Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing fame) delivered a speech to Microsoft techs on why Digital Rights Management is bad bad bad:
Even in the context of legitimate — excuse me, “traditional” — copyrighted works like movies on DVDs, anticircumvention is bad news. Copyright is a delicate balance. It gives creators and their assignees some rights, but it also reserves some rights to the public. For example, an author has no right to prohibit anyone from transcoding his books into assistive formats for the blind. More importantly, though, a creator has a very limited say over what you can do once you lawfully acquire her works. If Ibuy your book, your painting, or your DVD, it belongs to me. It’smy property. Not my “intellectual property” — a whacky kind of pseudo-property that’s swiss-cheesed with exceptions, easements and limitations — but real, no-fooling, actual tangible *property* — the kind of thing that courts have been managing through tort law for centuries.
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