The Digital Media & Telecommunications SIG of the MIT Enterprise Forum held a panel discussion Monday evening, November 26, 2007, on the topic, Digital Rights Media Debate - What Should the Model Be?, . Thanks to the organizers for including me as a speaker. My presentation can be downloaded from here (PDF).
The panel also included noted intellectual property attorney Steve Henry, Wolf Greenfield & Sachs, who provided an overview of basic copyright-related laws as they relate to DRM. Steve was kind enough to provide me with a copy of his slides, which can be downloaded here [thanks to Steve and WGS for making the presentation available for distribution].
Another panelist was Jake Shapiro, a musician and Executive Director, the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), a content exchange for audio and radio programming and a rights clearinghouse. In addition to some history of PRX and his band, Two Ton Shoe, Jake showed a 4 minute animated video explaining PRX, which can be seen here.
Walter McDonough, a founder of the Future of Music Coalition, and noted music industry attorney, was also on the panel [no presentation]. Among his many useful insights, Walter agreed that the record industry (as opposed to the music industry generally) has fallen on hard times and not much relief is presently in sight. Rather than a DRM-based solution, Walter thought that collective licensing might be part of a solution that would benefit both artists and consumers. In one version of collective licensing, the ISPs collect some small fee per subscriber or per peer-to-peer user. The monies collected would then be passed back to a licensing agency for distribution to creators and rightsholders.
A lengthly Q/A followed the presentations.
