My own views are, of course, very far away from those of Cory Doctorow, who has written a long and generally informative piece for Information Week entitled "A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law. Despite it's anti-DRM mutterings, it's worth a read.
Among other things, he describes the meetings of CPTWG, the Content Protection Working Group. In the late '90s I attended CPTWG meetings and Doctorow's account seems largely accurate.
Among the topics discussed are various legal decisions relating to consumer's use of copyrighted digital materials.
This principle guided the creation of virtually every piece of IT invented since [the Sony-Betamax decision]: the Web, search engines, YouTube, Blogger, Skype, ICQ, AOL, MySpace... You name it, if it's possible to violate copyright with it, the Betamax decision made it legal.
Unfortunately, the Supremes shot the Betamax principle in the gut two years ago, with the Grokster decision. This decision says that a company can be found liable for its customers' bad acts if they can be shown to have "induced" copyright infringement. So, if your company advertises your product for an infringing use, or if it can be shown that you had infringement in mind at the design stage, you can be found liable for your customers' copying. The studios and record labels and broadcasters love this ruling, and they like to think that it's even broader than what the courts set out. For example, Viacom is suing Google for inducing copyright infringement by allowing YouTube users to flag some of their videos as private. Private videos can't be found by Viacom's copyright-enforcement bots, so Viacom says that privacy should be illegal, and that companies that give you the option of privacy should be sued for anything you do behind closed doors.
