Tuesday, October 13, 2015, at 12:00 pm
Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Cory Doctorow wants to kill all DRM in the world forever, within a decade and as an EFF Special Advisor, he's working with them to do just that.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies attempt to control what you can and can't do with the media and hardware you've purchased. Corporations claim that DRM is necessary to fight copyright infringement online and keep consumers safe from viruses. But there's no evidence that DRM helps fight either of those. Instead DRM helps big business stifle innovation and competition by making it easy to quash "unauthorized" uses of media and technology.
DRM has proliferated thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), which sought to outlaw any attempt to bypass DRM.
Fans shouldn't be treated like criminals, and companies shouldn't get an automatic veto over user choice and innovation. EFF has led the effort to free the iPhone and other smartphones, is working to uncover and explain the restrictions around new hardware and software, has fought for the right to make copies of DVDs, and sued Sony-BMG for their "rootkit" CD copy-protection scheme.
About Cory
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of the YA graphic novel IN REAL LIFE, the nonfiction business book INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE< and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER and novels for adults like RAPTURE OF THE NERDS and MAKERS. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
About Jonathan
Jonathan Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at the Harvard Law School Library, and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, human computing, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education.
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