Read a great article on Slashdot about the recent DRM workshop, http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/18/1219257, by "al3x": As the talks began, I was brimming with the enthusiasm and anger of an "activist," overjoyed at shaking hands with the legendary Richard Stallman, thrilled with the turnout of the New Yorkers for Fair Use. My enthusiasm and solidarity, however, was to be short lived.... Comments from the RIAA's Mitch Glazier that there is "balance in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (DMCA), drew cries and disgusted laughter from the peanut gallery, who at that point had already been informed that any public comments could be submitted online. Even those in support of Fair Use and similar ideas began to be frustrated with the constant background commentary and ill-conceived outbursts of the New Yorkers for Fair Use and, to my dismay, Richard Stallman, who proved to be as socially awkward as his critics and fans alike report. Perhaps such behavior is entertaining in a Linux User Group meeting or academic debate, but fellow activists hissed at Stallman and the New Yorkers, suggesting that their constant interjections weren't helping. And indeed, as discussion progressed, I felt that my representatives were not Stallman and NY Fair Use crowd, nor Graham Spencer from DigitalConsumer.org, whose three comments were timid and without impact. No, I found my voice through Rob Reid, Founder and Chairman of Listen.com, whose realistic thinking and positive suggestions were echoed by Johnathan Potter, Executive Director of DiMA, and backed up on the technical front by Tom Patton of Phillips. Reid argued that piracy was simply a reality of the content industry landscape, and that it was the job of content producers and the tech industry to offer consumers something "better than free." "We charge $10 a month for our service, and the competition is beating us by $10 a month. We've got to give customers a better experience than the P2P file-sharing networks," Reid suggested. As the rare individual who gave up piracy when I gave up RIAA music and MPAA movies, opting instead for a legal and consumer-friendly Emusic.com account, I found myself clapping in approval. Reading this and the other comments on the meeting, a few facts come through: that the content companies are much more worried about closing the "analog hole" than mandating traditional DRM software systems; that the prospects for any legislation on these issues are uncertain given the tremendous consumer opposition; and that extremist consumer activists are hurting their cause by conjuring up farfetched scenarios that expose them as kooks. (That last point certainly applies to those here who continue to predict that the government will take away general purpose computing capabilities, allow only "approved" software to run, and ban the use of Perl and Python without a license. Try visiting the real world sometime!) It is also good to see that the voices of sanity are being more and more recognized, like the Listen.com executive above. The cyber liberty community must come out strongly against piracy of content and support experiments which encourage people to pay for what they download. It is no longer tenable to claim that intellectual property is obsolete or evil, or to point to the complaints of a few musicians as justification for ignoring the creative rights of an entire industry. There is still a very good chance that we can have a future where people will happily pay for legal content instead of making do with bootleg pirate recordings, and that this can happen without legislation and without hurting consumer choice. Such an outcome would be the best for all concerned: for consumers, for tech companies, for artists and for content licensees. Anything else will be a disaster for one or more of these groups, which will ultimately hurt everyone. Let's hope the EFF is listening to the kinds of clear-sighted commentary quoted above.