Question

B. Discussion Thread: "Digital Rights Management"

Some people argue that digital rights management violates the public’s right to fair uses. Should people or companies that create intellectual property have the right to offer it for sale (or license) in a form protected by their choice of digital rights management technology (assuming the restrictions are clear to potential customers)? Should people have a legal right to develop, sell, buy and use devices and software to remove digital rights management restrictions for fair uses?

Companies selling music or movies can include digital rights management tools that cause files to self-destruct after a specified amount of time. Give some advantages and disadvantages of this practice. Do you think it is ethical for entertainment businesses to sell content with such a limitation? Why or why not?

Answer 1

I do support the prevailance of digital rights management. There should be some rules and regulation on every business aspect to protect from violations. Digital rights offers features like copyright protection. This is very much mandatory while creating a new product. If there is no copyrighting privilage, the content may be copied and edited by someone else and the original producer may have nothing to do with it.

People shouldn't violate the digital right management system and sell products, instead, people can develop digital products and claim for a digital right protection. This will enable them to have the previliage of the ownership of the product protected. This is not the violation of public's right to use it fair. If it is not protected, everyone may not use it in a fair mood. People may misuse the product and may alter it in different ways. This may cause several problem ethically and in business aspect. To regulate this, the digital right management system issues copyright protection for the owner.

Advantages:

• Complete protection of the product being altered
• Reduces ethical issues and business issues
• Ownership is dedicated to creator only
• Business will go smoothly, else people will make free clones

Disadvantages:

• Normal people may not afford some products and using free copy will be a violation
• People cannot use copyrighted music to their simple casual videos
• No one can have the source code of a software to experiment an advancement.

The chances for copyright violation is more in the entertainment business and is mostly done there. Music and video creators produce the tracks and videos with so much effort and others can simply copy it to their projects. This should be prevented and that is what digital right management is doing. Even it is entertainment purpose, it is a big deal as the entertainment business is one of the biggest business today. Therefore it is ethical to to have some limitation on entertainment business.