When people think of managing metadata to include information about files, they often immediately think of Digital Rights Management, or DRM. DRM claims to do what we are actually trying to achieve: we want to help you manage licenses according to a set of digital rights and freedoms. What DRM actually does is restrict access to content, and is sometimes called Digital Restriction Management by free and open source software activists.
Our work might easily be mistaken for DRM, but there are some very important differences. DRM wants to be widely disseminated through files and software; we want to connect metadata and software by including our code in as many tools and web services as we can. DRM is based on concealing what it’s doing and relies on subterfuge. We want users to stop worrying about attribution as we develop better tools to automate it, which might seem like we are hiding something.
In order to put works in context and inform creative content producers that their work has been used, our software needs access to file creation histories. Unlike with DRM, however, users will always have the choice to circumvent this. We deliberately shape our tools so they can be used with users’ own hardware, allowing everyone to stay in control of their data. We also have problems with keeping our information attached to the metadata. It would be easy to resort to restrictive measures and make it impossible to expunge information or wipe metadata clean. Instead, we constantly engage in processes of critical thought to avoid exactly this situation: we want users to have the option of removing data if they want or need to.
Our software is also designed to maintain an attribution chain (link) and deliver a pingback when an artist’s work has been used: this in particular feels like DRM, which says that you must ignore the remixer’s wishes if you want the service to continue functioning without a gap. We want to allow users to have a gap if they want: if a remixer doesn’t want the original artist or previous remixers to be informed that their work has been used, the pingback is cancelled.
We think it’s important that the user is responsible for their actions, not the software. Enforcing law is the responsibility of living and thinking people (police, justice system, politicians, administration), not of technology. If software automatically restricts us from doing something illegal, we will not develop a healthy sense of moral and legal responsibility for our actions. More technology is then needed to enforce the law, which leads to technology paternalism, manipulation, and incapacitation. Free software makes users responsible for their own actions by refusing to allow restrictions: if we added something restrictive into our software, any user could remove it if they wanted to. Free software is the opposite of restricted software, and the Free Software movement relies on the autonomy and free will of users rather than a threat of punishment for transgressing a restriction boundary.
We are concerned about user-friendly defaults (link), and in order to make sure that the infrastructure we’re offering remains independent, we are developing an NGO to allow a community of users to weigh in on the development of our projects. With any luck, our software could replace DRM someday, changing restriction to freedom.
read original post on Claire Litton's Site
