Legal Aspects of Drm Use
With the coming into force of the WIPO Copyright Treaty or WCT in the year 1996, digital rights management system has received some legal recognition internationally. Especially article 11 of the treaty is relevant since it requires that nations who are parties to the treaty should enact laws to prevent DRM circumvention.
In addition the member countries in the World Intellectual Property Organization are implementing the treaty. In United States the DMCA or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act takes care of DRM implementation. European directives to the copyrights take care of use of DRM in Europe. Despite some related controversies, the French Parliament also adopted DRM with limited application in 2006.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act
The act has extended the copyright laws in United States and was unanimously voted in the year 1998. With the coming into force of this law the production or dissemination of information relating to such products that enables you to circumvent copy restriction methods have been criminalized. It is now law that if you circumvent a valid access control process then it will amount to criminal action and you will be liable to be penalized under the law for such action. With this law both DRM and the rights of the copyright holders are now safer to some extent.
This however does not prevent you such circumvention that might be necessary for fair use of the products or documents whether normal or pdf document. The process is called safe harbor. The cliché is that it depends on the intention of the user how he is going to use this relaxation. If the circumvention is done with the intention of fair use and to remove interoperability problems, it will be no problem. On the other hand if the circumvention is used for some other purpose likes making unauthorized copies and dissemination of information, it may create problems. This has also rendered the DMCA ineffective to a large extent in protecting DRM.
DRM in Europe
It was on 25th April in the year 2007 that the European Parliament came up with their first directive on the issue standardizing the criminal laws in the member states. Now the members are obliged to consider violation of the copyrights as crime if such violation is committed with some commercial purposes. Commitment of the crime can render you punishable with various penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment, depending on the gravity of the crime committed.
Most of the European Parliament members have supported the move of the European Parliament. Many of them have adopted the directives with some minor modifications befitting their local conditions. However the consensus is that sanctions against violations should apply only when DRM is violated for commercial purposes. Copying for personal use and non-commercial purposes have been mostly excluded from the purview of the enactments.
The International scenario
Since copyright violations have been the concern of most of the people who are in the creative fields in the digital world, there have been constant efforts to legalize DRM and to build up a favorable atmosphere in support of it. Several ongoing projects at the international level are now working on the issue. It is expected that some consensus opinion will come up soon and standardize the legal aspects relating to DRM internationally.
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