Is Creative Commons involved in digital rights management (DRM)?
No. We are in the business of digital rights expression, not management. Our tools make it easy to say what rights an author is reserving. But we do not provide tools for enforcing the rights the author reserves. Digital rights management (or “DRM”) does. In addition to digitally expressing rights, a DRM system provides technology for enforcing those rights. Why don’t we use technology to enforce rights? There are too many reasons to describe here. Perhaps the most familiar is the fact that technology cannot protect freedoms such as “fair use.” Put differently, “fair use” can’t be coded. But more importantly, we believe, technological enforcement burdens unplanned creative reuse of creative work. We want to encourage such use. And we, along with many others, are concerned that the ecology for creativity will be stifled by the pervasive use of technology to “manage” rights. Copyrights should be respected, no doubt. But we prefer they be respected the old fashioned way — by people acting
No; we prefer to describe the technical aspect of our work as digital rights description. Whereas digital rights management tools try to prevent certain uses of copyright works and restrict your rights, we’re trying to promote certain uses and grant you rights. Instead of having software say, “No, you cannot modify this file,” we want it to say something more like “The author will let you modify this file, but in return, give her credit.” While the tools are similar, our goals are different. Instead of using one of the many DRM formats, we’ve chosen to go with the W3C’s RDF/XML format. Instead of saying “We’re not placing these restrictions,” we say “We grant you these permissions,” so that search engines and other applications can easily find generously licensed works and sort them. A physical analogy may be helpful. It’s DRM’s job to put up signs that say “No Trespassing.” It would seem silly to take those signs and change them to say “Yes Trespassing,” which is what using a DRM form
