Richard Epstein’s recent Technology Review piece contains some cogent comments on the benefits that digital rights management (DRM) will bring to consumers as well as producers:

We should also welcome the expanded options that digital rights management (DRM) provides for marketing new works. Forcing people to pay for films and music on a per-use basis is a sensible response to the technologies that allow protected works to be copied infinitely at close to zero cost. With old-fashioned books, a work's value to a second reader is built into the cover price. But there's no way to price an initial sale to cover anywhere from one to a million performances of a song. Charging by use allows for price discrimination between heavy and light users, which neatly brings into the marketplace those low-intensity users who are unwilling to pay the flat fee for records or tapes. DRM is no more threatening to free culture than metered phone calls.

This relates to HR 1201, a repetition of last year’s HR 107, which would have the effect of destroying DRM – as I noted a year ago, the logical question to put to its sponsors is: WHY ARE ALL OF YOU SO OPPOSED TO THE REAL INTERESTS OF CONSUMERS?