Framing the DRM Debate

Don Marti fires back at our own Solveig Singleton and her post on “deconstructionism” and DRM:

“Fiddling with the language” won’t win the DRM debate, but getting the right terms into common use will help keep it from being harder than it has to be.

Framing does work. Archer Daniels Midland’s lobby groups help keep sugar quotas in force in the USA, even though they raise prices for sugar customers and hurt opportunities for mutually beneficial trade with sugar exporters. The winner? The corn syrup industry. Archer Daniels Midland can’t run its high-fructose corn syrup business at a profit unless the government puts heavy-handed restrictions on trade in sugar. And, no, this Decatur, Illinois company is not wasting its money on “deconstruction”.

Here’s an example. The “Sugar Alliance” makes their side the “hard-working farmers” and the anti-quota side “multinational food conglomerates”. Just as the proponents of sugar quotas and DRM have learned to choose language that works for their side, advocates for free trade and free speech should also be careful to choose language that works for our side. We can’t let them keep “farmers”, “entrepreneurs” and “artists” and leave us with “conglomerates”, “hackers” and “pirates”.

Singleton does point out that we shouldn’t be using awkward verbiage just to pry an argument out of the other side’s framing. Fortunately, free speech advocates have an advantage over the DRMers here, because most of our expressions are short and vivid, and most of theirs aren’t. If you want awkward, try this:

“The best policy going forward is for legislators to leave entrepreneurs’ experiments with DRM alone, while continuing to support copyright with appropriate enforcement institutions and actions.” (PDF)

What?

It looks like this is supposed to mean something like “Legislators should continue to ban circumventing DRM,” but framers of pro-ban arguments don’t say “ban”. Thanks to lobbyists, the USDA won’t release a document that tells people to “eat less” of a US agricultural product, even high-fructose corn syrup. And DRM proponents avoid talking about systems that “restrict” or “prevent”.

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