Last Tuesday night, Toshiba's Michael Ayers led a fantastic public discussion about DRM at the USC Annenberg School. Michael negotiates Toshiba's DRM deals, and helped bring the CSS system for DVDs to fruition — he's now working on next-gen DVD DRM for Blu-Ray and DVD-HD. For all that, he's generally an advocate for consumer rights in DRM, if only because the more crippled a device is, the less of it Toshiba can sell.
The attendees were split on this — some people from the Disney studios attended, and they, too, were conflicted about this. All in all, it was one of the meatiest, most interesting and wide-ranging talks about DRM, copyright and freedom I've been a part of.
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(Thanks, Andy!)
Reminder: The next two speakers in the USC Annenberg series are Bruce Sterling, 2PM on Monday, Sept 25; and Bruce Schneier, 7PM on Tuesday, Sept 26. These are free, public talks, and I'll post the audio for them as well. Link