The conference "Copyright, DRM Technologies, and Consumer Protection", on March 9 and 10 at UC Berkeley, was a great example of competing assumptions jockeying for mental floor space. Given the disagreements in the room, the conference understandably didn't come to any conclusions about DRM. But it did two other useful things: it gave an opportunity for every possible analysis of DRM to be heard and debated, and, perhaps more importantly, it revealed the rhetorical terms in which different parties want the public to think about DRM.
On the skeptical side, several panelists talked about DRM's negative side effects: it weakens privacy, because calculating usage restrictions may require external servers to get involved; it weakens computer security, because it is a black box that cannot be opened and tinkered with; and fundamentally it is simply not what users want (panelist Andrew Bridges, of Winston & Strawn LLP, memorably remarked "There are two ways to make money by connecting supply and demand: by making it easy, or making it hard.").
What was also fascinating was seeing how representatives from content-owning companies repeatedly used the words "balance" and "choice", often as part of a broader claim that DRM has the potential to enable a wide variety of business models. The business-model argument is worth some attention for the assumption underlying it: that enabling any particular business model is a positive good, a prima facie justification for whatever DRM mechanism might be required to enable it. In economic terms, some panelists (Thomas Rubin of Microsoft, among others) seemed comfortable talking of DRM-controlled files as being like physical products or limited-resource services, rather than copyable bit strings. Victoria Bassetti of EMI even said: "DRM preserves our products' integrity", without explaining what she meant. "Integrity" is always a loaded word in this context, because most people will assume it refers to low-quality copying or to plagiarism; yet DRM encourages the former, and can impede detection of the latter. In many ways, the biggest lesson of the conference was the power of language: words like "balance", "choice", and "integrity" were used as rhetorical bludgeons, not tools of clear thought.
I've concentrated here on the remarks of unreservedly pro-DRM panelists, but I don't want to give the impression that they set the tone of the conference. There were impressive critical presentations and questions from the aforementioned Andrew Bridges, from Gigi Sohn (of Public Knowledge), Cindy Cohn (of the EFF), Ian Kerr (University of Ottowa), Deirdre Mulligan (Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, Samuelson Clinic, and Boalt Hall School of Law), Peter Swire (Ohio State University), and others. I went to the conference partly to get a sense of all the arguments for and against DRM, and was not disappointed. If there remains any major point about DRM not raised there, I'd be very surprised; kudos to the organizers.
(A longer version of this report appears at http://www.QuestionCopyright.org/node/180.)