February 3rd, 2006
British librarians say DRM hampers the work of librarians.
“As custodians of human memory, a number would keep digital works in perpetuity and may need to be able to transfer them to other formats in order to preserve them and make the content fully accessible and usable once out of copyright.”
In its written submission to the group, the British Library said DRM must not “exert excessive control on access to information”.
“This will fundamentally threaten the longstanding and accepted concepts of fair dealing and library privilege and undermine, or even prevent, legitimate public good access.”
Yer darn right! I wrote a paper saying the same thing last year in school. DRM should be a major concern of all librarians.
A step in the right direction is this: Michael Godwin’s primer on DRM for librarians.
There’s still NO substitute for (acid-free) paper. The BOOK is still, and will remain THE thing….at least for some of us, readers and professionals (real archivists especially) alike.
Digital is definitely no substitute for physical. Not at this stage of our technological development, that’s for sure. But that doesn’t really mean anything in relation to Digital Rights Management, which remains all kinds of dumb.