DRM and the public
The DOC DRM workshop transcript is now available (thanks, Politech); I ought to read it. That was the workshop to which a bunch of activists went, but I think I ought to read it for the useful information therein.
One thing some activists haven't realized (although others have) is that a lot of people who are trying to take away your rights are doing it right in the open. (Sometimes "in the open" means "for a registration fee of merely $100!", which is not exactly in the open. But sometimes it's really in the open.) That means that you can go and find out what they're doing and tell other people about it. For example, people like Andy Setos from Fox will go to these events and tell you exactly what they are working on.
As we found during one of the BPDG conference calls, after we published information to allow interested parties to participate, and then slashdot encouraged people to join the call, some people will try to disrupt these meetings. In the case of the BPDG call, that prevented us from hearing details of what the studios were trying to do!
Now, the DOC workshop is a complicated issue because there was some sense that it was important to tell the government that the general public actually cares about copyright law and technology policy. (Some people persist in saying that the people who went weren't the general public. For example, Declan keeps calling them "geektivists", which sounds somehow pejorative to me, even though I don't think either "geek" or "activist" is pejorative.) And I think people do have to find ways to keep doing that, because if you listen to "the debate" as the so-called policy community is hearing it, there's very little sense that any relevant harm is being done to the public.
On the other hand, in the conference call, there was no productive purpose served, even if people wanted to utterly destroy and frustrate the BPDG, because it's not as though the few companies which were actually writing the proposal couldn't find some other (more secret) forum in which to meet. They were already proving rather adept at that. (Cory tells the story of being at at BPDG meeting where some of the more powerful companies went into a closed session to negotiate!) But, as I've said several times, the concrete result is that we didn't hear, and interested members of the public didn't hear, the substance of the negotiations. And that means that our opportunity to tell people about those negotiations is also frustrated.
I know that the freedom-loving technical community is rather social, so what I think would be exciting is this: when people gather together to talk about technologies of control or technologies of surveillance, or to talk about policy issues, some skeptic should go and listen and then just tell other people what happened. What we need is not for somebody to prevent Andy Setos from telling some group that you shouldn't be allowed to make an ADC which doesn't check for watermarks; what we need is for people to start telling each other if Andy Setos says that you shouldn't be allowed to make an ADC which doesn't check for watermarks. If electrical engineers started to talk to one another about that, within their own social networks, I think that would be productive.
If everybody who works in technology (not just executives, not just lawyers, not just lobbyists) heard that Hollywood has given up on "no mandate", I think that would be productive.
