Kes: As someone who has attempted in the past to challenge the digital rights management settings which have denied screen reader users access, especially when it denies students with disabilities equal access to educational materials, I have often had to confront educators who had obviously been whipped into a hysterical frenzy by "experts" who told them that any relenting of digital security would immediately result in students copying every file they could and then uploading it to the Internet. These "experts" are DRM rainmakers who get paid by educators to make sense of copyright issues and digital rights management, and instead misinform the educators about DRM, often to the disadvantage of students with disabilities whose access technologies cannot penetrate the proprietary software or security settings imposed by this junk science DRM. I spent two years as an undergrad denied access to all my online course materials because the university I attended had received some very bad--and one-sided--advice on DRM, which made me aware that these business models also impact education models for digital materials.

Posted by Cory Doctorow:

I've started writing a column for the MediaGuardian, the British website
for media professionals, critiquing DRM and explaining "copy-friendly"
business models. My first column is up today, explaining the way that
DRM is like the Soviet Union's Lysenkoism, a form of ideologically
correct junk science.

> The companies that sell this stuff are, at best, bunkum peddlers and, at worst, out and out fraudsters. Their wares simply can't work - not without changing
the laws of physics, maths and information science.

> DRMs are often designed by ambitious, well-funded consortia, with top-notch engineers from every corner of the industry. They spend millions. They take
years. They are defeated in days, for pennies, by hobbyists. It's inevitable, because every time you give someone a locked item, you have to give them
the key to unlock it too.

Column:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/31/comment.drm