Fairer usage contracts for DRM

Abstract

DRM has been widely promoted as a means to enforce copyright. In many previous papers, it has been argued that DRM gives too much power to rights holders and actually goes beyond the restrictions provided by copyright laws. In this paper we argue that DRM does not actually implement the fundamentals of copyright law, and is rather a mechanism for enforcing licence and contract restrictions on digital data. However, we believe that DRM does have a place in the digital distribution of copyrighted works and present two mechanisms that would allow users to get a more balanced deal from the rights holders. The mechanisms we present also allow for newer business models that cannot be easily implemented with current DRM systems.