DRM and Consumer Acceptability
ø
Our colleagues at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam released, as part of the INDICARE project, an interesting report on Digital Rights Management and Consumer Acceptability. It seeks to provide an overview of the state of the (European) discussion from a multi-disciplinary perspective, and analyzes social, legal, technical, and economic issues.
The report concludes that surprisingly little is know about consumers’ acceptance level of DRM, and what users’ expectations are regarding the use of digital content. The report, inter alia, calls for a better involvement of the consumer side and a joint dialogue between the market players.
The report will be updated. Three pointers to Berkman reports and papers in this context:
* re section 6.5 of the report on alternative business models, see also “Content and Control: Assessing the Impact of Policy Choices on Potential Online Business Modles in the Music and Film Industries.”
* re section 4.2 on the EU-Copyright Directive, see also “Transposing the Copyright Directive: Legal Protection of Technological Measures in EU-Member States,” and the respective Berkman project website.
* re section 4.4 on interoperability, see John Palfrey, Holding Out for an Interoperable DRM Standard, in Christoph Beat Graber, Carlo Govoni, Michael Girsberger, and Mira Nenova (eds.), Digital Rights Management: The End of Collecting Societies? (Forthcoming, April 2005.)
