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Cory Doctorow.
Fighting digital rights management … Cory Doctorow. Photograph: Peter DeJong/AP
Fighting digital rights management … Cory Doctorow. Photograph: Peter DeJong/AP

Whose digital content is it anyway?

This article is more than 9 years old
Author Cory Doctorow is heading a campaign to ban digital locks on ebooks, music and movies

In my last column I wrote about Tesco’s graceful exit from the ebook business, offloading its customers – and their precious libraries – to Kobo. While applauding the commitment to preserving customers’ purchases, it remains a shame that this sort of transfer is even necessary. Storing books – or anything else – in “the cloud” always comes with a trade-off: everything you put there is backed up and presumably safe for a while, but it’s also still controlled by the retailer- – not by the customer who legally purchased it.

More than just a question about books, this is a fundamental issue at the heart of the content industry and the internet itself. And now the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has fought for digital civil liberties since 1990, has launched a campaign to eradicate digital rights management (DRM) called Apollo 1201, referring to the section of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that prevents users tampering with the digital locks on the things they own, such as books, music and movies.

To lead the fight, the EFF has brought in Cory Doctorow, celebrated author, co-founder of blog institution Boing Boing, and originator of “Doctorow’s Law”, which sums up the dilemma neatly: “Any time someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.” For Doctorow, and for many others, computers should exist to do what we tell them to do: “It’s the difference between ‘Yes, master’ and ‘I can’t let you do that, Dave’.” Legal challenges to DRM strike at the heart of this issue: is it us, or distant, unaccountable corporations that control not only our media, but the software in our phones, our cars, and our fire alarms? The name Apollo 1201 also refers to the scale of the struggle: it’s a moonshot; it might take a decade, but it’s a stand worth taking, and fighting for.

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