While the traditional supporters of strong DRM have been economic conservatives, libertarians, and corporations, there is a category of advocates who represent an untapped well of support for strong DRM. This reserve: social conservatives who are suspicious of new social ideas and new content promoting them.
Within the community arguing about the proper role of DRM, there’s a philosophical conversation that maps to similar debates related to any other sort of regulation. On one side (media studios, economic conservatives) are those opposing regulation of DRM based on the standard arguments around freedom to contract. Nobody is forcing you to accept DRM’d content, according to these folks. There’s plenty of other content out there that isn’t protected or that is licensed very liberally.
On the other side (law professors, open-source advocates) are those who believe that there is some minimum standard of access to knowledge. Knowledge and content can’t be arbitrarily locked away, they argue, and such a position is backed both by First Amendment concerns that require access to information necessary for political discussion and by a long history of fair-use exemptions to copyright.
Personally, I tend to fall in the first camp. I believe that if people want to make a bargain with the devil, they should be able to do so. If they want to buy the Disney video-on-demand service to get the latest films, they should be able to—with all the DRM restrictions that come along with that decision. And then I thought about why I have that feeling.
In large part, it’s because I would never see myself subscribing to such a service. For me, the most valuable content is available free of nearly all restrictions, since it is content whose copyright has expired and which is freely available online through efforts such as Project Gutenberg. This does reflect my bias towards a classical Great Books education. I continue to believe that individuals would be better served by studying the ideas of the past which have stood the test of time than always looking for the new or different. I recognize the value of keeping up with the current milieu, but I do believe it’s overemphasized to the point of forgetting history. Are there many questionable ideas from our cultural heritage? Absolutely. But at least those ideas are developed to their fullest in that literary tradition. There is ample room to study them and come to an independent conclusion, often expending less effort than one would need to in order to refute such ideas de novo—and reaching logically-stronger conclusions, to boot.
And though I don’t consider myself a social conservative (in the sense of wanting to impose a large set of moral strictures on others through the law), I can easily see how social conservatives might support DRM for exactly the same reason. DRM encourages a classical education, since classical texts become (by comparison to DRM’d content) much less expensive and adaptable. DRM makes even more clear how much more expensive and ephemeral the present is compared to the traditions of the past.
So while the MPAA and RIAA should welcome the support of the Cato Institute, they should, perhaps, look beyond the tribunes of the people to their moralists and pontiffs.