It's a well-known story by now: Europe, the US, and plenty of other countries have made it generally illegal to circumvent DRM, even when users want to do something legal with the content. Sure, it sounds bad and Ars complains about it all the time, but come on—do anticircumvention laws really prevent real people in the real world from doing real things with their content? Or are the complaints largely dreamed up by copyleft activists who would like nothing more than to see the term "intellectual property" disappear into the tentacled maw of Cthulhu?

According to the first empirical study of its kind in the UK, by Cambridge law professor Patricia Akester, it's the former. DRM is so rage-inducing, even to ordinary, legal users of content, that it can even drive the blind to download illegal electronic Bibles.

Problems, problems everywhere

Akester's new paper, "Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment," does pretty much what its title implies. Akester spent the last few years interviewing dozens of lecturers, end users, government officials, rightsholders, and DRM developers to find how DRM and anticircumvention laws affected actual use.

Problems were not hard to find. When Akester spoke with the UK's Royal National Institute of Blind People, Head of Accessibility Richard Orme told her that those with sight problem have the right "to create accessible copies of works" by using screen reading software, for instance, but these rights can be blocked be restrictive e-book DRM.

Analog "equivalents" aren't often equivalent in any meaningful sense of the word

"The RNIB is very watchful of the issues around DRM," said Orme, "because it can see evidence of DRM preventing access to content in a world where digital technology actually makes information more accessible rather than less."

As an example, take the case of Lynn Holdsworth, who bought an electronic copy of the Bible from Amazon. It refused to allow text-to-speech, which Holdsworth required. She contacted Amazon, which has a policy of not refunding e-books after a successful download.

"On Amazon’s advice, Lynn Holdsworth contacted the publisher, but the publisher referred her back to Amazon," writes Akester. "Neither Amazon nor the publisher were able to assist her and she ended up obtaining an illegal copy of the work (which her screen reader application could access)."

Rightsholders will always point out that fair use and other exemptions to copyright don't necessarily allow access to any format the user wants. Professors who need film clips can just camcord off the screen! The blind can use Braille versions!

But analog "equivalents" aren't often equivalent in any meaningful sense of the word. Holdsworth noted that "it is not always possible to resort to non-digital [books] because of their size. She supplied an example: the standard version of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince contains about 600 pages, the large print version is only slightly bigger (at 998 pages), but the Braille version actually entails ten large volumes of text."

Libraries and lecturers

The British Library runs into issues with DRM on a daily basis—especially when it needs to transfer materials to new formats for storage or preservation.

Everybody that Akester spoke with had some problem of their own. Film lecturers, who are allowed to put together clip compilations under UK law, still can't (legally) bypass the CSS encryption on DVDs.

Lecturers who don't know how to bypass the DRM are faced with an unappealing choice: those "unable to extract a clip from a commercial DVD lodged in their library collection are forced to tailor the content of their lectures to the VHS materials at their disposal. They contend that this happens frequently, given that most commercial DVDs are DRM protected."

End users are allowed to time-shift programs, but Jill Johnstone of the National Consumer Council notes that "the way DRM is being used is causing serious problems for consumers, including unreasonable limitations on the use of digital products and infringement of consumer rights. "

And the British Library runs into issues with DRM on a daily basis—especially when it needs to transfer materials to new formats for storage or preservation.

Akester interviewed Ars Technica's own Peter Bright, a British Library specialist on digital archiving, who pointed out just how ridiculous the whole situation has become, especially involving DVDs. "For these duplicates and migrations to be useful, the DRM protection must necessarily be defeated. The reality is that this is generally easy to do—for all the time and money spent on trying to protect optical discs, software workarounds are cheap, abundant and fairly reliable.”

Edge cases

To DRM developers and rightsholders, though, these are just edge cases, not worth coding into DRM schemes. Creating DRM that has any sort of security while still accommodating every legal use in every possible market is simply infeasible—though this does lead rightsholders to question the wisdom of DRM.

Shira Perlmutter of global music trade group IFPI told Akester in an interview, "You are not going to get a one size fits all DRM that will deal both with the consumer and the special interests exceptions and, in any case, you do not want to give up a system that works for 99 percent of cases because there is a particular issue with a particular kind of user when you can let the system work and then deal with that user."

Are rightsholders willing to "deal with users" who experience problems? Some are, but Akester found that many require a legislative prod before taking any action.

The study confirms what anyone who has ever wanted to rip a DVD to their computer or iPod could have told you: DRM, coupled with anticircumvention laws, makes pirates of us all.

Akester offers some possible solutions to the problem. They are worth reading, but they are also unlikely to be implemented for years. In the meantime, copyright exceptions for the blind, libraries, teachers, and for fair use will continue to be limited by a crafty mixture of code and law.

Of course, as Bright points out, the massive lobbying, legislative, legal, and technical effort that underlies all these DRM regimes does so little to stop piracy that we'd be tempted to laugh at the folly of it all if we weren't already weeping.

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