Cory Doctorow spoke at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference¹ recently and warned against allowing platforms to determine whether or not publishers would use DRM on digital works.

Ultimately, Doctorow argues against DRM altogether, and this speech is a concise and convincing presentation of that argument. His message for publishers in particular is that, whether or not they decide to use DRM, it should be the publishing house that makes that decision, not the distribution platform (i.e., Amazon).

Somewhat jokingly, Doctorow gives us his “law” related to DRM: “Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.” Sadly, not a joke.

Here’s the link to the the speech on blip.tv. Also see EFF.org’s write-up about this speech²

1. A great site with videos and resources from the conference [back]
2. You might also be interested in checking out my “copyright” tag on the blog and on Delicious [back]