Despite a total of 1,414 signing an online petition on the UK government's e-petition website calling for the outlawing of Digital Rights Management (DRM), the UK government has rejected the call for it to be banned, but instead considers DRM a means of bringing value to consumers, such as enable content providers to offer consumers better choice of how they consume content. The government did however also acknowledge that the technology could weaken consumer rights.
In the government's response, they mention that the consumers' rights and needs need to be safeguarded and consumers need to be informed of any restrictions applied on a product. This announcement coincides with Steve Job's recommendation to eliminate DRM to encourage interoperability and boost music download sales. Besides interoperability issues, DRM has caused other problems in the past including the recent example of where Sony BMG's use of Rootkits caused widespread anger and protest due to the serious problem it caused with consumer's PCs when an affected disc was loaded.
From what I can see, even if all the DRM technology providers manage to agree on an interoperable DRM solution, there will still be many problems that only a DRM free solution could solve:
- There are a wide range of MP3 players on the market that have no support at all for DRM, including many budget MP3 players still being sold today.
- Most (if not all) portable DVD players lack support for DRM protected audio. For example, while most MP3 capable DVD players also support the WMA format, so far I have not encountered any that will play DRM protected audio.
- The majority of services that allow music to be written to Audio CD effectively renders DRM useless anyway, since these discs can be ripped back as ordinary MP3 files. The services that try copy protecting the written audio CD also causes problems in that these CDs are not compatible with certain CD players.
- Nearly every song sold with DRM protection is already illegally distributed as an unprotected MP3. It's like trying to keep something secret that is widely known about! This means that when consumers decide to buy DRM protected music, they are effectively paying the content provider to tell them what they can and cannot do with their music.
- Finally, for research, students cannot make use of sample clips of DRM protected audio, something they could easily do with most audio CDs.
