Digital Rights Management: A Guide for Librarians

Digital Rights Management: A Guide for Librarians (PDF document)
by MICHAEL GODWIN
American Library Association Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP), publication date: January 2006
"This is not an exhaustive list of the ways in which the use of DRM may
create tensions undercutting the balance of rights created by copyright law.
These tensions are fundamental and unavoidable ones, although not everyone
acknowledges this. What makes them unavoidable is that DRM tends to be
precise and immutable, while our copyright law policy tends to be general and dynamic. What makes them fundamental is that democratic societies
need libraries and librarians to support and promote public access to the
broadest range of creative and scholarly work. In practice, this means that, for
the foreseeable future, there will be ongoing tensions between libraries (and
librarians), on the one hand, and DRM-using publishers and rights-holders,
on the other."