This has been linked just about everywhere, but Cory Doctorow’s Microsoft Research DRM Talk is well worth a read. The author and Boing Boing contributor is a prolific dude who has released his two science fiction books and a collection of short stories on his website under a Creative Commons license. I haven’t read either of the books yet, but they’re on my “to read” list (which, if you haven’t noticed yet, is quite long).

Back to the DRM talk. Cory separates his points into five themes: DRM systems don’t work, they are bad for society, they are bad for business, they are bad for artists, and they are a bad business-move for Microsoft. Very intuitive, and the structure does a lot to help convey the author’s point. Here is a tidbit that I found particularly persuasive:

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we’ve changed copyright. Copyright isn’t an ethical proposition, it’s a utlititarian one. There’s nothing *moral* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there’s nothing *immoral* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They’re just the best way of balancing out so that people’s physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.

Technology that disrupts copyright does so because it simplifies and cheapens creation, reproduction and distribution. The existing copyright businesses exploit inefficiencies in the old production, reproduction and distribution system, and they’ll be weakened by the new technology. But new technology always gives us more art with a wider reach: that’s what tech is *for*.

Indeed. If you’re interested in DRM, check it out.