Just read trough the Final Conference Paper (warning: pdf) of the Creative Economy Conference that was held last week in London as part of the British EU presidency. It is a pretty troubling paper that seems to be build on two general assumptions: 1) DRM is good for humanity and 2) the more/longer/stronger Intellectual Property Rights the better. Both of these assumptions are obviously stupid but they seem to be what you get when you let corporations sponsor (and dominate) government conferences.

The paper does contain two especially stunning statements that do illustrate what kind of role citizens should play in the creative economy (if you ask the creative economy types). They must be consumers of products that are supplied by the creative industries and for the rest they better shut up. My favorite statement is this:

there are concerns from consumers’ and civil society representatives that DRMs will restrict uses they believe they are entitled to (emphasis mine)

There goes fair-use, there go exceptions to copyright that protect non-consuming uses of creative works. And the DRM loving authors of this document seem to want to make a point of it by creating a PDF that i cant copy and past the text out of. kinda stupid of me to believe that i have the right to quote from this paper. This silly belief must be related to the fact that i am belonging to a minority group of people who actually want to use the powers of digital networks:

A range of alternative licensing arrangements were discussed, all of which cater for some consumers/citizens demand to interact creatively with content in the online environment.

If you ask me this is a pretty outrageous demand indeed. and at the very minimum these people need to be punished by making them type their quotes from PDF documents.