Digital Rights Management from a Consumer’s perspective

The purpose of this article is to consider the impact of DRM on people's use of digital content and on its availability and accessibility for consumers. It describes the area of conflict between the economic interest of the media industry to use DRM to protect rights to and marketing of digital content, and consumers' desire to use digital content in accordance with their own rights and legitimate interests without suffering any unfavourable consequences as they do so. The article explains why the current approach, where DRM is considered to be exclusively a copyright issue, is too narrow. It lists a series of equally important individual or informational interests which must be respected, linking DRM to the protection of consumers and access to digital content. The article makes some suggestions how this theme might be usefully dealt with in the future.