 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 CD 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. Where does DRM come from and where does it go? Well Molly 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 glimpse how DRM is going to be implemented and working in the future and what we can do to circumvent it or to try to get rid of DRM. Please give a really warm round of applause to Molly. 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 okay. Okay, 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 going to be talking a little bit more about that sort of relationship later, 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 somewhere maybe even you 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 a 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 decrypts this other thing and allows you to interact with it on someone else's terms. So some of the ways that we see DRM in action is limited use, either times or number of times. So time might be, I am 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 ebooks, 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 say 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 when 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 is 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 start it again until it found the one I knew and that was sad when I was five. There's a digression here. One of my co-workers 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 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? Rights. This is a conversation about their rights. In this case, their, them, they is these like creators or rights holders, rights in this case, like specifically referring 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, purchased like the concept of this thing that they've made, that they deserve your they deserve your obedience in 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 to 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. Websites are a very good example. I don't know if you've ever looked at the HTML in a given webpage, 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, sans serif fonts are better. But if a webpage is presented in a serif 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 puts 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, 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 MIT OpenCourseWare and one of the things we would do is we would package courses onto hard drives and send them off to people. One example was 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 privileges and access that we have here. A 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 and 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 or I want them to have this new idea that has really affected my outlook on the world. 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. Translations. 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 though? Because, 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. Okay. 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, it's 191, they're not all nations, or maybe they are. It's UN 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 policies across the world to protect the sanctity of it. 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 just want to highlight that the DMCA actually does give you permission to circumvent these restrictive technologies. 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. So what does interoperability mean? That was my next question. So they have a clear definition later on in that same little bit of the title 17 code, which was very useful. 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. Sharing software for the purpose of violating or encouraging others to violate copyrights has been held illegal. So at this point in thinking and talking about the implications anti-circumvention laws have, we're beginning to understand that intent matters. So when you create a piece of technology to get around anti-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 illegal 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 EU 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. So it's in a slightly different way highlighting what's illegal here. But you're kind of allowed to do it sometimes in the same way you kind of with the DMCA, where if people are using it for non-evil, evil, non-illegal purposes, that's fine. Okay. Now I want to talk about two case studies, tractors 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. And this limited number of stations was actually because the dial would only click to certain frequencies. So it was really easy, 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 could only listen to one radio station. I propose that we think of this as device restrictions management, where we're creating these artificial barriers. You are free to make up your own background for DRM. I did. So what I want you to understand from that is that DRM impacts the physical world. This is Kureg. It's this coffee maker that uses these little pots of pre-ground coffee. They did a thing for a while there where they added DRM to it so that the machine would not work, the software on the machine would not work, unless you were using a Kureg 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. 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 14,000 members. So not only are tractors a big deal, John Deere has this following. At least in the US, it's the standard. 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 a repair person who might be expensive to come out and talk about it. Right. So if you want to get your own device, it turns out it's not that expensive, but you're avoiding your warranty when you're interacting with it. So this EULA in this particular case makes it so that you just can't repair your own tractor. This is made possible by anti-circumvention laws. So we have anti-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 when there's a problem with the tractor, that's their fault and that you can't fix because of them. 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 FarmHack. This is a little shoutout 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. Web standards are designed by the World Wide Web Consortium. They're voted on by member organizations. Becoming a member organization costs a lot of money in most cases. Those are the things that we're using to define how people are supposed to design web pages and supposed to share information with users of the web. DRM 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. Once something is a normalized technology, it's easier for people moving forward to justify creating even more restrictive technologies. It has all the same downsides that we see in DRM and other places, even though it's on the web. 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. You can't, in a lot of cases, when media especially is being locked down. 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 DRM? Where are the places that we can see it? If you want a humorous list, check out a Cory Doctorow talk. He gave a great one at Libra Planet in 2017. He gave another one at the previous hope. Here's 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 Fosden by Deb Bryant. Thanks, Deb Bryant. Karen Sandler is a free software and user freedom activist who has a defibrillator. She has a medical implant in her heart. A little side there, Dick Cheney also has a defibrillator in his heart. And when he was vice president of the United States, the Wi-Fi in it was turned off. The Wi-Fi in Karen Sandler's heart, I think it's turned, you should listen to her talk about it. 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 then suddenly the lifespan of 10 years becomes the lifespan of much shorter. And then you find yourself needing to have heart surgery again. Heart surgery is invasive, however you cut it. We also see it in vehicles. Vehicles are very scary, dangerous things. They kill lots of people. When you don't have control of your vehicle, like, there's a great little video anecdote I saw on the internet of somebody driving his car and then somebody else just 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'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 pre-Christmas dinner at a friend's house around the kitchen table, which was so great. 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 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 policy makers. We can talk to nonprofits. We can talk to companies who we're buying things from. We can talk to people who are using DRM. 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 are 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 are 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 were 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. And hopefully you'll go forth and talk to more people. I'd 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 email address and my status net and my Twitter. Thank you very much. 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 mic if you have a question and put yourself in the front. You can totally cut the line. All right. So we started with microphone number three, please. Hello. Thank you for this talk. So you said during your presentation that DRM solves no 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. Hi. I do music research into popular music and I've purchased audio files which are DRM'd 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 the old model of playing concerts and selling CDs doesn't work anymore. And also no one is willing to play for music, except for on-streaming services. So I thought the protecting model, for example, the WMA 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 be your argument for those who are actually doing creative work and expect some sort of material or money arriving at their end if you don't have this option anymore? Sure. So the question is about whether we, like, what kind of arguments can we make to artists who have lost other money-making opportunities, specifically musicians in this case? I'm 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 have mostly anecdata 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 not just the people listening to music but the people creating the music that respects the music being created. I'm in a band and I'm very lucky that with my band we not only really stare at 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. Okay. 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 MP. And if I understand you correctly, you don't think that for the so-called rights holders, there's any benefit in DRM either. If there's no benefit, why are they doing it? Control. Capitalism agreed. Pick your 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 expertise for it well. Okay. It'll be great to see some actual research that backs this. Yeah. I don't have it off the top of my head. Okay. One last question. Microphone number two, please. So this greed and this control, I think for a company you have a really economic incentive to actually implement DRM software because this control gains you the economy and also provides a vendor lock-in. So making DRM free software or making DRM free content, I don't see how this would impact the economic incentive for companies that actually implement this DRM. Is there a way that we can punish companies that implement DRM? Is there a way that we can punish companies that implement DRM? I heard some clapping. Do you guys want to clap for that? I mean, especially in the economic sense. The things that people do usually is 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. We're talking about money, but money isn't the issue here and it's not the question we should be talking about. What we should be talking about is what is the responsibilities of people creating and owning this ephemeral concept of materials to you and to everyone else and to society at large. Okay, thanks. So unfortunately we run out of time, so there's no more time for questions. Please stay here, stay seated and give another round of warm applause to Molly.