The famous research and dialogue project INDICARE focused on consumer issues of Digital Rights Management (DRM). The project's new research on user attitude toward DRM is as following.
That DRM technology has the potential to monitor consumers’ uses of digital
content and to profile their consumption behaviour. We wanted to know if
consumers are aware and possibly concerned about this DRM-related
privacy issue. We only asked this question to respondents that had at least a
basic idea about DRM.
Almost half of those digital video users that have heard about DRM were not
aware of the privacy issue related to DRM (37% have never heard about it
and 9% did not know or did not answer). At the same time, the acceptance
of monitoring is relatively high: almost one third of the users explicitly
accept monitoring or do not mind (see figure 5.4). Only one quarter of the
users dislike DRM because of related privacy issues. Again, these results are
very much in line with findings from our digital music survey in February
2005.
Interestingly, heavy Internet users and/or frequent digital video users are as
uninformed about DRM-related privacy issues as light users. The highest
share of uninformed users is among teenagers.
We also find some significant differences between countries: in France, only
18% have never heard about DRM-related privacy issues. This is in line with
a general familiarity with DRM as a technology. More than
half of the Spanish users are not aware of privacy issues, despite the high
share of heavy Internet users and frequent digital video users. Rejection of
DRM due to privacy issues among those users that have heard about DRM is
highest in France and Germany.
Consumers accept usage restrictions for specific objectives
To find out more about consumers’ attitude towards technical protection
measures and usage restrictions, we asked them to what extend they agree
or disagree that technological measures should be employed in order to
achieve certain goals. This question was meant to find out if consumers
accept usage restrictions and DRM if they are applied for specific objectives.
Figure 5.5 clearly shows that the majority of digital video users fully agree
that technologies and usage restrictions are acceptable to protect children
from viewing offending content. This is an actual challenge, e.g. for mobile
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operators , the importance of which can be expected to increase in the
future.
If DRM technologies are intended to allow consumers to pay only for what
they really want, an overall of two thirds agree to the application of technical
measures such as DRM for this reason. Similarly, there is a relatively high
rate of agreement that the creative work of artists needs to be rewarded and
that valuable content needs to be protected from illegal distribution.
The idea that DRM can help to offer consumers a broader choice of services
is not very well established with consumers. Only about a quarter fully
accepts this as a reason for employing protective technologies, which might
have to do with the fact that there is not much variety on the market yet.
Generally, consumers of all age groups and countries as well as heavy and
light users are in agreement with their evaluation concerning reasons
justifying usage restrictions. But there is a relatively high share of 10% to
15% of users that do not have a clear opinion on any of the questions (“don’t
know / no answer”).
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