What happens if someone tries to protect a CC-licensed work with digital rights management (DRM) tools?
If a person uses DRM tools to restrict any of the rights granted in the license, that person violates the license. All of our licenses prohibit licensees from “impos(ing) any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.” Encryption or an access limitation is not necessarily a technical protection measure prohibited by the licenses. For example, content sent via email and encrypted with the recipient’s public key does not restrict use of the Work by the recipient. Likewise, limiting recipients to a set of users (e.g., with a username and password) does not restrict use of the Work by the recipients. In the cases above, encryption or an access limitation is not incompatible with the prohibition on DRM because the recipient is not prevented from exercising all rights granted by the license (including rights of further redistribution). If, however,
