Digital Rights Management Conference at Berkeley

DRM will be examined from a variety of angles February 27-March 1 at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall:

Music is being released on copy-protected CDs, movies on encrypted and region-encoded DVDs, and Congress is considering the mandate of technological protection for digital television. The next generation of information distribution will be defined by the purchase of rights to receive digital content for a set of defined and controlled uses. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are the technological measures built into the hardware or software of home computers, digital televisions, stereo equipment, and portable devices in order to manage the relationships between users and protected expression. As technological solutions increasingly interact and even supersede the laws of intellectual property, privacy, and contract law, it is imperative for everyone from lawyers, technologists, and policy-makers to artists and consumers to keep up with the changes.

The Berkeley Center for Law and Technology (BCLT) and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (BTLJ) are proud to announce this year’s ground-breaking conference confronting the controversies surrounding digital rights management. We have assembled the leading thinkers from industry, academia, government, and the nonprofit sector to engage in a broad-ranging conversation about the legal, technological, and policy landscape of digital rights management systems, discuss recent developments, and debate the future balance of content protection, fair use, and privacy.

The conference will begin with a tutorial on Thursday that includes one session on DRM technology and one on the current legal and policy landscape. This tutorial will be essential for those less familiar with DRM and will allow everyone to participate in the high-level discussion of the conference. Panel discussions will focus on:

• DRM as an enabler of new business models
• Impact of DRM on innovation, competition, and security
• Impact of DRM on the free flow of information
• Impact of DRM on consumers
• DRM-related legal and policy initiatives in the U.S.
• Anti-circumvention regulations in the US and elsewhere

The speakers list is long and imposing:

Law professors:
Julie Cohen, Georgetown Law School
Graeam Dinwoodie, Chicago Kent School of Law
Bernt Hugenholtz, University of Amsterdam, Information Law Institute
Raymond Ku, Seton Hall School of Law (visiting at Cornell Law School)
Larry Lessig, Stanford Law School
Joe Liu, Boston College School of Law
Anita Ramasastry, University of Washington School of Law
Tony Reese, University of Texas School of Law
Pamela Samuelson, Boalt Hall School of Law & SIMS

Others:
Hal Abelson, Computer Science, MIT
Mike Chartier, Intel Corp.
Drew Dean, SRI
John Erickson, Hewlett Packard
David Farber, University of Pennsylvania (visiting at Computer Science, CMU)
Edward Felten, Computer Science, Princeton University
Joan Feigenbaum, Computer Science, Yale University
Barb Fox, Microsoft
Lucky Green, cypherpunks.to
John Manferdelli, Microsoft
Chris Murray, Consumers Union
Tomas Sander, Hewlett Packard Labs
Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Security
Carl Shapiro, Haas School
Cary Sherman, RIAA
Emery Simon, BSA
Lon Sobel, Entertainment Law Reporter
Hal Varian, SIMS, Berkeley

Fee schedule and registration here.