DRM and freedom of information
I found this on BoingBoing.net, but I'll link to the original posting on the Technology Liberation Front.
Now, I'm quite ignorant about DRM (digital rights management), and this is apparently where Microsoft intends to make its future billions, so I clearly have some reading to do. Also, I have no firsthand experience with this sort of thing, so I'm taking the posting at face value for the sake of asking the questions below.
But even if you don't know about DRM, this story is interesting.
The gist: a digital government document has been protected from copying and pasting by a password system. Basically, because the American government has used a specific technology, it has limited how people can access and use information to which they are supposed to have unfettered access.
Given that large organizations (like governments) are digitizing huge amounts of their paper files to allow stakeholders (citizens, shareholders, community members etc) to get at info without bogging down workers, this is an interesting development. How will it affect FOI requests (already a ponderous process) if a government puts every document it has online, but makes them untouchable?
1 comment:
As it happens, I'm doing some market research on DRM technologies with the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, based at the University of Ottawa faculty of law. If you're interested in understanding DRM technologies better, and we all should be because there are serious implications, as your post implies, CIPPIC is a good source of information coming from the good-guys side of the fence (from my perspective, anyhow).
Here's a link to CIPPIC: http://www.cippic.ca.
You can find their DRM page from the menu on the left under FAQs & Resources.
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