for example, recording things
or CCTV is closed circuit television.
So you'll also see it in stores
where you're generating
video footage that can be used in a court
of law against someone.
If that video footage is locked down
under DRM, then people can restrict
your access to it to only be on their
terms. And suddenly you have a legal team
after you've been arrested that can't
help defend you because it can't see what
is being levied against you.
There's also data in general.
I don't know a lot about the data laws.
They're very complex.
But who owns your data?
Who owns data about you?
And who owns the information
generated from that data is
a very complicated question.
And when you're talking about it,
suddenly you realize that maybe you don't
even you're not even able
to access it.
Maybe they would share it with you if you
paid a large fee and only interacted with
it on their terms.
So what can you do?
You can do things. You can make things
right. So you guys can make devices.
You can make media.
You can make companies right.
You can be a book publisher.
And you can share and give and sell
DRM free ebooks.
And that's amazing.
You can be an artist who makes DRM free
music.
You can make an organization or a
nonprofit.
You can make things together.
You can make communities that are
dedicated to working around DRM.
You can make policy and
tell everyone the most important
thing you can do with any issue,
any cause you care about is tell
every single person you know.
Someone once gave me great advice saying
that there's no wrong place to talk about
free software.
And it turns out there isn't.
I talk about it with my doctors.
I talk about it with my taxi drivers.
I talk about it with a woman who cuts my
hair.
I talk about it with my parents.
I talked about it at Prete Creek, pre,
pre, pre Christmas dinner
at a friend's house around the kitchen
table, which was so great,
you know, and that's how you get people
to care. You find these compelling
stories and you tell them you find your
story or you find someone like Karen
Sandler who has a great story, or you
find somebody who has accessibility
issues, or you find somebody else in your
life who needs to have DRM free
media, who needs these are anti
circumvention laws to not exist.
You can also organize.
There are so many actions we can take as
individuals or as groups.
We can talk to people on
individuals. We can talk to politicians.
We can talk to
other types of policymakers.
We can talk to nonprofits.
We can talk to companies who were buying
things from we can talk to people who are
using DRM.
Right. And you can do this by yourself,
but it's so much more powerful and
effective when we take these actions
together in groups.
Thank you.
I'd like to make some quick acknowledgments
here, some people who I would like to
thank in various ways.
I'm going to highlight the Congress
organizing team for inviting me here
and all of you for coming to this
particular talk. Wow.
I can suddenly see you there, a lot of
you.
I'd like to thank the Free Software
Foundation for giving me so much.
And the members and supporters of the
FSF, we're an organization
that's predominantly funded by small
donations and membership fees.
And because those things happen, I get to
spend all of my time thinking about
issues related to user freedom,
related to DRM and related to anti
circumvention laws.
And I think that's really great.
And that helps me come to places like
this to talk to all of you about it.
Hopefully you're you'll go forth and talk
to more people.
I might also like to thank everyone out
there who works hard to fight DRM and
support user freedom every day.
I'm going to assume that as my friends,
all of you are doing this.
And so thank you so much.
This is just a quote I like,
and there's my e-mail address and my
status net and my Twitter
thanks.
If you have questions, I'll make
a quick request that if there's anyone
here who has never asked a question
before or somebody who identifies
as a woman or non binary individual, you
go up to the mike if you have a question
and put yourself in the front.
You can totally cut the line.
All right.
So we start with microphone number three,
please.
Thank you all for this talk.
So you said during your presentation
that DRM solves some problems
and that there are basically
no real repercussions for not
using DRM.
And of course, I agree.
I just want to hear more because I'm
interested in this subject.
So we have a question about why
there are no repercussions for using DRM
from the perspective of the
person who's implementing it.
There are some studies on that.
One of the things looked at frequently is
financial loss, whether
or not selling a piece of media with or
without DRM matters
to the actual profits being made.
This is a very practical argument.
I like to focus on arguments that are
generally based around rights, which
I didn't really bring up earlier.
If you'd like to later, I can look up
some things and send them to you that
talk more in-depth about this sort of
stuff. I know most people are compelled
by stories and not numbers.
I'm personally compelled by numbers.
Thanks. Microphone number two, please.
All right. I do a music
research into popular music and
I've purchased audio files
which are disarmed in the past and got
victim by not being able to use
using them later on.
But then again, I'm in contact
with many musicians who've basically
lost their source of life because of
the old model of playing concerts and
selling cities.
Doesn't work anymore.
And also, no one is willing to play for
music or pay for music except
first on streaming services.
So I thought the
protecting model of,
for example, three WME audio
was actually a fair idea.
And I was surprised that
it disappeared out of nothing.
I think about half a year ago.
So what would you what
would be your argument for
those who are actually doing creative
work and expect some sort of
material,
more money arriving at their end
if you don't have this option anymore?
Sure.
So the question is about whether we
wake what kind of arguments can we make
to artists who have lost other
moneymaking opportunities?
Specifically musicians.
In this case,
I am not an artist.
I know a little bit from having talked to
some of them.
I think more people pay for music than
we give them credit for.
You would know more about this than I
would because you're the expert here and
I'm not. I've mostly anick data
around the issue.
I like I said, I generally focus
on really rights driven issues.
I focus on the importance
of interacting
with a society that respects like
that respects not just the people
listening to music, but the people
creating the music that respects
the music being created.
You know, I'm in a band and I'm very
lucky that with my band we
not only really stream free media,
we also do it under
a free license.
And we do that because we believe that
it's very important. We actually think we
make just about as much money as we would
otherwise. But that's a unique case.
That's not much of an answer.
And I'm sorry.
OK. Microphone number one, please.
So I understand that as
a user or consumer or maybe even
as a hacker, there's benefits for me of
not having DRM on media or on a
key. And if I understand you correctly,
you don't think that for these so-called
price holders there's any benefit
in DRM either if there's no
benefit? Why are they doing it?
Control capitalism, greed.
Pick a choice. So there's a benefit?
I think there's a perceived benefit.
I think a lot of people have a fear that
they don't when they don't understand
what's actually happening in the world.
I think there's a fear and a thought
that if we just keep making more and more
restrictive technologies,
eventually it might work.
There's also a lot of people who don't
trust researchers and research.
We're not a society that respects
us expertize very well.
OK. It'll be great to see some some
actual research to get access.
Yeah.
This is I don't have it off the top of my
head.
OK, one last question.
Microphone number two, please.
So this greed's and
this control, I think
for a company you have a really economic
incentive to actually implement
DRM software because
this control going to
the the economy and also
provides the vendor looking.
So making
DRM DRM free software
or making burum free content,
I don't see how this would
impact the economic incentive
for companies to actually implement
this DRM.
Is there a way that we can, like,
punish companies that implement
DRM?
Is there a way that we can punish
companies that implement DRM?
I heard some clapping. You guys want to
clap for that?
I mean, especially in the economic.
Yeah.
The things that people do
usually is they they vote with their feet
or they vote with their wallets.
That's the phrasing.
I talk to companies.
Right. To them.
I know that can be really hard.
Find somebody within the company who
agrees with you.
They usually exist.
And over time they can build coalitions
of people there, build coalitions outside
of this and talk to organizations,
talk to the companies that are
implementing DRM, help them understand
what's not effective and what is
effective, but also just help them
understand that, you know, we're talking
about money. But money isn't the issue
here and it's not the question we should
be talking about.
Well, we should be talking about is what
are the responsibilities of people
creating and owning this
ephemeral concept of materials
to you and to everyone else
and to society at large.
OK, thanks.
So unfortunately, run and we run out of
time, so there's no more time for
questions, please.
Yeah. Stay here, stay
seated and give a nut a
round of warm applause to Molly.