Ed Felten's just blogged a good piece reflecting on the news that CBS has pulled its original "Rathergate" PDFs and replaced them with versions that have Adobe's DRM turned on so that you can't copy their text, presumably to make it harder for critics to stuck damning quotations in their works.
This is yet another use of DRM that has nothing to do with copyright infringement. Nobody who wanted to copy the report as a whole would do so by cutting and pasting — the report is enormous and the whole thing is available for free online anyway. The only plausible use of cut-and-paste is to quote from the report in order to comment, which is almost certainly fair use.
This sort of thing should not be a public policy problem; but the DMCA makes it one. If the law were neutral about DRM, we could just let the technology take its course. Unfortunately, U.S. law favors the publishers of DRMed material over would-be users of that material. For example, circumventing the DRM on the CBS report, in order to engage in fair-use commentary, may well violate the DMCA. (The DMCA has no fair-use exception, and courts have ruled that a DMCA violation can occur even if there is no copyright infringement.)
Worse yet, the DMCA may ban the tools needed to defeat this DRM technology. Dmitry Sklyarov was famously jailed by the FBI for writing a software tool that defeated this very same DRM technology; and his employer, Elcomsoft, was tried on criminal charges for selling fewer than ten copies of that tool.
