DRM will not be legislated

[AARG! Anonymous]

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.