Dan Gillmor is moderating a session on Digital Restrictions Management.

Joe Kraus of DigitalConsumer.com: Congress is thoroughly convinced that DRM is about ending theft. They do not see it at all as about openness, access and fair use. This is largely because Hollywood has been effective whereas Silicon Valley believes that if its recitation of facts didn’t work, it needs to re-state the same facts.

Wendy Seltzer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The law is being interpreted to mean that when you buy a DVD, you haven’t bought the right to use it as you please but only in DVD players acceptable to the content creators. The word “theft” shuts down all discussion. [What’s the counter?]

Bunnie Huang who did the X-Box hack is here as a DMCA victim. He hacked the XBox. He asks: After we undergo the massive hardware change required by Palladium, will we feel safer? Couldn’t we do it just as well today using technologies like PGP? Huang says that Microsoft says they’re not worried about the hardware hacks that could undo Palladium, e.g., something that goes in the memory slot to unprotect it. [Keep in mind that we’re being protected from ourselves.]

Cory Doctorow says that we’ve heard from nerd-determinists and nerd-fatalists. He says that the good news is that Napster built the largest collection of human creativity ever and did it totally bottom up. When the copyright law was used to “burn that library to the ground,” the library rebuilt itself. The bad news is that the problem doesn’t lie solely with Congress, the recording industry or Silicon Valley. It’s our fault: there were 57 million Napster users. That’s more than the number of votes W got in 2000. The real point is that copyright’s purpose is to build libraries, and its tactic is to compensate artists. Napster and Kazaa don’t have models for that and it’s a real problem. DRM is the answer to a question we shouldn’t be asking: How do we burn the library burned down for good? The real question is how do we come to some compromise by which there’s fair compensation. The “broadcast flag” isn’t a compromise; it gives the entertainment industry a veto over PC design.

Cory says: The next time someone says “We have to stop Internet privacy,” you should reply: “Rather than burning the library, let’s talk about how we can compensate artists.” [But the entertainment industry says that they are asking that question. They say that in order to enable compensation we have to turn off the free spigot, which means altering PCs, passing laws, etc. I think the compromise isn’t over the fact of compensation but over accepting that there will inevitably be some use-without-payment, just as there is when we record off the radio, make a back up of a VHS, etc.]

Joe: We’ve lost the debate on theft. The real debate is really over incumbents vs. innovators. We should stop talking about music and movies and begin talking about what we know about: technical innovation where investors are being sued for investing in Napster, etc.

Q: Will the inclusion of DRM in Office 11 give people a positive taste for it? The panel disagrees. [How about a Creative Commons license stamper for Office?]

FUN QUOTE. Cory: “The compensation for science fiction writing isn’t small, it’s historic, it’s quaint.” (approximate)

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