Defective by Design... anti-DRM campaign...

About DefectiveByDesign

We Oppose DRM!

DefectiveByDesign.org is a broad-based anti-DRM campaign that is targeting Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and DRM distributors. The campaign aims to make all manufacturers wary about bringing their DRM-enabled products to market. DRM products have features built-in that restrict what jobs they can do. These products have been intentionally crippled from the users' perspective, and are therefore "defective by design". This campaign will identify these “defective” products, and target them for elimination. Our aim is the abolition of DRM as a social practice.

What is DRM?

Big Media describe DRM as Digital Rights Management. However, since its purpose is to restrict you the user, it is more accurate to describe DRM as Digital Restrictions Management. DRM Technology can restricts users’ access to movies, music, literature and software, indeed all forms of digital data. Unfree software implementing DRM technology is simply a prison in which users can be put to deprive them of the rights that the law would otherwise allow them.

From Richard Stallman, President of the FSF:
”The motive for DRM schemes is to increase profits for those who impose them, but their profit is a side issue when millions of people’s freedom is at stake; desire for profit, though not wrong in itself, cannot justify denying the public control over its technology. Defending freedom means thwarting DRM.”

We oppose Treacherous Computing!

Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them. With a plan they call "Trusted Computing", the Big Media corporations, together with computer companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Intel, have decided that your computer should obey them instead of you. Treacherous Computing is now inside most new computers and devices, and is the bedrock upon which DRM is being built.

Can Free software licensing help protect us from DRM?

One common view among programmers is that the GNU General Public License (GPL) - the software license covering most of GNU/Linux - should say nothing at all about DRM, because DRM is a technical problem, and can be solved by technical means. This was true five years ago—all DRM was ultimately software, all software is data, and all data is mutable. So, DRM could always be circumvented. In other words, these people are perfectly happy to have DRM so long as it is toothless.

But even if it were acceptable to have DRM from which programmers could free themselves, that’s not the DRM we have in 2006. Modern DRM is based on Treacherous Computing (TC). The Trusted Computing Group realized that a secret cannot be kept in software that is widely distributed. So, they moved the secret, and the root enforcement mechanism into hardware. From the Trusted Platform Module’s private key grows a twisted tree of "trust", where "trust" is defined to mean that your computer does what others expect of it. You can't chop down the tree except from the root, and that key is inside a piece of hardware. Now, you not only need to be a programmer, but a hardware engineer.

The new draft of the GPL contains explicit provisions to protect free software from DRM.

You can help thwart DRM.

• Take the pledge to fight DRM, join DefectiveByDesign.org
• Refuse to purchase hardware which includes Treacherous Computing or Digital Restrictions Management functionality.
• Boycott CDs and DVD's with DRM, and download music and video from sites that don't force DRM upon you.
• Let your public institutions of learning and research know that they should also boycott DRM. See Richard Stallman’s letter to the Boston Public Library as an example.