Frustration, Confusion and Disutility: Researchers’ Experience of Digital Locks
The second of three reports from the University of Glasgow, commissioned by Knowledge Rights 21, explores how researchers and research institutions experience technological protection measures (TPMs) – commonly known as digital locks. The key take-away? These locks are a driver of frustration and potential inequality.
Digital Locks as Barriers to Research
As highlighted in the first report (see our post), TPMs pose significant barriers to research, education and cultural participation.
Since removing or circumventing these locks is typically illegal or challenging, content providers can impose their own rules on users. This means they can restrict, monitor, or control content usage, regardless of copyright exceptions available to users.
How Do Digital Locks Impact Researchers and Institutions?
What does this mean practically though for the research sector – both the individuals carrying out research, and the institutions (such as libraries) that work to help them? For researchers and libraries supporting them, TPMs represent a widespread yet under-researched problem. Many researchers encounter issues with digital locks but remain silent, making the scale of the problem hard to gauge.
To shine a light on the situation, researchers from the University of Glasgow carried out a survey of both researchers and libraries, asking about their experience of digital locks, and impacts on their activities.
Led by Kristofer Erickson and Victoria Stobo, and based on 92 responses from European institutions and 134 responses from the research community, this work helps to fill a significant gap in understanding how TPMs impact research activities.
Key findings: digital locks, real issues
Prevalence of issues:
A first key conclusion is simply how widespread the problem is. Some types of technological protection measures were cited as a challenge by nearly 70% of responding institutions, while over 70% of researchers indicated that they had been frustrated in their work by TPMs.
Common challenges:
The study highlights that some of the most common challenges come from online authentication (which stands in the way of accessing content to carry out text and data mining for research), limits on downloading, copying and printing, as well as format shifting and interoperability. These restrictions hinder essential research activities and have a measurable impact.
Indeed, almost half of institutions and 80% of researchers were keen to avoid acquiring materials when TPMs were present, underlining a potential source of harm to content providers themselves, except, of course, when researchers and institutions have little choice.
Inequality:
A noticeable finding is that challenges from TPMs tend to be unequally distributed. In addition to the barriers they pose to accessibility, it is also the case that institutions themselves tend to be more risk-averse than individual researchers. While this is fine for those researchers who do have the skills and knowledge to work with TPMs, it doesn’t help those who rely more on libraries than others.
Moreover, larger institutions are more confident in dealing with TPMs, leaving researchers at smaller, less-funded institutions at a disadvantage.
Remedies aren’t working
The survey also asked about experiences of seeking access to TPM-restricted works by contacting rightsholders. Processes are either cumbersome or opaque: barely a third of institutions and less than 30% of individual researchers tried using them. These figures are far lower than respondents who reported encountering TPMs, indicating that many simply give up on carrying out or supporting research in the way they would like.
Publishers and other content providers are rarely responsive – only 11.3% of requests to remove or allow circumvention were resolved in less than two days, with over a quarter taking up to a week, over 30% up to a month, and 20% taking over a month. In a third of cases, there was no response, or requests were declined.
This is far from what researchers themselves would expect. When asked what an appropriate waiting time for the removal or circumvention would be, the majority of respondents indicated that 72h or less would be acceptable. This underlines a gap between what is seen as reasonable by the research sector, and what publishers and other content providers are offering right now.
Severe consequences
Online access TPMs can have dramatic impacts, with 40% of responding institutions noting that they had their accounts automatically suspended at some point in the past. Yet only a quarter of these were able to have the TPM issue corrected by the provider. While some institutions reported changing providers after an automated suspension, the majority simply had to accept that they needed to change their behaviour to comply with suppliers’ technical rules.
Recommendations for better access
The report highlights some key recommendations arising from the practical difficulties observed by the survey: generalising provisions to allow for the removal or circumvention of TPMs for research purposes, and enforcing a 72h time limit for responding to requests before institutions and researchers can seek their own solutions.
Importantly, neither of these are new ideas – provisions that remove protections for TPMs already exist in EU law for text and data mining (although arguably are not accompanied by adequate implementation mechanisms), while both Bulgaria and Slovenia enforce the 72h limit.
In addition, the report calls for more robust monitoring of TPM access requests and results. This would help improve systems and build on the work in this report.
By implementing these changes, we can ensure that copyright’s TPM locks are subject to fair balancing and that researchers have access to the content they need.
12 December 2024
