Digital Rights Management : The Problem of Expanding Ownership Rights

Summary: This book examines the social context of new digital rights management (DRM) technologies in a lively and accessible style.

It sets out the scope of DRM in non-technical terms and then explores the shifts that DRM has produced within the regime of protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs).

Focusing on the social norms around the protection of IPRs, it examines the music industry and software development sector to ask whether the protections established by DRM are legitimate and socially beneficial.

Using these key examples to establish a more general argument, the book's central conclusion is that rather than merely re-establishing threatened rights, the development of DRM has extended the rights of intellectual property owners, and that such an extension violates previous carefully balanced political compromises as regards the maintenance of the public domain.

Key Features: 1. Places DRM in its political context 2. Sets out the social impact of a new and important technology 3.

Accessible and clearly written for a non-technical audience 4.Based on author's extensive research on the political economy of IPRs and information technology The Author: Professor Christopher May is based at the University of Lancaster.

His books include A Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights.

The New Enclosures and The Information Society. A Sceptical View. He has published widely on intellectual property rights.

Readership: This book is aimed at information professionals, librarians, copyright lawyers, technology scholars and campaigners concerned with information society issues around the protection and maintenance of the information commons (or public domain).

Contents: Introduction: setting the scene: Intellectual property and social norms: markets, property and history; scarcity, withholding and the global 'problem' of intellectual property Digital rights management - two trajectories: the problem of 'fair' use; the challenge of digital rights management Digital rights management and the overprotection of rights and the expansion of open alternatives