Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor

Huh, if there's one that can be said about advertisements, political or otherwise, it's that they never involve DRM. After all, the goal is to as widely seen as possible.

...Walled gardens don't require DRM. Unless you consider a unique user identifier to be DRM, that is.

Don't take this as an inflammatory comment, I may be missing something important, but: why would I care? No part of my daily internet diet is DRM'ed. Some parts are behind paywalls, but then I can make an informed decision to support those news sites (which I do). I much prefer to read reporting that is co-financed by its readers rather than solely by advertising.

I'm not a fan of DRM, but sometimes I can't help feel that many anti-DRM people imagine a human right to be entertained. Such a right doesn't exist, and it shouldn't.
If Disney wants to prevent me from consuming their content without paying, their call. My life is fine without Disney. If a director or studio thinks I shouldn't be able to own a copy of their work and pay for each view or lease a film for six weeks, well, there's plenty of other directors and studios in the world. I'll just take my money elsewhere.

The real problem is ever-extending patent and copyright legislation that lets people own ideas, concepts, and historical media forever. The DRM outrage shouldn't distract from this. DRM is just a tool, like scrambling set-top boxes. I don't have to buy in.

I am not trying to downplay all other problems listed by Tim. As I said, DRM is not the root of all evil, but it is a major problem that W3C should have recognized and treated as such, instead of caving in to pressure from corporate sponsors and legitimizing a concept that directly opposes the open and collaborative nature of the Web. It is especially disturbing to see it entirely omitted from Tim's post when I can plainly see several different ways it has contributed to creating the problems he described. Stay with me, and I will explain this further.

First of all, don't overestimate the impact of your personal buying decisions, or your own ability to remain unimpacted by DRM. Most people don't even know what DRM is, and most of the people who do, don't care. In the absense of market pressure and other limiting factors, use of DRM is going to keep spreading to more and more types of content, until the shrinking niche of non-DRM content becomes unable to satisfy even your narrow needs.

You may shrug off the "right to be entertained" as non-essential, but even if we manage to keep textbooks and reference materials DRM-free (which I'm not convinced is a given), what you call "entertainment" constitutes most of our cultural heritage. Fiction books, movies, TV series, stand up comedy, music clips, video games, even memes and cat pictures are all part our communication framework, reference points for describing our world, expressing concepts and emotions, and establishing empathic connections that tie the fabric of our society together. Locking it all down with DRM is the digital equivalent of burning the Library of Alexandria and going back to oral tradition as primary means of preserving culture.

The economic significance of entertainment is just as important. Like it or not, as automation pushes humans out of production, transportation, and services, entertainment's role in global economy is only going to grow. Which means that legal, economic, and social structures reinforced by DRM are going to influence more and more people involved in producing and distributing DRM-protected content.

And now consider what exactly are the legal, economic, and social structures that DRM was created to reinforce, and where those structures would be without it. Taken in its entirety, the concept of "intellectual property" uses artificial monopolies and censorship to enforce ownership over contents of our minds. In an era when intellectual labour takes precedence of manual labour, it is the economic equivalent of slavery. Between online piracy, free software movement, and Streissand effect, the Internet has made enforcement of intellectual property so impractical that the whole concept almost shattered, and gave way to alternatives based on open collaboration, decentralization, and gift economy. DRM is what kept those alternatives confined to narrow niches instead of becoming the only practical way to produce and distribute online content.

And this is how DRM has contributed to re-centralization of the Web into walled gardens and motivated universal identity tracking.
Unlike gift economy, which is works just as well if not better with strong online anonymity and pseudonymity, intellectual property protected by DRM requires you to provide personally identifiable information (credit card number, home address, eventually all the way to a retina scan or DNA imprint because passwords don't work) to every content distributor. The advertisement method of monetizing content takes this need for tracking your identity even further, making not just your identity but the whole record of your online activities a valuable commodity.

Without DRM and the intellectual property regime that it sustains, everyone would have the option to obtain the same content from sources that do not track and sell your identity, significantly reducing if not removing altogether the economic incentive to build centralized walled gardens and advertisement networks that have created all three challenges described by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.