Cory Doctorow’s Anti-DRM Speech gives a good summary of why DRM (”Digital Rights Managment” — an excellent piece of Orwellian new-speak, if ever there was one), as advocated by oligopolists’ mouthpieces such as the RIAA, violate fair use rights, and stifle intellectual and commercial innovation.

An excerpt:

Remember Schneier’s Law? Anyone can come up with a security system so clever that he can’t see its flaws. The only way to find the flaws in security is to disclose the system’s workings and invite public feedback. But now we live in a world where any cipher used to fence off a copyrighted work is off-limits to that kind of feedback. That’s something that a Princeton engineering prof named Ed Felten and his team discovered when he submitted a paper to an academic conference on the failings in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a watermarking scheme proposed by the recording industry. The RIAA responded by threatening to sue his ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is the kind of client that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and clean-cut and the RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn’t so lucky.

Matter of fact, the next guy wasn’t. Dmitry Sklyarov is a Russian programmer who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the failings in Adobe’s e-book locks. The FBI threw him in the slam for 30 days. He copped a plea, went home to Russia, and the Russian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket warning to its researchers to stay away from American conferences, since we’d apparently turned into the kind of country where certain equations are illegal.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 15th, 2006 at 3:08 am and is filed under Digital Rights / Digital Wrongs, General, Pigopoly. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.