Making sense of Digital Rights Management in Videogames

CIPPM researcher Marcella Favale has been awarded a Fusion Investment Fund for a collaborative project on Making sense of DRM in game development (Madrigal)

Restrictive technology can prevent you from copying certain CDs or DVDs to a portable device to watch during your train journey or even go as far as to dictate which brand of coffee capsules you put in your espresso machine. This is Digital Rights Management (DRM).

The Madrigal project will investigate, identify and communicate how game developers make sense of DRM technology when developing video games. At present virtually no empirical research exists on how much videogame developers  really know about the relationship between DRM and copyright law in terms of boundaries to DRM implementation, or on their real expectations from currently available DRM technology.