Sun has launched an "open source DRM" project called "Open Media Commons." I have spent hours reading their docs and I've spoken with their project lead on this and I can't make any sense of it — how can you have a technology that restricts what users do (DRM) while allowing users to modify it, including in ways that remove the restrictions (open source), and what is the word "commons" doing there when Creative Commons licenses forbid the use of DRM in connection with the more than 17,000,000 Creative Commons-licensed works in circulation? EFF's put out a short advisory about this:
Yesterday, Sun Microsystems announced its new "Open Media Commons," with a goal of "[s]pecify[ing] open, royalty-free digital rights management and codec standards" to "ensur[e] intellectual property protection." The problem with this approach is that making DRM "open" and "royalty-free" doesn't make it any less damaging and counter-productive.
People have the legal right to make fair uses of content. They have the legal right to use materials in the public domain. They have the legal right to use publicly owned works, such as government-gathered facts. Any software system, open or not, that blocks us from making these legal uses of our digital content is bad, especially when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal for us to circumvent the copyright protection to make these legal uses.
This "Open Media Commons" says a lot about fostering sharing and so forth, but there's precious little to indicate that it will be any less threatening than the Microsoft DRM that it's supposed to challenge.
