The US Public Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery (USACM) has released a Policy Brief on Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology to help law- and policymakers make better decisions. The recommendations are, as they call it, a balanced view of the DRM debate, which can so often only reflect the shrill, alarmist view of some content owners and copyright holders. The ACM recommendations recognize that two principles must be upheld to avoid a skewed and unfair copyright regime: 1) copyright owners have every right to protect their works, and 2) the public has every right to fair use, consumer protection, and the absence of policies that overreach or attack problems that do not exist.

The recommendations succinctly state: "The marketplace should determine the success or failure of DRM technologies but, increasingly, content distributors are turning to legislatures or the courts to erect new legal mandates to replace long-standing copyright regimes. DRM systems should be mechanisms for reinforcing existing legal constraints on behavior, not as mechanisms for creating new legal constraints." This is a beautiful example of the grey areas of technology regulation - Congress is notoriously bad at regulating the growth and evolution of new technologies, but some technologies are so disruptive to certain activities that Congress has to surmount the steep learning curve of complex technological ideas and create laws that fairly protect all the stakeholders.  Remember Sony's copy protection scheme? It's that kind of egregious corporate behavior that must be prevented at the Federal level to ensure that we little people - the music-listening, video-watching public - are protected and safe from unfettered and harmful attempts to control the use of media.

[Via p2p.net.  Thanks, Christian!]