Cory Doctorow, who has to be the hardest working person on the internet, has rejoined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to continue his work against the pervasive use of digital rights management (DRM) in online content. DRM threatens users’ security and privacy, distorts markets, confiscates public rights, and undermines innovation, according to the EFF. Doctorow will be a special consultant to the EFF’s Apollo 1201 Project (a Doctorow-developed project) with the primary mission of eradicating DRM in our lifetime, referring to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Doctorow has worked against DRM since its inception and is most widely known for Doctorow’s Law of DRM:
“Anytime 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.”
“We’ve seen DRM misused again and again, whether it’s to thwart competition in printer-ink cartridges, to prevent videogame fans from modifying their consoles, or to block consumers from reading the parts’ specifications on their own cars,” said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry in a media release. “Cory has an unparalleled ability to show the public how bad copyright policy tramples on everyone’s rights.”
“No matter how noble your cause, you can’t advance it by insisting that computers everywhere be equipped with spyware to stop people from running the ‘wrong’ code,” said Doctorow in a media release. “The bad guys will still figure out how to run that code, and everyone else will end up with critical infrastructure that, by design, treats them as untrustable attackers and, by design, lets remote parties covertly seize control of the computers around them. We all deserve a better future—one without DRM.”