On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:25:38 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> The way I see it, there's two sides to this DRM stuff.

That's a reasonable view.

I actually had an opportunity to listen to a talk given by the head of 
legal at the RIAA last year.  He talked about their strategy (this was in 
the context of "intellectual property protection" to a group of exam 
creators/publishers), and the underlying part of the strategy that 
they've taken is to actually cut off the supply lines for those who 
counterfeit products and sell them in the streets, particularly in places 
like China and New York.

From that point of view, the strategy makes a lot of sense (I've always 
said that they need to go after those who are actually selling 
counterfeit products for profit, never considered that the source of the 
material for those counterfeit products was largely file sharing, for 
example).

That said, there's a difference between preventing illegal distribution 
and making it inconvenient to use a product for legal purposes (such as 
fair use provisions in US Copyright law - mostly not codified but enabled 
through legal precedent).

Jim

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