Digital Rights Management
Digital Rights Management
[Black Hat is standing on an advancing glacier] Black Hat: Dear Sony, Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Apple: Let's make a deal. You stop trying to tell me where, when, and how I play my movies and music, and I won't crush your homes under my inexorably advancing wall of ice.
There appears to be a larger version of Black Hat, drawn in pencil and erased, behind him. The smaller figure makes the inexorably advancing wall of ice appear correspondingly larger.

Digital rights management (DRM) is a class of methods for controlling digital files, such as by preventing media from playing on any device besides the device from which the purchase is made. It is used by several major companies, as it makes it more difficult to pirate media, which they claim cuts into their profits. Those companies typically also lobby for laws forbidding circumvention of DRM techniques, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
However, DRM is usually disliked by consumers, as it makes it difficult to use their purchased media. For example, if they buy a new computer, there's no guarantee that their DRM-covered media will be usable on the new computer. Thus, Black Hat is suggesting to the pro-DRM organizations Sony , Microsoft , the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and Apple that they stop their DRM-fiddling and lobbying, and he'll stop his inexorable ice-wall.
The title text refers readers to law professor Lawrence Lessig 's book Free Culture .
[Black Hat is standing on an advancing glacier] Black Hat: Dear Sony, Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Apple: Let's make a deal. You stop trying to tell me where, when, and how I play my movies and music, and I won't crush your homes under my inexorably advancing wall of ice.
There appears to be a larger version of Black Hat, drawn in pencil and erased, behind him. The smaller figure makes the inexorably advancing wall of ice appear correspondingly larger.
