Thankfully, I don't have to re-invent that wheel. Jonathan Schull, an Information Technology professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a DRM pioneer, has already done it in a presentation he gave last year at the Open Digital Rights Language Workshop 2005.
Schull writes:
"Approximately 1 billion years ago, propagating patterns branched out to a new media - animal nervous systems - that allowed them to reproduce, first via learning, then via spoken paterns of sound, then via written patterns of ink on paper, and just in the last century, as patterns of electrons, in yet another culture-medium that is now known as the global internet.
"Thus, over the last century the remarkable dynamics and "technology" of biology have come to be understood. My claim is that digital rights practitioners need to recognize that those dynamics and emerging analogous technologies are an increasingly fundamental part of their own discipline."
The point is, DRM implementation is an evolutionary process that will change over time. Companies that keep their control as un-restrictive as possible will thrive over those that exert a heavy hand. Eventually an entirely new process will be born as technology innovations refine and liberate our present system.
