The Second Roundtable Discussion on "Digital Content and Rights Management" took place yesterday in Washington DC. It was standing room only at the event, with a Commerce Committee rep saying "We've never had anything like this before". With a stacked-deck panel, industry heavyweights from AOL/Time Warner, Vivendi, Microsoft, MPAA Spokesman Jack Valenti, and others had full control of the microphones ...for a while.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the progress and future of digital rights management, in particular to discuss how the government can assist in moving DRM further down the tracks. Critics have consistently charged that DRM erodes the small slice of 'fair use' rights media consumers have left. The Electronic Privacy Information Center has amassed an impressive collection of resources to assist those who aren't aware that this battle has been raging for quite some time.

The event, originally scheduled to be a back patting event between big business and Uncle Sam, quickly evolved into something much more, as consumer rights activists flooded Washington D.C. and the meeting chamber. When Jack Valenti's rhetoric reached an intolerable level, one fair use advocate stood up and made his position heard, complaining about the obvious lack of public representation at the event. It was asked that Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (who was present) be afforded the opportunity to speak, and counter the one sided argument that had been presented so far.

After the initial outburst, a committee member asked the individual to "shut up and sit down". The protests continued unabated however, and after some work, panelists and some attendees convinced the committee to have additional consumer representation. The event was stacked twenty three to one in favor of corporations, with Graham Spencer of digitalconsumer.org, being the only officially recognized public advocate at the event, and he said very little.

Who was responsible for making your voice heard? You can thank both members of NYLXS and NyFairUse for representing the public at the event. Brett Wynkoop of NY for Fair Use actually nudged his way up to the table, and commandeered the microphone to get his point across. A move Phillip Bond, undersecretary for Technology in the U.S. Department of Commerce later criticized, noting that "We have a structure here." A structure, apparently, that wasn't working: Seth Johnson of the Information Producers Initiative stood in the back with his hand raised for over an hour, never receiving acknowledgement from Bond. Representatives like Robin Gross, intellectual property lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, were told not to show up at all.

Even the corporations present acknowledged the light consumer representation, with representatives from Phillips Electronics and IBM both criticizing the lopsided panel, which contained absolutely no representatives from the free software community, no technology journalists, no programmers, no professors.....(you get the picture).

Jack Valenti, spokesman of the MPAA, continued to make himself an easy target by insisting at one point that his group did not oppose the VCR. He was quickly nailed on this by another panelist, who remembered that Jack's group had tried to get an injunction on the VCR, and had proposed royalty rates of $25 to $50 on blank tapes. He was also quoted by the press, and as is widely known as saying "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone".