Well, OK, I do know what DRM is. But the biggest problem in the fight against it is the term itself. Even if he or she knows that it stands for digital rights management, the average, intelligent, but non-digerati person on the street has no clue what it means.
There are plenty of signs that book publishers are losing their taste for putting locks on the media you buy, just as music publishers have mostly done. But the process could be speeded up, I believe, if we could just come up with a better term for DRM.
As with the similarly opaque term net neutrality, which more people would favor if they understood what it was, DRM—term and practice alike—is protected by its obscurity. I admit that most of the alternatives I can come up with—locked media, restricted use rights, captive e-books—don’t resonate. So here’s an opening for someone out there who has the killer term that will, in fact, kill DRM, once and for all.
In the meantime, why not visit the Day Against DRM website and learn more about why you too should be against DRM?
Of all the publishing-industry reactions to the debut of Apple’s iPad so far, the strangest may be a suggestion that the iPad and other e-readers will allow magazines to give up the Web. In a brief