This is the best article I have read on the subject is "What color are your bits"[1]. My feeling is that people arguing for stricter copyright enforcement online are trying to unring a bell. They just don't understand that yet.
It's going to take a new generation who have grown up with the internet to wipe this slate clean.
There's an important comment in that article. Tanner Swett says:
[T]here's already a word for the concept of Colour: "provenance"
So, to enforce copyright, it would be necessary to produce the "provenance" of any artifact (e.g. USB key) in our posession at any time. And, of course, that doesn't mean having the sales receipt from the grocery store where you bought it, it means being able to produce a record of every data transfer it ever made, and then records of every data transfer those devices ever made, ad infinitum, ad absurdum.
Perhaps a short educational film is needed to communicate this more widely. I'm thinking something with a sinister-looking Gestapo-knock-off 'media agent' coming into a home asking to see their blue-rays' and computers' papers, and those papers' papers.
Well, it is no good mandating citizens only have computers which respect the grand unified provenance management system and then allowing the gaping loophole of unauthorized computer repair. So yeah, not too far from that.
Interesting - that article is one of my favourites, but I always thought the conclusion was a little more balanced. In addition to the idea that legislators and content creators don't understand bits, I think that the author also wanted to say that programmers and netizens don't understand "colour".
I missed a newline before the sentence beginning with 'my opinion is'.
Although, in his last example around one time pads, he points out that even in an area where the colour of bits really matters to programmers/cryptographers (whether or randomly generated numbers are in fact random), it is not actually possible for us to do determine wether they are random just by looking at them.
In the second to last paragraph he says the following:
"I think it's time for computer people to take Colour more seriously - if only so that we can better explain to the lawyers why they must give up their dream of enforcing Colour inside Friend Computer, where Colour does not and cannot exist."
It's going to take a new generation who have grown up with the internet to wipe this slate clean.
[1] http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php