Digital Rights Management

Damaška, Mladen. (2015). Digital Rights Management. BSc thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Information Science. [mentor Stančić, Hrvoje].

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Abstract

Digital Rights Management or DRM is a complex and controversial topic, as it pits users' rights against the copyright holders' and exists in a grey area of legal give and take. The video games industry is a good place from where to analyze this phenomenon since it had some form of DRM integrated since its beginnings. In this thesis the gaming industry's history is analyzed where crucial points of contest in the DRM debate could be found. In the end there is no easy answer to the DRM debate and all that can be done is to take a look at the examples provided by the video games industry and see where each incident went wrong and whether it has been remedied in newer iterations of DRM systems. There is no final answer to the question whether DRM is a good or a bad thing, merely that each of its implementations has both advantages and disadvantages for both users and copyright holders, and a balance between those two is the only reasonable goal.

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