Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), the software that comes bolted to your digital media and computerized devices and tries to police your behavior. The major media companies are its masters, and they justify it as a necessary evil to prevent filesharing, calling it Digital Rights Management. But it does more than that, and worse than that. Giving its owners power over our cars, medical devices, phones, computers, and more, it opens a deep crack in our digital rights and freedoms. That crack will only get wider and more dangerous as our societies continue to interweave with technology.
Governments and corporations steer the massive technosocial system that perpetuates DRM and makes it profitable, often steering it away from the best interests of the technology's actual users. Committed to a more ethical technological future, our movement pushes back.
Today, on the tenth anniversary of the International Day Against DRM, we have a lot of progress to celebrate, and we still have a lot of work to do. At events today around the world (eleven have been announced at the time of writing) we are broadening our movement. We're working to explain DRM to everyone who is affected by it, so that together we can regain popular control of our cultural media and our technology.
Join us today on dayagainstdrm.org to take action against DRM. Learn more about the problem, and join the conversation about how we can eliminate it and make a freer, better world. There's also a list of discounted ebook offerings from stores participating in the Day. To participate on social media, use the hashtag #dayagainstdrm.
We have a new kind of action for this tenth-anniversary year -- we've published a timeline of the first ten years of the International Day Against DRM, and we want you to help us extend the timeline into the future, imagining the steps that will lead us to victory and the elimination of DRM from the world.
Happy International Day Against DRM. I hope to see you on the DRM-elimination crew discussion list or the #dbd IRC channel on Freenode.
One last thing -- Defective by Design is powered by individual donations from people like you. If you can, please pitch in to support us so that our year-round work and next year's Day can be even better. All contributions are tax-deductible in the United States.