Digital Rights Management: Hurting, Helping and Everything in Between

Why digital rights management exists and whom it’s helping

Recording companies, film companies and even e-book companies, to ensure that they get their profit and money from consumers, use digital Rights Management. These companies do not want consumers “ripping them off” by mass distributing their music and such through various way.  Companies who use this include Apple, Amazon and AOL. They want consumers to pay for music/film/book and to be able to share it with one other person. But don’t think that digital rights management is always only fighting against individual people, they are also fighting against hardware manufacturers and publishers, and an infamous example of this is the site limewire.

How digital rights management works

Digital rights management works to protect legal contents and to protect company assets, which include a musician’s song and album. We might not think of music as something that can be or should be bought but it seems like at the end of the day, we do forget those who work behind the scenes that help to bring the artist’s music to us (such as talent scouts, music producers..etc.) What digital rights management also does besides protecting is also punishing. They have the right to fine those individuals and even larger hardware manufacturers and to bring them to court and to make them pay for the illegally downloaded music and the illegally mass sharing and distributing of music. Even if the individual artists themselves believe in the free distribution of their music, there might not be much they can do about it because it is the recording company that signs them and in a way they are an asset to the recording company. Therefore digital rights management is not always a choice. 

What it all means on a personal level

Digital rights management will punish. As much as I think that yeah, music should be free for all it’s hard to keep in mind that when you are paying for that CD or for that itunes download that only 20 percent actually goes to the artists themselves and the rest goes to the crew and team that have brought them to us, the audience. Legally, everyone is only allowed to share their music with one person and so sites such as bear share and youtube to mp3 help to legalize music downloads because they aren’t mass distributing the music freely to the world is rather in a peer to peer format. So fans can still get music for free but just through a little more work to find legal ways or to just buy it and think of the people who worked to make that album happen.