According to Wikipedia, Stallman wrote "the right to read" in 1997, not 1985:
"The Right to Read" is a short story by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, which was first published in 1997 in Communications of the ACM.
That said, I remember several copy protection measures where en vogue for games, on Amiga and Atari, and even business software. It wasn't called DRM at the time, but DRM is just an acronym describing any similar practice, not a specific technology.
From Wikipedia we also learn: "A very early implementation of DRM was the Software Service System (SSS) devised by the Japanese engineer Ryoichi Mori in 1983 [135] and subsequently refined under the name superdistribution. The SSS was based on encryption, with specialized hardware that controlled decryption and also enabled payments to be sent to the copyright holder."
For some reason, I remembered reading it already in 1992, that should show about trusting my memory...
Still, he was discussing these things before "The right to read" (in which the ideas were well enough crystalized to put into literature), and modern DRM is inline with "right-to-read" (e.g. Japanese penalties passed this week) and dissimilar to anything that was there (in theory) before 2000 and (in practice) before 2005.
> That said, I remember several copy protection measures where en vogue for games, on Amiga and Atari, and even business software. It wasn't called DRM at the time, but DRM is just an acronym describing any similar practice, not a specific technology.
I see a huge difference between software copy restriction (a.k.a "protection") and DRM. With copy restriction, you owned your copy and could do anything you wanted with it, including lending and reselling it. Many of these schemes would still let you make a backup, so long as the dongle/original was available for a 1 second check. That is, the restriction was on distribution.
Modern DRM restricts use.
> From Wikipedia we also learn: "A very early implementation of DRM was the Software Service System (SSS) devised by the Japanese engineer Ryoichi Mori in 1983 [135] and subsequently refined under the name superdistribution. The SSS was based on encryption, with specialized hardware that controlled decryption and also enabled payments to be sent to the copyright holder."
That's more in line with modern DRM. But Japan had always been in the future :)
"The Right to Read" is a short story by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, which was first published in 1997 in Communications of the ACM.
That said, I remember several copy protection measures where en vogue for games, on Amiga and Atari, and even business software. It wasn't called DRM at the time, but DRM is just an acronym describing any similar practice, not a specific technology.
From Wikipedia we also learn: "A very early implementation of DRM was the Software Service System (SSS) devised by the Japanese engineer Ryoichi Mori in 1983 [135] and subsequently refined under the name superdistribution. The SSS was based on encryption, with specialized hardware that controlled decryption and also enabled payments to be sent to the copyright holder."