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By Chris Meadows

ftc Remember the FTC “town hall meeting” on Digital Rights Management, to be held March 25th in Seattle? BoingBoing reports that the EFF has submitted its comments, in the form of a 16-page PDF.

In one of the comments on the BoingBoing post, one reader linked to the public listing of all 700 other comments the FTC has received so far. I looked at a few of these comments at random, and the results were highly encouraging. Not one of the people who sent in comments liked the way DRM was implemented today. (A few agreed with the idea of DRM in principle, but even those did not like how it was turning out in practice.)

Among the more recognizable names to submit comments was open-source advocate Eric Raymond, who stated:

[T]he worst effect of the DRM fraud is that it generates pressure to cripple general-purpose computers in an attempt to foil emulation attacks. As a society, we can live with silly restrictions on device-shifting the latest blockbuster movie, but we cannot tolerate (for example) attempts to prevent PCs from running software not certified in advance by a consortium of Big Media companies. Yet that – and even more draconian restrictions – is where the logic of the DRM fraud inexorably leads. Such measures have already been advocated under the misleading banner “trusted computing”, and half-attempts at them routinely injure today’s computer users.

Surely some of those comments must be pro-DRM, but I did not find any in my random sampling. It would be interesting to know just how many there actually are.

If anyone will be attending the meeting in Seattle on March 25th and would care to tweet and blog it, please let us know.

Update: Ars Technica covers the 700 comments as well, and will also be covering the event.

 
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