As counterpoint to the RRIA position, I love “The Day of the Longtail” trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

I do work with Educause and know that they oppose things like broadcast flag, but they feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. I'm not surprised they're pushing RIAA propoganda to show that they are making an effort on illegal downloading to bolster their argument that we don't need more stringent laws.

The RIAA is wrong, and appeasement won't do.

I can understand how Educause might feel that way, but I believe that making an effort to avoid more stringent laws is somewhat parallel to returning runaway slaves in order to avoid more stringent measures like the civil war. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that trying to make money off of non-real property is as evil as physically chaining and selling your fellow man. But I do mean to say that both cases are an attempt to shore up a doomed concept, and that in addition to being futile, the shoring up is causing actual harm.

Changes in information technology - including media technology - have always brought changes in how we think about identity, freedom, creativity, and non-real property. It's easy to think that our current morals evolved slowly and smoothly, but they didn't. Libraries and moveable type, for example, ushered in radical paradigm shifts in how we thought of ourselves and of “property.”

Paradigm shifts are rarely smooth and frequently not monotonic. With the current rate of change reflected in such events as the fall of Communism and the rise of international terrorism, it will not do to ignore the inexorable. It may be the job of the legal and political professions to slow this change down — as long as they first do no harm. But institutions that purport to be for and about education must not shirk their responsibility to study and lead this change.
---
By the way, I don't think that changes in our sense of identity, freedom, creativity, etc. fall out logically from advances in information technology. But again, these happen as what Kuhn called “paradigm shifts,” which happen rather quickly through social and not logical means. I do believe that while advances in IT don't cause the ideas to be born, the IT advances DO cause the paradigm shift that represents a society's adoption of the ideas.

A possible consequence of this, that I'm not really prepared to argue, is it may be immaterial whether it is “right” or “wrong” to own non-real or non-scarce property, or whether such a thing can even be decided. What does matter under the hypothesis, is what society accepts. And society is very much voting with it's day-to-day actions.

-------
Here's just one example of how IT is puting the lie to one chestunt of “intellectual property.” It used to be taught that plagarism — distinct from fraud — was an intellectual crime committed by an unattributed close (but not exact) reuse of a prior utterance. Now Google shows us that everything we say has been said before. What we say and do is strongly influenced by what we have seen and heard. We do not have to be original to be of value, which is fortunate, because none of us are original. Trying to enforce anti-plagarism rules in the age of Google is absurd.