A tip of the FGI hat to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation Deep Links blog, which has alerted readers to DefectiveByDesign's Day Against DRM taking place today.

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and in practice means crippling the functionality of digital files to discourage or prevent any copying, even if that copying would fall under fair use provisions of copyright law. Additionally, DRM technology can track users across the Internet or even expire documents to make them unreadable.

We at FGI are very concerned about DRM because the Government Printing Office (GPO) has never publicly pledged to keep DRM'd documents off their Future Digital System (FDSys). GPO does not have any current plans for DRM that we're aware of, but GPO insistance on a policy neutral FDSys leaves open the possibility that future federal documents will be subject to DRM.

So we wish the folks at DefectiveByDesign well in their efforts to foil DRM for legal purposes.