IP: well worth reading -- Internet activists, business face off

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

Internet activists, business face off
BY DAN GILLMOR

Mercury News Technology Columnist 
THE past and the future coalesced in a San Jose courtroom last Wednesday, where some of the world's most powerful companies faced off against an amorphous band of Internet activists. Big Business found itself trying to stamp out a fire it had helped to fuel -- and, for the time being, it failed. 

This was, to be sure, only the first round of what may be a long legal war growing out of an entirely predictable occurrence -- the recent cracking of the encryption scheme designed to protect DVD movies from piracy. It was predictable because the entertainment industry's protection method was laughably weak from the start, and because the industry had blown off a small but influential group of computer users.

http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/columns/gillmor/docs/dg010200.htm