Future Now
The IFTF Blog
BAVC Panel: DRM at World's End
I participated as a panelist at the Bay Area Video Coalition’s fourth in a series of four “Innovation Salons” last night. The title was “Scramble This, Ye Scurvy Dog! DRM at World's End” and I had the honor of sitting on the panel with Brooke Wentz, who knows more about the intricacies of music licensing than normal brains can handle; Susan Callender (I can't find a suitable link for her), an attorney who works with hardware companies, many of them overseas, who face pressure from DRM proponents to include DRM measures in their software or be cut out of the loop; and Tiffany Shlain, filmmaker and Webby Awards founder. Ken Goldberg moderated the panel.
There was supposed to be a podcast of the panel, but BAVC couldn’t get their equipment to work with the theater’s and so, sadly, there is no podcast. For me to try and summarize what we discussed would be pointless because it was more about the conversation than about taking notes, but I did have the opportunity to talk a lot about the sort of free media and user-generated, self-distribution future I imagine and even got a few unintended laughs, one of which had to do with an appropriately timed Jethro Tull reference (you probably don’t understand how happy this makes me, and if I explained, it would probably be one of those "you had to be there" things). The discussion was great and, at times, heated, and the audience participated throughout by asking some great questions.
One particularly great question was about whether or not other countries are seeing the same sort of political/legal fight in media as we are in the US. Susan’s answer was basically that they all think we’re insane. That lead to a great discussion of politics, where we all came out as Obama fans, and how an anti-lobbyist movement pushing for change is sort of growing. Lawrence Lessig's activism is changing that, and Lessig’s name came up several times last night. I pointed out that, while the MPAA and the RIAA have lots of money and for years have been lobbying congress to do what they naively thought would protect their interests in the changing technological landscape, only recently are people like Lessig and EFF are starting to become voices against the traditional lobbyists in favor of open technology and freedom of information.
It was fun!